The killing of the Rhine
THE FIRE at the Sandoz storage facility in Basle [or Basel], along with Ciba-Geigy's criminal negligence in dumping 400 litres of herbicide into the Rhine, have highlighted a host of questions about the functioning of the chemicals industry.
the atmosphere, the attitude [of the management that a few accidents here and there were the price that had to be paid for production." (3)
All these remarks could be applied to Sandoz or Ciba-Geigy, with one exception. In Switzerland, there is very little chance of seeing a commission of enquiry set up to look into the Sandoz affair as competent and independent as the one appointed by the American administration (even under the reactionary Reagan) to look at the Union Carbide accident at Institute.
However, after the Basle accident, an official of the Office Federal pour la Protection de l'Environment (OPFE), Hans Peter Hauri, accused Sandoz of having violated several
CHARLES-ANDRE UDRY
An examination of the various far from unavoidable accidents in the chemicals industry, immediately shows a common denominator: The chemical companies pay little if any attention to the most elementary regulations laid down by the various state bodies. These big bosses, the champions of law and order, do not miss a chance to break the law where their profits are concerned. Here are a few examples.
In his book La civilisation du risque (The Dangerous Society), Patrick Lagadec writes: "In Flixborough [a small rural town about 260 kilometres from London], Nypro installed a storage capacity 43 times that authorized. In Seveso, Imesa (a subsidiary of Hoffmann-La Roche) violated the rules of all the regulatory agencies. These violations, moreover, were not 'acceptable adjustments in view of an overzealous administration.'
"When you go so far as to ask for authorization to build a waste. treatment facility to eliminate the residues of a dangerous production process that was not declared and therefore not authorized, there is obviously an unacceptable gap between the law and the practice." (1)
In 1974, the explosion at Nypro, which made intermediate products for the fabrication of nylon, killed 28 people, wounded dozens and damaged 2,450 homes.
The reddish cloud that escaped from the Imesa factory [in Seveso] in July 1986 contained a highly toxic product (dioxin), endangering the health of the local population and contaminating the area.
A few years later, - HoffmannLa Roche compounded the crime. Through Givaudan, a Geneva firm that it controlled, it made a contract with the German firm Man16 nesmann AG to dispose of toxic waste from Seveso secretly and thus with a clear conscience!
They buried a shipment of animal carcasses in northern France, at Anguilcourt-le-Sart. They were found out by accident. Only then was Hoffmann-La Roche forced by the pressure of the French government and public opinion to build a special furnace to incinerate and neutralize these poisonous wastes. (2)
After the Bhopal catastrophe in December 1984, Union Carbide was responsible for another accident in its Institute factory in West Virginia in the United States. This accident was discovered by the workers and people of the area by means of their sense of smell. The noses of those endangered are often considered a security device by industrialists who claim, in order to justify their refusal to provide information, that they rely only on science and technology and distrust the "panic reactions of the population." If looking ridiculous were as deadly as dioxin, a lot of these captains of industry would have long since removed themselves from the scene. "Deliberate violation of the regulations"
After an investigation of the Institute accident, OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), a federal regulatory agency, imposed a fine of 1.4 million dollars on Union Carbide. In his argument, the Reagan administration's secretary of labor, William Brock, indicated that the commission of enquiry had found "a continual and deliberate violation of the regulations." He added that the worst thing "was in articles of the environmental protection law that went into force in 1985. (4) It is certain that the same thing applies to Ciba-Geigy's "spillage" into the Rhine. Nonetheless, the real offenders remain at large, while their products remain in the Rhine.
All studies of the bigger accidents in the chemicals industry show that they have been repeats of previous ones. The only thing that sets these more notable ones apart is their greater scope, which attracts the attention of public opinion and, only after that, of the authorities.
These observations lead to the conclusion that these catastrophes are not "inevitable" but are rather quite often foreseeable. Evidence of this is that the insurance companies, which do not want to have to pick up too big a tab for the mess (as the insurance bosses say privately) generally point out the dangers to the industrialists. It is known that the American insurance companies did that in the case of Union Carbide. And the same thing happens in Switzerland.
