David Marrack Interview, Part 2 of 3

DM: We couldn't get from any of the clinics in the hospitals the data on the number of children coming with asthma. The-some medical records had said well that raises legal problems and identity problems and all sorts of things like that, we don't need any of that. We said we don't need the identity, we just need the numbers. You know, they're all coded on (?) what's the problem. Every conceivable plot and no one ever got any decent data. Even the Baylor people in their own clinics, weren't able to get decent data together. It quite obviously went up.

DT: And the kind of data that you were looking for was...

DM: (Inaudible) attendance for asthma was what I had in mind would be the obvious thing to do, which obviously went up. And it was a-one of the problems is the whole of the asthma problem children is not expressed in the medical records of hospitals and clinics because a lot of patients go to private doctors, pay cash, and get treated and that's it and there's no record anywhere of their existence.

DT: No insurance record I suppose?

DM: No. There are in the-in the doctor's office maybe, but nowhere else. And the-so you can't get good statistics anyway, but it would be interesting to see how many people come in. And again, you've got mothers who are knowledgeable, just increase the dose when the child gets a liver problem and no one sees that. So one of the sessions I had a long time ago was to document the purchases of Asper and decongestant medicines from pharmacies cause they've got it all in the computer and you can see-well I collected up some data on this and it does show when the air pollution goes up the sales go up.

The whole problems, you know, back in the late '60's and particularly the '70's created lots of problems in terms of dividing people and-serious-serious, aggressive behavior potentially. There was a great hearing that Cheryl Stewart can tell you about on ocean dumping and the chemical-the companies wanted to dump really very hazardous chemicals out to sea and I testified in that-the risk it rose-created and why it shouldn't be done and it wasn't done.

DT: And what did you say?

DM: Well, basically that these things-they were-they admitted that it was too toxic a material to-to handle on land so you could just dump in openly in the sea. And it all sort of vanished and disappears and it was a great (?) when never see again and that isn't the way the sea works. Currents.

The fish and aquatic organisms will bring it up and bring it to the surface. I mean this is-you see this and then the problems at Lavaca Bay currently still with the lead and mercury that came from the Arcola plants until the clean air-Clean Water Act in 1972 when a Texas attorney, whose name, I can see him, who became legal advisor to the Audubon Society and the vice president. He was set-sued Arcola for the state to reduce the emissions.

But every time you stir up the mud in the bottom of that re-doing the channel, you increase the mercury and the lead in the shellfish and still areas of that bay are still closed as I understand it to fishing, to eating the fish

because of the pollution persists in the sediments. And the bethnic or-organisms keep recycling in and amongst themselves and particularly the mercury becomes dimethyl mercury, which is a-really a very nasty poison-much more poisonous than mercury as such-a neurological poison.

And it's not (?) in waters it's going up-coming off the surface the whole time too. (Inaudible) the other way from the air in and we have data on, for instance, the pollution of lakes or impalements that are cooling ponds for cold-fired power plants and their fish contain a lot more mercury than-and selenium which are in coal, than do the cooling impalements for oil (?) utility generating plants and they are still higher than natural occurring waters, a nice step gradient depending on what fuel is used in the power plant. And of course this is being studied in the Great Lakes and demonstrated very clearly that about a third of the Great Lakes pur-pollution comes from the air.

DT: Well you said that...

DM: Going to these hearings, I have been intimidated-or attempt intimidation a number of times by rednecks and others, threatening remarks, threaten my car. I usually make a point of going someone else with me in the car when I'm going to the meeting that would be beside me all the time when we were not in the meeting and again I usually got a-had a car behind me on the-on the road so that there was a second vehicle involved at witness and it was very obvious that we were going together and made a point of-being known that there were at least four of us there, not just a single-single driver in a car. And, you know, one learned from that good lady, Karen, whatever her name was in the plutonium cart...

DT: Karen Silkwood?

DM: Silkwood, that's right, thank you. Yeah, I mean this is a very risky thing to be doing. These people are-think it's life and death for them to be-to clean up. And so there are some very extreme views out there. I had to be very careful to keep my-make sure that my identity and involvement in environmental things was not known when I did physicals for the large petrochemical plants employees that it was not known, the other side of my life was not part of the-recognized in the plot.

DT: Did you feel like you could be blackballed?

DM: Oh well that would have been-they would have liked to have done that-(?) being physical. I think it would have been a physical attack or burned my car or blown it up or whatever else.

DT: Can you give us some examples of cases that worried you most?

