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Poisonous Legacies
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Business New Haven
3/23/1998
By: BNH
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By nature, we view with suspicion attempts by government to impose new layers of regulation and restrictions on private business. When legislators and bureaucrats try to tell professionals how to run their businesses, the result is often folly, or worse.
However, two major stories in the news recently underscore the need to take a close look at what happens - and what ought to happen - when companies that handle hazardous materials abandon industrial sites and leave a trail of contamination behind.
In Milford, at least five pounds of poisonous liquid mercury were recently discovered on the site of a defunct factory owned by Light Source Inc. on Cascade Boulevard. At least some of the substance, which was used in the manufacture of mercury vapor lamps at the site, leaked into a creek that flows into the Oyster River.
Mercury is highly toxic to humans. It can wreak damage both psychiatric and physical and has been linked to birth defects.
Light Source Inc. abandoned the site some nine months before its toxic legacy was discovered. State Department of Environmental Protection officials were unable immediately to determine where the firm had relocated to. The same officials were uncertain whether Light Source would be subject to fines or possible criminal charges.
Two weeks earlier, the federal Environmental Protection Agency announced it had commenced a cleanup of contaminated waste oil and other dangerous chemicals at an abandoned oil-storage and laboratory operation on a West River riverbank in West Haven, near a residential neighborhood and grammar school.
The site, previously occupied by National Oil Services Inc., houses storage tanks contaminated with solvents and laboratory containers of corrosive acids and highly flammable ether, which cleanup workers were expected to remove as quickly as possible.
While in business, the company stored oil in above- and underground storage tanks before shipping it elsewhere for fuel blending and reuse. National Oil Services was evicted from the property last December. The mess it left behind was discovered by state and federal environmental officials in January.
The West Haven cleanup is expected to take three months and cost taxpayers about $1 million.
National Oil Services had come to state officials' attention as far back as 1992, when a state DEP inspection prompted officials to ask the state attorney general's office to pursue the company for numerous violations of hazardous-waste statutes, include lack of a system to contain spills, failure to properly analyze hazardous materials and, notably, failure to maintain financial assurance for proper cleanup following closure.
The company agreed to abide by a state court order and pay a $15,000 fine in 1994, but failed to comply with the order. The state filed a contempt motion in 1996, and last October a court forbade the company from receiving and processing waste. But the company continued to operate, in direct violation of the court.
Both Light Source and National Oil Services acted with flagrant disregard for both the law and their responsibilities as corporate citizens in leaving behind highly contaminated sites - and callously sticking taxpayers with the cleanup bill.
But all of us in the public and private sectors bear a greater responsibility as citizens to ensure that proper monitoring systems are in place to prevent companies that handle dangerous materials from simply skipping town and leaving toxic messes behind.
Should companies whose operations impact the environment be held to a higher standard of accountability and/or face more careful monitoring than is presently the case?
If the examples are Light Source and National Oil Services, the answer is yes. In both these cases, the system didn't work.
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