Update on an earlier story:
In this north Abidjan district men in white overalls are using mechanical diggers to extract toxic mud from the city’s main household waste dump. It is gooey and black, and it stinks of garlic. The dump, in the district of Akouedo, is one of around fifteen sites in the Ivorian commercial capital where untreated toxins were wantonly offloaded on the night of August 19, eventually poisoning tens of thousands of people, seven of them fatally.
Akouedo was one of the worst-hit areas, with three separate sites affected, and the Ivorian authorities have designated it as the first priority for cleaning up.
On the second Akouedo dump the diggers are working in a crater covered in a thick layer of polluted earth that is obvious even to the naked eye.
Each load is meticulously placed into a plastic bag one cubic metre (1.3 cubic yards) in volume. Along with the liquid waste, these will be stored in the coming days in a secure warehouse prepared by the Ivorian authorities.
Not far away, a Dutch team is working on a third location, pounding the contaminated banks of a dried-up stream with water cannon in order to liquidise the polluted earth so it can be pumped out, as the diggers cannot access it.
Inhabitants of Akouedo have been doubly affected by the dumping: as well as inhaling poisonous substances, many of them live off food they grow on allotments on the site, which is normally only partly given over to waste.
Those parcels and all of their produce will now have to be destroyed. The Ivorian agriculture ministry has promised to compensate their owners…
Several government officials accused of corruption and cronyism in arranging the deal which brought the toxic waste to local household dumps — have resigned. Hopefully they will be indicted and judged for the tragedy they brought to their nation.
Is there a Ford plant near those locations?
The garlicky smell may well be arsine gas, which implies that there’s arsenic there. Very bad.
The lows some go to to make a buck.
Earlier stories indicated they moved from port to port to look for a place to rid of the waste. What prevented them from dumping in the open ocean? I don’t advocate that by ANY means, but no one would have seen them. Who would be dumb enough to do this where there are people around that could get sick, die and implicate them? Seems like some VERY dumb criminals…
The thing is you need paperwork to prove you didn’t just dump it in the ocean. This is why Ivory Coast government officials were involved. They had the wherewithal to provide the proper paperwork, otherwise the Dutch officials would have realised immediately when they returned to port.
You know the Kyoto Accord would have prevented this.
Y’know, more than anything else, I find it impressive there are still people running corporations who do not realize that you cannot dump ANYTHING toxic – poisonous – et al. into a closed ecological system without suffering severe consquenses someday, somewhere. There simply “ain’t no free lunch” on this planet. Makes me wonder if those types ever consider their grandkids or great-grandkids running around on flippers or dying at 8 or 10 from some really cool form of cancer ?