DM: None of them really worried me, I felt very capable of dealing with it. So we got things organized and I felt capable of dealing with almost any situation that was likely to arise. I mean obviously if we had a-someone set a fire-fire to a car or blew it up, we've got a problem, but just ordinary physical, verbal and physical abuse was not likely to be really serious effects. I could take care of myself pretty well.

DT: What were the kind of threats that you often...

DM: You know, anything from 'we'll get ya' to 'you go in there and testify, you'll come out mashed' etc. and all sorts of things.

DT: And these people were mostly employees or...

DM: I think they were employees or thugs employed brought in by the companies to try and intimidate witnesses.

DT: Did you often have any work or support for unions on behalf of what you were trying to do?

DM: In the vinyl chloride business, Darman Shamrock, unions weren't against it but they weren't too-they-they got-split position because on one side they-it represents jobs and employment for their-and size of their union, and the second side is of course the cost-health costs to their workers. And they are split. And we have this ongoing. Among them Houston Port Authority or the bay port is claiming this is jobs-well when you look at it isn't that many jobs.

And what's more, it wouldn't make any difference which port-which specific locations, Spillman Islands or Freeport or the goods were important, there would still be jobs. The jobs are created by the goods coming in, not the location. And so putting it in the bay port doesn't particularly any beneficial to getting jobs. That you may need some more container-handling facilities somewhere, yes, and that will create jobs.

DT: Since you've mentioned Bay Port, can you help us understand the whole controversy over Bay Port?

DM: Well it's-probably the-the right kind of project-I mean there's been talk for an additional port facilities along the coast-upper Gulf Coast somewhere or another. The container ship business is obviously the way things are going to be moved around the world. So they needed the special facilities that-efficiently moving containers.

There's some real problems with the Bay Port, but apart from the destruction of important wetlands that's involved, increasing the depth of the ship channel, we have a long investigation of deeper ship channel some years ago and it got down to 45 feet. That's one of the-part of the business of the-we (?) earlier about the salt intrusion of the (?), the deeper the channel, the more salt that will come in the upper bay, the more salty it will get and the more difficult it will be for the shrimp and the other fish who depend upon the salinity gradient to find their way out to the gulf or come in.

I mean that has driven and if the salt's concentrations don't change, they've got no guidance which way to go, they get confused. Also it damages the oysters because the-there are oyster

parasites that are destroyed by high fresh water inflows and there are oyster parasites that are destroyed by high salinity situations. So they need a balance in between and in fact they need a fluctuation to occur regularly to kill off the various kinds of parasites. And that's-so the deepening of the channel was a-a very important issue and it will also probably change the circulation pattern in the bay, which is a crucial issue too.

And then, on top of that, is the emissions, air emissions from the-somewhere around 7000 diesel trucks coming and going everyday and they've got late trains, big trains with loads of stuff going through, going right through the middle of properties. Now, there is good data that every used highway have a health impact stretching out about 500 meters on either side. Of course it depends on which way the wind's blowing somewhat.

But I gave a paper last year and I've got one to give this year in June at the Air Waste Management Association on this problem of a significant ignored health-adverse health impact from transportation and-particularly the diesel. But it's not entirely diesel, cars are not innocent by any manner or means. But it is an issue that needs to be addressed and we need to reduce this in terms of the public health. It's been to my attention that the standards for particular-fine particular (inaudible) are such they will have no-applying

them religiously will have no effect on the public health basically because the problem lies in the five minute and the ten minute exposures that you get sitting at the bus stop by a traffic lights from a big puff of diesel emissions, or bus. And of course there's the data and the problem that's being investigated of the diesel school busses and the evidence that the in-cabin concentrations of toxic (?) particulates is 3 times higher than the ambient air outside.

It's not innocent to send your children by diesel driven school bus to school or to drive it to school in your SUV-they also have a high concentration inside. If you go on the freeway with your car, you are exposing yourself significantly to toxic chemicals, both fine particulates, BM 2.5 and the-things like benzene and formaldehyde, which are coming out of the exhaust.

And there's some real problems with measures to control this in diesel at least, which (?) know about because some of the control systems increase the amount of formaldehyde you get don't help. It's a complex-extremely complex situation of fuel, engine design, and control-computer control. And I don't think we have it solved.

DT: And the diesel truck issue is just one of the aspects to the Bay Port complex problem?

DM: Well yes that and then of course the-the-not only the trucks, but all the heavy equipment there belching away at-and the subdivisions around it. So they're going to get exposed and then those along the so-called San Jacinto Rail Line, again there's another problem coming up-un-unaccounted, undocumented public health-adverse public health effects.

