What's the worse environmental hazard you've seen with your own eyes? I've seen a few. Though the worse was a lake I visited about once a day. We came once during winter (winter it's harder to get up there because it's too cold to take long walks and then school makes life busy.) I walked up there with my friend and we smelled dead fish, even a mile away. When we got to the lake, we counted over 345 dead fish. Now this lake wasn't that big, so that's a lot of fish. There was obviously oil in it by how it looked. We called our local "Stream Team" and they said it was just a turn over. I'm not sure if you all know what that is, but it comes from people spraying vitamins or w/e to make the grass grow better. It gets into the lake and causes a sheet of vegetation to grow over the lake. This takes the oxygen from the fish and wala, dying lake. That's not what happened, as there was no vegetation! Anyways, that's about the worse I've seen. Second worse would be when the sewage backed up into another lake near my home. It smelled terrible, and the fish were probably dying in there, and people still fished??!!! Anyways Yeah.
I grew up in an industrial town in North West England, for the first sixteen years of my life. The air there was so thick with pollution you could practically drink it. But our water was nice and fresh, piped from the lake district- not like the disgustingly hard stuff in the south
When I was a chemist, one of the projects our lab was contracted for was an environmental impact analysis on a site that had been a leather tannery for decades, but which had been vacant for years after the tannery was demolished. This was not a project I was directly involved with, but everyone in the lab became unpleasantly familiar with it. We had dozens of soil and water samples from the site stored in a refrigerator purchased for the project. Due to the strong odor of the samples, this refrigerator was located at the extreme end of the lab corridor, furthest from the entrance, lunchroom, and most of the laboratory rooms. The samples were highly contaimnated with chromium compounds, once used in the tanning process. These are both toxic and carcinogenic, and essentially killed the soil. The samples smelled like raw sewage, but worse, especially by the end of the project a few months later. Not only the samples had to be specially disposed of at a hazardous waste facility, the refrigerator they were contained in was also a complete loss. The site had been initially considered for industrial development, but after the report, it was deemed unsuitable.
Only anaerobic bacteria. Everything else that keeps soild healthy (worms, insects, aerobic bacteria) had died.
We did a job in a building a few years back and were investigating the two 4" steel conduits that run from the basement out to the street and then up the power pole. Ordinarily these pipes have a weather-head on top for obvious reasons. Well, one had been lost. So in the basement, when the end-cap came off the second pipe, the poor guy in the way caught about 2 seconds of water before he could put the cap back on. At this point the back room in the basement carried a smell worse than any other I've ever known. We put out a 50 gallon trash can and filled it up with the water from that pipe. We found out that a dead squirrel was in the pipe, not to mention all the stuff that rain will bring down. Then the smell worked its way to the other parts of the basement. The back side opened up to a parking lot so fresh air wasn't too far away. I got lucky and was moved to another job two days later.
The worst that I saw was actually about 3 weeks ago. In Shanghai my first day there, I was staying at a cheap hotel next to a number of small rivers. It smelled like an open sewer. Whenever I went over one of the bridges the water was full of garbage, and it was common to see people throwing garbage cans full of all types of garbage right into the river followed by the plastic garbage bag. I now understand why not even the poorest people in Shanghai drink water that hasn't been boiled.
Unboilded water? You know what is even more unfortunate, even if one does boils water it does not guarantee at all that the water will end up being safe to drink.
The state of the environment is simply horrible in some areas - I keep hearing more about China - but it seems most people are willing to let it slide for the sake of business. This 'Green' phase just seems to be PR, though one will only know in years to come. I don't know what would remedy all of this without a legislative and executive backing. Sure, a group of people can influence a community, but in the end, money speaks louder than actions. Hopefully there will be some genuine changes when another generation occupies the seats of the government.
Sorry about the bad English, I was in a hurry. I don't think people will let China slide for too much longer. I'm not talking about other nations either. It's own people are getting fed up with having so much smog in the air. I'm in a small city of only 3-5 million (I've heard both figures) and I have barely seen the sky in 2 weeks. At best I'll see a patch of blue sky directly above me that looks hazy, and as I look around it fades to grey. It's believed that air pollution related deaths run well into the tens of millions. And in the past two years a number of cities have been unable to use tap water even for cleaning due to chemical spills. That has caused reports of widespread anger. And if we're hearing about this anger in the West, the citizens must be really upset. I haven't heard any reactions first hand though. But I don't speak Chinese (slowly learning though), and I'm playing it very safe and avoiding subjects the government might not like. So I only have news reports and unconfirmed stories to base this on. Hopefully China will get its act together, because right now, it's a mess.
My cousin was sent to Taiwan for a few weeks by her company and she showed us pictures of nearly everyone wearing gloves, for germs in general, and face masks due to SARS and heavy smog. And they don't have nearly as many combustion vehicles as the US does relative to its size. I'm all for capitalism but they spent lot of time and money on the Taipei 101 building, now the tallest in the world, probably just to keep more business in the country and the smog and pollution is as bad as a large, over crowded city like L.A.
L.A. isn't overcrowded, but it's badly designed. There is virtually no functioning public transportation system, for instance. You always need to drive to get from point A to point B, and that means that wasting time driving becomes a part of your life in L.A. But compared to the traffic in India, the traffic in L.A. is nothing. I know that most Americans think that L.A. has a terrible traffic congestion, but you can't begin to compare that to traffic congestions in major cities in India.