Five years ago, the Zurich Insurance company made numerous criticisms of Sandoz's safety system. The firm's response was simple. It changed its insurance company, and took no serious step to deal with the deficiencies in its safety setup. That is a good illustration of the so-called freedom of the market, of respect for the law of supply and demand.
To collect the fat premiums that formerly went to its competitor, Zurich Insurance, Winterthur and Gerling were prepared to shut their
1. Patrick Lagadec, 'La Civilisation du risque,' Le Sueil, 1981.
2. John Elkington, "Poisons to burn or bury." in Encyclopedia Britannica,' suppl. 1984, p. 364.
3. Charles Perrow, "The Risky Systems - the Habit of Courting Disaster," 'The Nation, October 11, 1986, pp. 347-356. (All quotes originally in English have been retranslated from the French.]
4. Roger Gaillard in 'L'Hebdo' of November 13, 1986.
International Viewpoint 8 December 1986
eyes and hope that all would be for the best in the best of all possible chemical worlds. Sandoz continued its criminal stocking of highly dangerous products without encountering the slightest sanction.
So, Sandoz was warned by Zurich Insurance. Today, now that the crime has been committed, Sandoz had not even been legally put on notice (to say nothing of preventive imprisonment!). It is Winterthur that has to take the consequences and Zurich Insurance that can congratulate itself.
This moral double bookkeeping that is inherent in private property, the market economy and competition simply reflects the respect of the industrialists for profit and their distain for the people and the workers.
It is worth noting that Sandoz changed its insurance company in the wake of a study by the Mac Kinsey firm, specialists in reducing production costs, from "general costs" to wages. Safety and profits do not get along well together, especially when "rationalization" measures are being applied. Servility of state bodies to the chemical trusts
A closer look shows that certain state bodies also took a tolerant attitude. In fact, the highly toxic products were stored in facilities built in 1968 to house machinery. But, ten years later, in 1979, Sandoz claims it got authorization to transform these facilities into storehouses for chemical and agro-chemical products.
It would be interesting to know in detail what investigations were or were not carried out by the component services before the administrative green light was given.
All these accidents have demonstrated either the servility of the state bodies to the chemical trusts or their inability to enforce respect for a series of basic regulations, or both at the same time. It is no coincidence when investigating committees established to look into accidents of a certain scale turn up scandals.
Will we ever get to know what lies behind the Basle mysteries? It is ironic to note that a love of secrecy and for releasing information drop by drop are as much a characteristic of the Swiss chemicals industry and the confederal authorities as they were of Gorbachev at the time of Chernobyl. The difference is that at the time of Chernobyl, the US satellites informed (and misinformed) public opinion about the unfolding of the nuclear accident. Here we do not have the benefit of the explanations that might be offered by the Soviet espionage services!
We have to be satisfied with a few revelations coming from the German Greens (following a leak that was certainly not looked upon unfavorably by Zurich Insurance), or more or less directly from German and French competitors of the Swiss chemical companies. The latter are quite happy to get a chance to "clean up" their consciences on the cheap by tripping up their esteemed Swiss colleagues and business rivals.
The Basle accident makes it possible to point up the underlying thread connecting all the previous and future catastrophes in the chemicals industry. (5)
In fact, the chemicals industry works essentially with a relatively limited number of raw materials (oil, coal, chlorine). On the basis these substances, the industry multiplies intermediate products more than Jesus did the loaves and the fishes. Some of these are highly toxic. They are used in a great number of finshed products. Thus, a whole series of dangers are created by the economic and technical logic of the process of producing these intermediary products.
Barry Commoner has been pointing this out for some time: "Thus the astonishingly high level of profit in this industry [chemicals] seems to be the direct consequence of the intervention and production at short intervals of new synthetic materials which, when they enter into the environment are most often a source of pollution (since they are toxic and non-biodegradable) • evolution of this sort is a nightmare for ecologists, because the period of four to five years in which a new synthetic substance [intermediate or finished product] turns up massively on the market and in the environment is literally too short for it to be possible to determine its ecological effects.
"By the time the effects become known, the harm has been done, and the great weight of the investment made in a new productive technology makes it extremely difficult to abandon production." (6) Fundamentally, this explains the ecological disasters caused by Sandoz and Ciba Geigy.