And so there's lots of reasons for not doing this type of operation in the middle of a residential area, and-particularly when there are alternatives and the law requires that you use the least adverse impact alternative and that obviously is problem Spellman Island or one of the other (?) Island down in Galveston Bay. And that has great advantages because the-there's already a fifty foot channel up to Texas City, so that's there.

The site is not in the middle of a residential area. And the shorter distance to the gulf means the cost to the shipper of his vehicle go-his ship going an extra fifteen miles in land, slowly, is a significant cost in-in accumulated over multiple ships. So if you can do it on a much shorter journey into-to the port from the gulf, you're better off.

And of course that was one of the reasons for proposing this years ago. The offshore oil terminal there off Freeport. Again the-the tank of ships-one you didn't need to do any dig-dig a deep channel, two could unload their oil cargo to a platform off in the gulf and then pipe it in land and that would reduce the time and cost to the shipper of the oil, the vessel being at sea.

And the quicker you turn around the better you do. And so that was one of the basis of that proposal. Also, of course, it was part of the proposal-similar proposal was down at Palacios to build a liquid, natural gas terminal, a huge one, from Gas-compressed natural gas in Algeria. The problem with this, digging up part of Lavaca Bay where I mentioned the lead and the mercury down there, but also liquid natural gas is not a nice stuff.

When, and as we saw out at-was it, not Brenham where it was, that escaped from a salt dome that spread down on a cold day along the ditches and then blew up. And that's exactly what natural gas does. It's cold, it's dense, it spreads with a film out over the ground and then it eventually reach-somewhere along the line,

it gets a detonating mixture and it gets spark and fire it and the whole lot and a wonderful (inaudible). And I have seen something like that when a large gas, a coal gas storage tank in east London was hit by a bomb back in '60-I mean '50-no, back '40-'43 probably and happened to be about a quarter of a mile away. I saw this thing go up, I ducked, I didn't prevent my face from being burnt.

Yeah, it's-I was in a trench watching and just-just a tremendous flare. And what we didn't realize there was a delay between being hit and the whole thing burning so the-spread out before it burned because you've got to get enough oxygen air mix in. And then of course it (?). This-(coughing)-liquid natural gas has got some real risky handling problems, you don't want it anywhere near people.

So that was not addressed in the-by the company that was proposing and recognizing-I mean-there was a major public civilian injury episode, I think in Algeria, when the stuff leaked from a tank and down, down into the village along the slope and then blew up. It's a real risky problem. The-so anyway,

we-we fought that and successfully won that situation too, that was never built and that won't be built I don't think. Yeah, the problems of the public health, now I mean still, is the general inhibition of the process and you've got somewhere this article that was-came out by Natural Resources Offense Council, they call itself. (Inaudible) an (?) poisoning in Texas that was an interesting article too. It's, (inaudible) pointing out the problems as a situation not to be too friendly to. Being the kind of research that needs to be done and some people at Baylor are trying this now, I don't know how successful they'll be.

DT: Is this called the silent treatment?

DM: Yeah, (inaudible), yeah silent treatment. Thank you. I think it represents a significant social moral issue for the area. It's interesting they never manage to get the churches and the religious groups to take up this issue in any way--a hands off, much I think for the same reason the--the academic community has been hands off as the economic issues for their particular activities and the source of their funds.

And offices of the petrochemical companies are not going to fund out of their pocket research, which is considered to do damage to their interest in issues. And so it's began to be a continuing problem in this area and it's a whole problem of the funding of political campaigns, particularly in this area. Industry holds, carries the lead, and can pull them rather effectively. I mean it goes to the problems of the transportation. There are the subdivision developers who see West Harris County as a major urban area. They don't recognize, or don't wish to recognize the flooding problem that would create downstream

in Houston. They don't recognize the problems of air pollution that's going to create for everyone around because the transportation, they've got to get to work. And we don't have a transport system. And until we get a--an efficient mobility system for the public, we've got a problem. I mean I find it un--unreasonable.

There should be a capitol investment in busses for schools and they don't use them for the public too. The public transport system should provide transport to the schools and transport for the public. Daddy and mommy go to work and the child goes to school and the same bus system can take both. And we need to use low emission transport sources to do this and of course Chicago is trying the hydrogen bus. It obviously isn't going to come tomorrow.

In the meantime you've got to do something with the diesels that are poisoning us. And I think that society needs to address this kind of pollution, because I don't think we're going to see the big change in the public health issue, which is the only reason we're doing anything until we address these issues. The ozone is certainly not good for, certainly not

the levels we've had in the last few days, but on the other hand, it's not the only poison out there. The benzene is a good one and of course Dr. Killian at--who is the chief of the medical services at DOW did some very interesting studies on animals and showed the leukemia effect in animals. His publications were suppressed for sometime and some of its been published since.

