Climate Change Stirs Ghosts Of America's Toxic Past

McIntosh, United States, (UrduPoint / Pakistan Point News - 20th Apr, 2021 ) :Murky flood waters of Alabama's Tombigbee River rippled over ground tainted with mercury and a pesticide so toxic that US officials outlawed it decades ago, a dangerous past that could cause even more damage with climate change.

Hundreds of America's worst polluted places, like a neighboring pair of chemical plant sites on the Tombigbee, are threatened by storms, rising waters, fires and other extreme weather made more intense as the Earth warms.

"There might be a whole lot of danger for us," said 59-year-old Darrell Wayne Moss, who lives across the street from the sprawling Olin chemical plant. "It makes you afraid." A tall, barbed-wire topped fence rings the factory -- which is a jigsaw-like collection of pipes, storage tanks, shiny metal vats and sheds -- and bears signs warning "DANGER: RESTRICTED AREA.

" The Olin site, and the property at the neighboring BASF works, are part of the US Superfund program which oversees the clean up of worst-of-the-worst hazardous waste dumps, industrial facilities and mines.

Ciba-Geigy Corp's factory, which is now owned by BASF, began making the powerful pesticide DDT in the 1950s as well as other heavy industrial chemicals. Toxic waste was dumped into open, unlined pits, some of which were in the river's flood plain.

DDT is a nasty compound that was banned from US use in 1972 over the risks to people and animals' health, and because it stays potent in the environment for an unusually long time.

The prohibition of DDT has also been credited with helping the resurgence of America's national symbol, the bald eagle, which struggled to reproduce after being poisoned by the pesticide.