Pacific Views

Monsanto Gets Nailed

Thanks to flipping past 60 Minutes just now, I heard the very good news that a jury in the state of Alabama just told Monsanto that they have to pay up to the tune of $700 million for several decades worth of PCB contamination. The town of Anniston, Alabama is considered the most toxic in the country, and residents weren't warned even after the harmful nature of the chemicals was well known to Monsanto.

...Stewart uncovered close to a million pages of company documents that show Monsanto knew PCBs were a problem as early as 1938 - when scientists hired by the compay reported that rats exposed to the chemicals delivered liver damage. By the 1950s, Monsanto was urging its own workers to wear "proper protective clothing" and "respiratory equipment" when handling PCBs. Many of the documents dealing with PCBs or other pollutants were marked "Confidential: Read and Destroy."

...In 1969, Monsanto created a high level PCB Committee, whose mission was to "protect the image of the corporation" and "permit continued sales and profits." Even they concluded that PCBs will someday become "a global environmental contaminant." But no one let the community know the extent of the problem and little was said about it in the press.

In fact, people in Anniston might never have known about the contamination if it weren't for a man with the Soil Conservation Service, who pulled a badly deformed largemouth bass out of Choccolocco Creek in 1993. Instead of throwing it back, he decided to send it off to an independent lab for analysis, and discovered that the fish was loaded with PCBs.

...Last summer, when it looked like an Alabama judge might order the company to remove all the PCBs from Anniston, the EPA stepped in and signed a consent decree with Solutia giving the company two more years to study the problem - and then propose its own clean up. ...

The 60 Minutes people are unfortunately too nice to point out that this is yet another case of the Bush administration stepping in on behalf of corporations to the detriment of the people they live near. Because it wasn't just 'the EPA,' it was Bush's EPA. But fortunately I'm not nearly that nice, so I'm pointing.

Posted by natasha at August 31, 2003 10:43 PM | TrackBack