He graciously showed me the data. He was on the Texas Air Control Board at one time as a medical personnel and he showed me privately the data. It's pretty convincing. It isn't--it really isn't new because back in the middle '30's, I well remember my--we used to use benzene at home. We had a bottle of it in the cupboard in the sink and we used it to get the tar spots and oil spots off clothing and paint off things and we used it pretty freely.

And I remember one of--an evening my father came home and said, let's get rid of the benzene and proceeded to take the bottle and put it into someone's gas tank out--we didn't have a car at those days, but our neighbor did and we put the benzene in his gas tank and that was the last benzene we had in the house. And from there on, we were much more circumspect about solvents that got around--into the house or even that we exposed ourselves to, recognizing that these are--represent serious health problems.

DT: Well tell me when you've spoken to the industry figures that promote the plants and facilities that might be polluting this area and you say that the health effects, which you and your neighbors and they themselves are viable to suffer, what is their response? I mean they're not immune to these...

DM: They're not interested. They don't think it's--you know, it's like not putting on--fixing your seatbelt and not getting immunized against influenza. There's a serious dichotomy, which we are in a schism between statistical realities, if you believe they're realities, and the perception and actions of people. I mean, you know, why--after 9--1, people, well I wouldn't go on a plane, it's too dangerous, but they get on a freeway with a--without thinking. The freeway is much, you know, ten times more dangerous than any plane has ever been. You know, though 9-11 was a great tragedy. We just have to recognize that the total number of people killed in that was only two months road kill on

the highways in the United States and about a third of that is avoidable because it's due to drunks. And the Swedes showed us how to get rid of drunks on the road. It works, it's doable. We have a real deficiency in the way we react to figures and it goes for influenza immunization versus a fuss over SARS and Nile Virus. They're not seen in the same--part of the same statistical process. It's worrisome. There's lots of this around I mean there are areas in Houston where benzene concentrations go above 10 pbb, where they ought to be .5 as a maximum. And so (?) transfer terminals, it's near 20 or 30. And that's a dreadful situation.

DT: Do you think that the exposures vary with the poverty or the ethnic makeup?

DM: Oh yeah, well that's of course one of the things I didn't bring up about the Bay Port and the rail line that's going to--supposed to be going to support it--is the report by the transportation highway--the transportation board, completely had antique data on the distribution of minorities around the site. When the current census data was used, it was a huge minorities all along the sides. My recollection, there were 20,000 school children within a quarter of a mile of that road--proposed rail route.

And some of those schools were right up against a major highway too. And you have (?) example of the Chavez School, which is sitting right against a major highway, so the air pollution. There's a (?) petrochemical plant on one side, (?) site within a mile. No one in his right mind would put a--a school there. In California there's a commission, a board, which reviews all proposed educational sites for their environmental suitability. We need that here, everyone needs that, where there's any industry around.

DT: Well do you think there's a different general attitude about business and environmental effects in Texas than in other...

DM: Oh yes. If it smells bad, that's money basically. And the--the fact that it's costing a little--Bob brought out in the Sonoma Report that was commissioned by the--the city of Houston on the costs and health effects of air pollution that was above the national standard in the AQS. And it showed that air pollution that's above the standards was costing us about three billion a year in dollars.

It also is costing something between three hundred and four hundred lives. And of course everyone says in the paper, it's all the elderly that's about to die the next day anyway--it isn't. The average loss of expected life with each death was five years. It's significant. Of course part of that is children that die of respiratory problems, it isn't only cancers and all the other things. And it may be much higher than that because the statistics were very conservative to put it mildly and so it may be double that quite easily.

DT: In your clinical practice, do you have any sort of anecdotal experience (inaudible).

DM: Yes, the brighter side (?) wonderful one. I had a patient, a woman, who I had seen two or three times and one early summer afternoon, I got a phone call from this woman and she said she didn't like tr--troubling me on Sunday afternoon, but she wondered what she should do. Her husband had come out in a bright red rash and I had seen her within a week or so (?).

And she said it's itching and it's burning and it's terrible. So, I--I think we got him some--I assumed it was an allergic reaction to something, but I had no idea what. And I said well, it must have been Sunday afternoon, I said you better bring him into me first thing Monday--Monday morning, I'll see, I'll meet you here and find a hole and get him in immediately.

