Haiti and Toxic Waste

[Judi Lynn]

Weekend Edition
January 22 - 24, 2010

Dumping Ground of the Caribbean
Haiti and Toxic Waste
By MITCHEL COHEN

Two decades ago, the garbage barge, the Khian Sea, with no place in the U.S. willing to accept its garbage, left the territorial waters of the United States and began circling the oceans in search of a country willing to accept its cargo: 14,000 tons of toxic incinerator ash. First it went to the Bahamas, then to the Dominican Republic, Honduras, Bermuda, Guinea Bissau and the Netherlands Antilles. Wherever it went, people gathered to protest its arrival. No one wanted the millions of pounds of Philadelphia municipal incinerator ash dumped in their country.

Desperate to unload, the ship's crew lied about their cargo, hoping to catch a government unawares. Sometimes they identified the ash as "construction material"; other times they said it was "road fill," and still others "muddy waste." But environmental experts were generally one step ahead in notifying the recipients; no one would take it. That is, until it got to Haiti. There, U.S.-backed dictator Baby Doc Duvalier issued a permit for the garbage, which was by now being called "fertilizer," and four thousand tons of the ash was dumped onto the beach in the town of Gonaives.

It didn't take long for public outcry to force Haiti's officials to suddenly "realize" they weren't getting fertilizer. They canceled the import permit and ordered the waste returned to the ship. But the Khian Sea slipped away in the night, leaving thousands of tons toxic ash on the beach.

For two years more the Khian Sea chugged from country to country trying to dispose of the remaining 10,000 tons of Philadelphia ash. The crew even painted over the barge's name -- not once, but twice. Still, no one was fooled into taking its toxic cargo. A crew member later testified that the waste was finally dumped into the Indian Ocean.

The activist environmental group, Greenpeace, pressured the U.S. government to test the "fertilizer." The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and Greenpeace found it contained 1,800 pounds of arsenic, 4,300 pounds of cadmium, and 435,000 pounds of lead, dioxin and other toxins. But no one would clean it up.

More:
http://www.counterpunch.org/cohen01222010.html

[madokie]

1. I've often wondered what happened to that barge and its cargo of waste

[Mika]

2. Hi Judi. Please post this in the Lat Am forum also.

Thanks for posting it. :thumbsup:


:hi:

[joshcryer]

3. Profit.

Picture I found of this legendary ship. Shame they dumped the remaining ash into the sea.

[DeadEyeDyck]

4. that waste is inconsequental compared to what is

bewing in the hundreds of mass graves. I looked closely and there were no liners. The leechate from the decaying bodies is going to be very bad.

[kestrel91316]

6. The bodies are organic matter, not concentrated heavy metals.

They will compost aerobically or anaerobically, depending on how much air gets to them.

[Merchant Marine]

5. Its a wonder they didn't pull the old

"Foundered in a storm" insurance scam. That one's as old as shipping itself, very popular with the third world operators.