The killing of the Rhine
International Viewpoint 8 December 1986
ECOLOGY the atmosphere, the attitude [of the management] had to be paid for production.
All these remarks could be applied to Sandoz or Ciba-Geigy, with one
In Switzerland, there very little chance of seeing into the Sandoz and independent as the one appointed by the American administration (even the Union Carbide accident
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. 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, Icmesa (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 residues of a dangerous production process that was not declared and therefore not authorized, unacceptable between the law and the practice.
In 1974, the explosion at Nypro, which made intermediate products for the fabrication of nylon, 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. La 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 thus with a clear conscience!
They buried a shipment of animal 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 these poisonous wastes. (2)
the Bhopal catastrophe in December 1984, Union Carbide was responsible for another accident in its factory in West Virginia in the United States. This accident discovered by the workers people of the area by means of their of smell. The noses of those endangered security device by industrialists who claim, in order to justify their refusal to provide information, that and technology "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 "Deliberate violation of the regulations"
investigation of the Institute accident, OSHA (the Occupational Safety and Health Administration), a federal regulatory ageney, imposed a fine of 1.4 million dollars on Union Carbide. In his argument, the Reagan administration's secretary of labor, William of enquiry had found "a continual and deliberate added that the worst thing "was in after the Basle accident, an official of the Office Federal pour (OPFE), Hans Peter Hauri, accused
Sandoz of having articles of the environmental tection 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 they have been repeats of previous ones. The only thing that sets these more notable ones greater scope, attention of public opinion and, only after that, of the authorities.
"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)
point out the dangers to the industrialists. It is known that did that in the case of Union Carbide. And the same thing happens in Switzer-
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 Gerling were prepared to shut their
Patrick Lagadec, La Civilisation du risque, ' Le Sueil, 1981.
John Elkington, "Poisons to burn or bury, in 'Encyclopedia Britannica, suppl. 1984, p. 364.
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 congratu-
This moral double bookkeeping that is inherent in private property, the market economy and competition reflects the respect of industrialists for profit distain for the people and the workers.
noting that Sandoz changed its insurance company in the wake of a study by the Mac Kinsey firm, specialists in reducing production
"general costs" 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. 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 ironie 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 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 works essentially with limited number of raw (oil, coal, chlorine). On the of these substances, the industry multiplies intermediate more than Jesus did the loaves and the fishes. Some of these toxic. They are used in a great number of finshed products. whole series of dangers are 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) An 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 the time the effects become and the great weight of the investtechnology makes it extremely ficult to abandon production." (6) as the enterprise, 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 recorded 346 chemical operating on Swiss soi, along with 924 firms with licences for producing chemicals and 794 firms working in plastics and rubber. Many of these store dangerous chemical Often, the latter are transported in unsafe conditions.
It is thus possible to get an idea of the potential that exists for accitheoretically foreseen by the insurance companies or the state administration.
the response to these threats is manifestation of the great 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 such preliminary deliberately neglected or secret by the private firms.
explosion persons evacuated; 1984, Bhopal, 3,000 dead.
Barry Commoner, L'encerclement,' Le Seuil, Paris, 1972, pp. 260-261.
7. *Die Zeit, ' November 14, 1986.
On this subject, see William Kapp's classical work, 'Les couts sociaux dans l'economie de marche, Paris, Flammarion, 1976. (The English original was published in 1950 and second corrected edition came out in 1986.)
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