And I probably gave him some--I brought him some Benadryl and I think I gave him some steroids to take too. And I saw him and he obviously had been wearing a muscle shirt, or whatever you call those things, with deep arm holes and the front around the arm hole in front of his arms and part of his chest

which showed was the color of that red band of yours there, a brilliant red, itching and dreadful, in spite of putting Calamine on it and taking steroids. I looked at this and obviously it was a reaction to something and it hit him from in front. I said where did you--what paint did you spray on Thursday or Friday?

I haven't sprayed any paint, I haven't used any paint. Well what have you been doing to yourself over the last--since Thursday, where have you been? I said what's your job. Oh I'm a landscape gardener. What's pesticides or--or herbicides have you been spraying? I haven't, all I do is mow lawns, or mow grass. So I looked at him and I said well. Now it had been raining on Friday and I said well you mowed Friday, did you on Thursday? And he said yes. Where did you mow?

Oh, I was off--a road off Dixie Farm Road. Well I said where exactly? And he said there was a turning that goes up north from there, and its name I've forgotten, and I said oh yes. And what was on the side of the road? Well on one side he says a high chain-linked fence, which says, "Do not enter," or something or other. And I-

-in fact I mowed the--one side of the--of the street, the divider in the middle, and then I went down the fence line. And the grass was wet and it sprayed up and that's all I did on Friday was mow down in that area. This was a brio site and he mowed along the east fence of the brio site, the spray had come up and where it hit him, he got this red rash I had seen in the children earlier in the Southbend sub-division.

So, I put him in the hospital right there and then and treated him for two or three days. It subsided, went home, but it reoccurred and I had to readmit him for intravenous treatment to get it under control and his skin sort of--eventually sort of flaked off where the rash had been. A rather typical, severe, allergic reaction. I had no idea what chemical. I have a suspicion that it's a thing called Trichloroethnyl, which is known to be a very potent chemical for producing allergic reactions. It's made--the only place it's made was in the ship channel and it of course (?). It probably got to the brio site or brio site and it was in there. That

same chemical was responsible for this extraordinary episode over in Deer Park where a number of people got severe rashes including children. She had dreadful, I saw--I brought her down to the office and saw her and she had all sorts of ulcer up in her nose and around the face. It really was a miserable sight.

She would--she--the family moved her out of town and she recovered in about three weeks. The states investigated the soil in the area and found nothing and did some other studies on leaves and what have you and found nothing. Some of the sample was sent to a lab in Florida and a diligent pH recognized a funny little peak on his gas--Mass Spectrogram whose identity he didn't know. And--but it was there on multiple occasions and it wasn't there on the blanks.

And they said well that--whatever that is, it could be interesting. They eventually pinned it down that this was dichloroethyl and it's blown from the pla--the plants on the--one side of the ship channel, across to the other side, and this girls rash problems exacerbated severely when the wind was in the right direction from the plant.

We then found that several workers in the plant had had a problem too, but they quietly got them moved off elsewhere and no--no mention was ever made in the reports by the plants to anyone and it was never brought up to OSHA or anywhere else. They just quietly paid off and went somewhere else.

DT: Did you ever see any more acute and long-term problems, neurological problems or carcinogenic problems that might have been environmental?

DM: Well there could have been, well of course the--it was a problem with--down at the vinyl chloride at Texas City. The plant down there, Lefington and Whiteswyler did an epidemiological study down there on brain tumors. This arose because a student--I was teaching public health at Galveston, and one of the students came up and told me that his uncle, or whoever it was, had a brain tumor and he had met his friend in the hospital and his relative, father or something, had a brain tumor of similar kind.

And he said he thought it--there was another one around like this and he wondered whether there was any connection. So, I said well that could be, as a nice little research project for you, go to the medical records and see and look at the brain tumor records. Sure enough he came up with 16 or 17 cases and when we did a bit more research, there were twenty cases I think. It's the largest cohort of brain tumors and they--that paper they wrote blamed it on probably vinyl chloride, but they tried--couldn't pin it down to the Texas City Plant

because a number of cases that had not worked in the--in the plant--in the vinyl chloride plant. Well they didn't know, or willing to know, that Infantus study on vinyl chloride up on the Great Lakes, when it was re-examined, it turned out that two of the controls that had this strange liver tumor had--one lived, a fence line from one of the plants, and the other one had worked in the plant has something that wasn't connected with the vinyl chloride unit within the plant, but their job required them to go there and take papers, frogs or something or other there, or collect them, and they were going in and out of the place.

