What’s in that railcar?
Excuse my geeking out on this (The Guardian):
For more than 30 years, Susan Kamuda lived with her family several hundred yards away from an unassuming brick building situated in a small office park.
Kamuda’s son, Brian, remembers riding his bike past the building on his way through the neighborhood; he later taught a girlfriend to drive in the nearby parking lot.
Neither Kamuda nor the surrounding community knew that the building housed a company that was spewing a colorless gas into the skies above Willowbrook, a middle-class, suburban enclave south-west of Chicago. A company called Sterigenics used the gas, ethylene oxide (EtO), to sterilize medical devices and other products.
Kamuda, 70, had no history of breast cancer in her family. She won a $363 million judgment against Sterigenics over her 2007 diagnosis. Brian was diagnosed with stage four non-Hodgkin lymphoma. Kamuda knew of others near the plant who had fallen sick. Only recently had they begun to link the illnesses to proximity to the Sterigenics site.
EtO has been associated with an increased risk for cancer since the 1970s. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) says that the greatest cancer risk is for people who have lived near a facility that has released EtO into the air for many years.
Records show that regulators were concerned about the health risks associated with EtO when Sterigenics quietly moved into Willowbrook in 1984. That year Illinois environmental officials sent the company a letter warning that the facility could expose people living within a mile from the facility to EtO concentrations 14 times higher than amounts then considered safe.
This is not the first time I’ve come across EtO. It is used in small quantities in hospitals to sterilize instruments that cannot tolerate autoclave temperatures. It sterilizes effectively because it kills … basically everything. It’s not only toxic and carcinogenic, but explosive.
A site adjacent to a factory where my firm did some design/construct work sold EtO. Another engineer who’d had business there said one of his contacts had doodled out on his blotter how large a crater the explosion would cause if one of their EtO railcars blew up. Um, large.
Some years later, there was a derailment near Liberty, SC (IIRC). The state environmental agency’s press office statement over the radio said one of the overturned tank cars was leaking caustic soda, but that was contained. Another car, she said haltingly, contained “eth-yl-ene ox-ide.”
“I’m not sure what the properties of that are,” she went on, “but as a precuation they have ordered an evacuation of people living within a quarter of a mile.”