Private ownership, competition and the accompanying secrecy, as well as the primacy given to caleulating production costs for an enterprise, considered as an economic unit, makes it impossible for civil society to exercise an effective control. All this leads the chemicals industry to get entangled, "without serious safeguards and without any reliable guidelines" in a jungle of procedures to perfect intermediate products that are often very dangerous.
Moreover, as the Sandoz example shows, these products are stored haphazardly, without any clear account being kept, various products piled up next to each other, with all of the attendant dangers. For example, 30 different products were stored in Sandoz's Hangar 956. Among them were 25 tons of Parathion (EthylParathion), known by the code name E 605. The Roempps chemical dietionary defines the toxidity of this product as follows: "A dose of 0.1 to 0.2 grams swallowed by a person amounts to a lethal dose." (7)
What led to the tragedy in Seveso was the overheating of an intermediary product - 2,4,5 TCP - which produced dioxin. Massive potential for accidents
In 1985, confederal statistics recorded 346 chemical companies operating on Swiss soil, along with 924 firms with licences for producing chemicals and 794 firms working in plastics and rubber. Many of these enterprises store dangerous chemical products. Often, the latter are transported in unsafe conditions.
It is thus possible to get an idea of the potential that exists for accidents. In many cases, they can be theoretically foreseen by the insurance companies or the state administration. But the response to these threats is a "fatalism," which is a palpable manifestation of the great invisible hand" of the market described by the English free-enterprise economists of the nineteenth century. (8)
Given the jumble typical of chemicals production, a listing and classification of the intermediary products, as well as a schedule of their toxidity, are not only difficult to establish but often such preliminary steps are deliberately neglected or kept secret by the private firms.
zeit Hiss a enter the maor sue. In its November *Die dents in the chemicals industry. following can be noted: 1948, explosion at BASF in Ludwigshafen, 200 dead and 3,800 wounded; 1974, Nypro explosion in Flixborough; 1976, the leakage of dioxin near Toronto, 25,000 persons evacuated; in Seveso; 1979, Mississauga explosion 1984, Bhopal, 3,000 dead.
Barry Commoner, "L'encerclement, Le Seuil, Paris, 1972, pp. 260-261.
'Die Zeit,' November 14, 1986.
8. On this subject, see William Kapp's classical work, l'economie de marche, Paris, Flammarion, 'Les couts sociaux dans 1976. (The English original was published in 1950 and a second corrected edition came out in 1986.)
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International Viewpoint 8 December 1986
This state of affairs can be seen today at Sandoz. Worse still, the confederal and cantonal institutions lack the necessary means and information to make such an accounting. Representing Sandoz, Ernest Zugger had the gall to say that independent inspection of the chemical firms is virtually impossible technically. The American example alone is sufficient to refute this. But worst of all he had the effrontery to claim that such a regulatory agency would cost the taxpayers dear! As if pollution does not cost them anything, as if the profits of the chemical industry were not enough to finance a genuine independent inspection!
The mechanisms themselves of producing intermediate toxic products lead to increasing the dangers. A line of research needs only be abandoned and the result of the past research piles up in the form of toxic waste. A chemicals firm making intermediate products needs only to see its orders decrease, either conjuncturally or structurally, and dangerous residues build up. The list of examples is endless.
Imagine only, to get a concrete picture of the problem, that all the cars junked or kept in storerooms were highly toxic products, poorly looked after and poorly put away but with clearly identifiable dangers for the population.
Some would say that efforts are being made now to get better looked after disposal sites for toxic waste. That is partially true. But one figure alone is enough to show the limits of the measures taken in countries that are much more advanced in this field than Switzerland. For example, in the United States in 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency judged that only 35 of the 275 tons of toxic products produced annually came under its purview. (9)
Finally, everyone thinks that it is normal that before a medicine goes on sale, a state institution, independent if possible of the pharmaceutical industry, gives the go-ahead. But for thousands of highly toxic intermediate products put on the market (if only on the inter-enterprise market) such precautions do not exist. That is another feature of the capitalist chemicals scandal.
The Basle accident poses at once the problem of the procedures for invention and fabrications of chemical products, of their social, economic, and ecological utility for humanity (and a number are useful in the present historical stage), and of effective social control over the activities of the chemicals firms, of safety and protection measures. 9. J. Elkington, op. cit. 18