So really two of the so-called controls were cases and it completely changed the statistics because the numbers were very small anyway. And I was aware of this and I said well, you know, the first this to do is look for the other sources of vinyl chloride and I was aware of one, the--the (?) site and it turned out there was another one. So we have three vinyl chloride sites and that completely threw out their statistics and analysis. What none of us knew at that time was that the (inaudible) in animals is clearly a brain tumor

generator. And the original study had been done in England using rats and there was no evidence that they produced brain tumors in the rats. When the same study was done by--in the United States, were using mice and several strains of mice, it rapidly--the thing was supposed to go for 120 weeks. By 60 weeks they had lost a third of their mice to brain tumors.

It became the obvious at this point that butadiene was a brain tumor inducing agent. And in the '60's and '70's, when you drove to Galveston down 45, you knew when you were getting to Texas, you could just smell the butadiene, it was very easy--it's got a pretty strong-potent smell. And you were obviously going through high concentration, or significant concentrations.

That isn't true today, or very rarely, but obviously butadiene was ex--exposition everyone in the area and so we had another source of brain tumors that was not known to the epidemiologists when they looked at the Texas City Plant they made complete nonsense of any epidemiology studies and some statistics. But they did find that there were

eight times more brain tumors in Galveston County than there ought to be in terms of general population and other--and other urban areas--not so urban areas. It was very clearly a problem and the public health authorities never got really interested in it and the Petrochemical companies got concerned about their loss of product escaping from valves and wherever else and of course have cleaned up since then. Then the measurements of the Texas Air Control Board and the--and the Environmental Quality subsequent organization required them to cut down on these emissions.

DT: I guess a lot of these emissions we've been talking about are industrial and they're bi-products of processes that produce other products, but I understand you've studied a lot of incinerators that are purely built to destroy medical waste and other kinds of waste. Could you talk about some of those?

DM: Yeah, medical waste incinerators were a particular field in which I obviously had an interest because there are a lot of little pot burners and miniscule--two or three--six foot long, four foot diameter creatures that were filled up with the waste from the hospital so-called infectious waste and infectious after all, the people who put it in the bags don't get infected--into it each evening and set it to light and leave it over night burning and puffing away.

There was the commercial one down near Pearland, which we went to court over and eventually got--got it shut down, not before the chimney on it, the stack, fell off because it rusted through it was so coercive. And, I don't--I don't think it's back and working. It was--one problem was all these little things that were in the backyards, right in the middle of residential areas and right around the hospital. One of them in--in Houston had one of these things and the top of the stack was level with the air intakes into the IC--cardiac ICU and when the wind was right, waste just blew straight in and the nurse would tell you, well yes, it stinks in here sometimes from the incinerator. When--you had the same--an interesting problem up on Memorial City. They wanted to upgrade

their medical waste incinerator on site. They came up with a pretty good quality pro--unit to put in--a commercial unit. It wasn't the best in the world by any matter or means, but it was a great deal better than what they were doing. The local people protested because they had to get a permit and it was never done because the people wanted to go on with the dirty thing that was there rather than have a clean one put in.

It doesn't make sense. The--the Houston Hospital Counsel, which is an organization defunct, tried to organize a collective medical waste incinerator for the Houston area and organized, collecting up all the waste from the hospitals and going to one site. We had a high quality incinerator. When that was about time we were organizing the Erie Pennsylvania Medical Center had a American built medical waste incinerator, but it was really a pilot plant, which was extremely good, far better than anything else around municipal or medical waste. Really emissions from the municipal waste incinerator were no different from those in the medical waste incinerators. People thought the actual PBC mattered, it

doesn't. We show very clearly that the amount of chloride going in to the fuel, in the fuel of--of the incinerator made very little difference than the amount of dioxins. It was a way you dealt with the--the burning process and the after effects that mattered. And the Hamot facility in Eerie did very well indeed and was a prototype for others.

I might say in parenthesis that my view is that if you, and I think you should, have the medical waste segregated at the hospital site in red bags and boxes and what have you, and then it goes to a special chute into a municipal waste incinerator so that you can log--you can monitor the radiation and make sure you don't put radioactive stuff in, monitor, barcode the boxes so that you know exactly where they came from and whose--what was going in and you weigh them on the way of course, and then you charge the com--the hospital. And just use the well-run municipal waste incinerator to deal with our medical waste. There really isn't any difference between that waste and the stuff that comes out of a hotel. What is

important is the incinerator have the design characteristics that result in small--only small quantities of dioxin and mercury escaping, and that can be done. We know how to do it extremely well. One of the derivatives of the design that was used at Hamot Eerie, was built in Kings College for Kings College Hospital in London.

And actually the firebox--incinerator part of it is built in New Zealand and the rest of it was built in Pittsburgh and then they shipped them put together. And they were about finished with it, building it, and the three medical waste incinerators in London, one went--or two went down, one was down for repairs or something like that, and anyway, there was not enough medical waste incinerating capacity an area to deal with all the medical waste.

