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Hawai'i's ocean slowly being poisoned?

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  • Hawai'i's ocean slowly being poisoned?

    We all thought the unexploded ordnances on Kahoolawe and on the Army training areas were bad enough, but now there is increasing worry about 8,000 tons of chemical weapons that were disposed of in the ocean off Oahu after WWII leaching out and polluting beaches and killing off sealife.

    The DoD dumped hundreds of thousands of barrels of toxins off the shoreline on the West Coast, East Coast, Hawaii and the Gulf Coast after WWII. More than likely, the toxins were housed in steel drums, which would eventually corrode and allow the toxins to mix with seawater creating all kinds of havoc.

    The DoD is remaining pretty tight lipped about what they dumped out there, but State officials are worried at the potential risk to sealife and humans.

    "...Officials in Hawai'i and Washington, D.C., are demanding information from the Department of Defense on more than 8,000 tons of chemical weapons that were dumped off O'ahu at the end of World War II and may still be there.

    The weapons and bulk chemical containers include the lethal toxins hydrogen cyanide and cyanogen chloride and the blistering agents mustard and lewisite. In 1944 and 1945, the military dumped much of its chemical weapons supply into the oceans of the world, including waters as close as five miles from shore and as shallow as 1,000 feet deep off Wai'anae, Pearl Harbor and Honolulu Harbor.

    An Army spokesman last week said there is no danger of the toxic chemicals washing up on O'ahu beaches, but he was unable to say how the Army came to that conclusion. The Army has not responded to Advertiser requests over the past week for additional information on the situation.

    In 1976, several Hawai'i maritime workers received chemical burns to their feet when they dredged up off Honolulu Harbor leaking containers of a blistering agent, possibly the chemical munition mustard. An Environmental Protection Agency report says that in July 2004, three explosives demolition workers on the East Coast were injured by a mustard agent from an explosive shell dredged up off New Jersey...."



    Miulang
    "Americans believe in three freedoms. Freedom of speech; freedom of religion; and the freedom to deny the other two to folks they don`t like.” --Mark Twain

  • #2
    Re: Hawai'i's ocean slowly being poisoned?

    Hopefully, there isn't much migration of the disposed material. In order to achieve corrosion, you need free oxygen which is usually not abundant at the bottom of the ocean. So hopefully the metal housing will still be fairly intact. Now, if there were migration through the years, not only will it be difficult to locate the items in question, but should they get to shallower water where they are now in the mixing zone where the waves breaks, where you now have free oxygen in the environment, there's a good chance of leakage due to corrosion.
    Whoa, Mista Buss Driva, eh, you can stop the buss o wat?

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    • #3
      Re: Hawai'i's ocean slowly being poisoned?

      It would have been better if they'd just poured the stuff into the ocean.

      With the stuff in slowly corroding steel containers we now have a time-released hazard that will, over a long period of time, be an ever-present threat.

      Pretty careless and stupid.

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      • #4
        Re: Hawai'i's ocean slowly being poisoned?

        And then there's that pesky Arizona, slowly leaking oil for the past 64 years into Pearl Harbor.

        They say that the solution to polution is dilution, but if we keep testing that theory by dumping increasing volumes of toxic substances into our oceans, well there's only so much the deep blue sea can take before it begins to die. And as the ocean goes, so goes Hawaii.

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        • #5
          Whale dies with fishing nets, plastic bags in stomach on Kauai (staradvertiser.com)

          Throw Nets? It's like fishing with dynamite.

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