Blacksmith is working to avert a catastrophe on the scale of Bhopal or Chernobyl at the old Gorlovka chemical plant in the Ukraine.
Recently, I’ve been working to avert a catastrophe at the Gorlovka chemical plant in the Ukraine, which we reported on in Blacksmith’s July newsletter as an “accident waiting to happen. ” This town has an abandoned munitions warehouse just on the outskirts of the town center. Tens of thousands of tons of an extremely toxic chemical – MNCB – is dumped there, much of it outside and under tarpaulins. It is so nasty that half a teaspoon will kill you. We just finished re-packaging 400 drums of the most exposed MNCB – barely the beginning. But more problematic, there are also tons of unexploded TNT in pipes throughout the warehouse. If this were to sunddenly go off, it would destroy nearby tanks of ammonia, which would flood the town and kill 200,000 people in ten minutes. Yes, another Chernobyl or Bhopal in our lifetimes. Yikes………
In a related note, the latest Blacksmith World’s Worst Polluted Places report points out the good news about ending chemical weapons. It is anticipated that by 2021, all chemical weapons in the world should be destroyed.
Richard