And the ministry of health approached the people doing the Kings College Hospital building--building it, and asked when will you be finished? And they said, well, we hope to have it finished in about a month. Can you do it any quicker than that, we've got this stuff and don't know what to do with it? It's been sitting in re--refrigerator trucks around. I said, well, I

suppose if we work 24 hours a day and with a bit of luck, we can do it in a week. They said all right, we'll pay, do it. Actually they finished it in three days. They really only had some electronics to connect up and get going and test to some extent, and fire it up. And it ran im--I mean they ran it immediately. And immediately, by that time, the side streets were choked with these refrigerator trucks grinding away there.

And so they loaded the thing up with as much waste as--assigned capacity, you can't overload it because it's got shutdown--automatic shutdowns on things. The art of managing.. it's important in incinerators or the operators cannot--they can shut the whole thing down, but they can't fiddle any of the controls, they're built in, locked, at the weight of waste going in is set and that's it and you can't increase it and overload it. And again, the settings for the emissions are set and locked and you can't change it. If the oxygen goes down too low or the carbon dioxide goes too high, it shuts down and you can't do anything without getting back to the manufacturer.

So it makes it very simple to find out what's going on. The incinerator probably in general, and the--and the general combustion problem inevitably makes things that aren't carbon dioxide and water and in terms of public health, one needs to reduce the amount of particles less than two microns in the diameter

of the generator, carbonates cord particles. They're the main source of the pollution, whether it be from a diesel engine or from an incinerator, and then reduce the amount of organic compounds that are very adverse, and of those obviously, the one that's known to everyone is dioxin, but there are polychlorate hydrocarbons that come out to.

So polyaromatic hydrocarbons as well, all of which are not good for you. The technologies which result in the lowest emissions of those are also--are the same for each of them basically. It happens to be that those also are pretty efficient at getting rid of the mercury that may come through and the Kings College Hospital example is a very good because when that--they were running this thing and it had to be running about a week full load, someone said, we better test and see what the emissions look like.

And when they did, the answer from the stack was the emissions were lower than the background, eye London air for both mercury and dioxin. They said they can't be. Well, it happens there was another two of these incinerators similar, they're clones in--elsewhere in the world,

one in Australia, which was very similar results. In fact you could put those out side by side, you couldn't tell which one was which. And they said that's the way it is, do it again. And they did it a second time with all the care they could and they got exactly the same results basically--that the emissions from this incinerator were--was cleaning up the London air from dioxins, mercury, and other organic compounds.

In other words, we know have to do it very well, it's just a question. People don't (?) because you move better controls, it's more expensive, it isn't. As a matter of fact, it's--this plant at Kings College is cheaper than the one up in New York, which is the (?) best in this country. There's nothing like it. It's an order of magnitude, dirtier. It does require very strict management too in the sense that you don't let people loose doing strange things in the middle of the night.

It's happened to one incinerator where the workers wanted to watch the televisions so they loaded the--the incinerator up with waste--overriding, because they could on that particular thing, it wasn't one of the ones I am talking like at Kings College,

where they could override the cutoff. So they over--overloaded it and lit it up and, soaked it up, and off they went to look at their restroom or recreation room to look at the television. And it burnt very well, too hot, it softened and deformed the neoprene seals on the air pollution control devises and when it was tested some months later, it was severe emissions coming through.

And the company complained to the manufacturer and he said and that's what you've done to it. I am coming over to see it, so he left the United States and went and visited this country and looked at the thing and looked to the records. He very quickly saw these huge peaks in temperature. I said well what were you doing at that time, it's the middle of the night? And it soon turned out that they'd overloaded the thing and softened the caskets and the air pollution devises and it just leaked.

You don't need very much leak to make an enormous difference to the out--the emissions. And so, and that's what happens. You have to have, I think, strict computer control. There is one company that at one time used its in-house computer to monitor its units out in the field and could ring up and say you're letting it get too hot or whatever else you like. You need to do so and so, that's the way to do it.

DT: Well let's switch topics for just a moment and touch on some energy issues. I believe you were involved in opposing the Allen's Creek...

DM: Well yes, well that was to have been the largest and dirtiest nuclear emissions plant in the United States--electrical generating plant in the United States. It was interesting in many ways. The first thing, at the time it went to hearing, there wasn't a complete design. H L & P had got young engineers from college who had no experience with nuclear power plants what so ever, doing the design as they built the darn thing.

