Or, disaster, 500 innocent human beings dead, 400,000 poultry dead, as the result of an otherwise technically-adept society failing to use current knowledge. We all heard about "PCBs", the insidious oil-like synthetic chemical compound developed in the '30s to fill, cool, and insulate large electrical equipment, like transformers. So useful was it that it found it's way world-wide, though a few warnings had been issued. What is this stuff like? Looks, acts like oil, very heat resistant, very non-flammable, insidious; power company workers I spoke with told me they had all but bathed in the stuff years earlier, didn't seem harmful except to raise skin blisters......no one knew human physiology mistakes it for ESTROGEN, takes it up, stores it in fat cells. In large concentrations, it kills, otherwise poisoning coming generations through fat in breast milk. In 1968, a Japanese company making rice bran oil used PCBs in piping to heat the rice bran, pumping the oily PCBs through tanks of the foodstuffs. Pipes leaked, ultimately causing 500 deaths, many injuries,about 40,000 affected, nearly one-half million poultry dead. The Japanese, a technically-advanced people, should have known better. Incredibly, this event was REPEATED ten years later, again in Japan! See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yushō_disease Frank
I wonder if that's the same PCB that they were spraying alongside the highways here. I remember that the highway dept. had to dig up soil beside a lot of the highways and replace the soil after some company dumped PCBs.
I had a distant cousin who worked for the railroad and was involved in some PCB spill incident. He was permanently disabled and had to retire with disability.
@Don Alaska Shocking. See if this list of disastrous PCB incidents will come up: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polychlorinated_biphenyl#Pollution_due_to_PCBs