It was a very similar problem at the south Texas plant, which was also going at that time. And I was involved, because again, the transmission lines were going to go through the migratory field feeding grounds and migration track for the duck and geese along the--of the KT Prairie and down to Freeport area. And so I was involved, that was my

contention in the thing. Others were--of course the economics of the situation, the nuclear emissions, and simply poor design of the whole thing. It was a--and there was the issue of the water withdrawals from the Brazos River that were required to make this proposed lake, which may get built now for recreational purposes.

And all of these combined together, it was a very long and tedious hearing, one of the largest administrative hearings that the federal government had ever dealt with. I think it went to 600,000 pages of--of record, many months. And I was involved with this continuously more or less.

DT: What were some of the economic problems that you pointed out?

DM: Oh just--the economic analysis really didn't correspond with the--the facts they were giving. And two attorneys pulled them completely to pieces. Eventually, Baker and Botts recognized and must have advised HL & P [Houston Lighting and Power] that this was a lost cause. They spent 300 million--over 300 million on pushing the Allen Street plants and eventually abandoned it, the whole project.

It was a disaster, it was far too close to Houston in the first place, it was bad from the water point of view because at Brazos River water is (?) the new Texas city and industry down there and to short circuited up to sea level meant that they were going to be short changed down stream.

DT: You say it was a dirty plant, in what sense was that?

DM: Oh, the emissions from the various bits of the plant were going to be much higher than any other nuclear power plant in this country.

DT: Why was that?

DM: Design failures, basically. They just did--didn't have the competence or the concern to minimize their emissions and the nuclear regulatory commission was not very happy with their proposal and some of us were even less happy and eventually HL & P recognized that they were going to go nowhere and abandoned the issue.

Good--I mean we saved--if you (inaudible) I think it was 5 billion dollars for the plant and we reckoned it would probably have cost about 10 billion and most of that would have been tax money. I mean indirectly because it's like (?) cost would go up to pay for it. The--there are all sorts of problems that arise with the peaking process required in the demand and it goes into the elec--electrical generating issue and costs and economics.

It's a--the economics of this, I didn't go into it very much, but I recognized that there is a very complex situation of not much margin, or no margin, and part of the problem lies in the variability and the demand for electrical power supply--very short notice relatively speaking. The-and it's, you know, we have problems with the Parris plants and it's coal

burning emissions and difficulty of getting adequate controls on those for particles of mercury and other emissions. I mean in the Texas 2000 study in the Houston area airplanes flying over knew when they went over the plants, you could see the emissions go up and come down again.

And the same applied for for instance Chocolate Bayou Plant, you recognize where it is by the emissions and the volatile organic compounds over the plant. And these aren't necessary-or I should I say they're avoidable. One of the big issues-there are two big issues in plant emissions. One that the assumption has been that flares burn 90% plus of the VOC's going up the stack.

The evidence for this fallacious, it is not true, it may be only 70% and maybe lower than that at some of them. Some of the Can-some of the California studies suggest been as low as 60% of these. And since the flow up these things is quite substantial, the amount coming out in the air is significant. The other one which has been studied here and also-and in California and

done maybe somewhere else too, is even more interesting. It's the cooling towers. Everyone assumed that cooling towers were innocent creatures. They are a major source of volatile organic compounds. The reason being is that the water from the unit of the plant gets contaminated-gets-is-sorry-the gasses (inaudible) or fluid coming from the plant needs to be cooled to do something. You go through heat exchange.

The heat exchanger is cooled by the water, the water goes from the heat exchanger into the cooling tower and down through the air stream and comes out the bottom and recycled back in again-cooled. And the reason the towers are so bad is the heat exchangers leak and the heat exchangers leak sometimes because of corrosion, but much more frequently because of breakdowns in the compressors. Usually the gas stream going-being cooled is under high pressure. And so a very small leak results in a large quantity of product escaping into the water system. And these ones we have been interested in are ethylene,

propylene, and butadiene, and all of these are relatively insoluble in water so when they get in the-get out in the-in the tower, the-the water stream dropping through gravity through the tower and the air stream going up, they strip the volatile organic compounds off to an efficiency of about 95%.

Well, the flow going into these cooling towers in the order of 250,000 gallons per minute. And so if you're organic concentration is only two ppb, part per billion in that water, that's an enormous amount of chemical. And California has recognized this and is now beginning to require backup compressors and backup heat exchanges for its units. That is one approach. The heat exchanges leak because the compressors break down, drops the pressure on the gas stream, and the thing expands and the gas gets a leak then the pressure gets up again and of course gas leaks out of the cracks. They also may drop in temperature and that may...[End of Reel 2278]