Toxicities

Ground Zero: For months, everybody in New York breathed tiny particles of burnt and pulverized building, windows, furniture, insulation, people, office materials, jet fuel, asbestos, and dioxin.
 

PHOTOS AND TEXT BY VICE STAFF
 

ou don’t need to live in the smog-, garbage-, and disease-choked third world to be in the firing line of man-made disaster. In fact, it doesn’t seem to be a matter of IF you will get a disease from breathing the air where you live. It’s a matter of WHEN. Unless you’re in a cabin deep in the Yukon chopping wood and reading this on the internet on a computer you made yourself out of ferns and berries, you are almost definitely going to die because of pollution (and it is going to hurt, too).

We asked each of our Vice magazine editors around the world to find the most pollution-spewing sites in their home city and send us a little toxic postcard. The results make Al Gore sound like Doris Day.

Come along with us…

 

FIAMMA ABRASIVI FACTORY

The Sisas Factory and Chemical Dump: After shutting its doors, the Sisas factory boxed and buried three mountains of waste above Milan’s water supply. As water is pulled out of the substratum, the vacuum pulls the waste deeper into the soil, closer to the water. Tick-tock.

Petrarca Neighborhood: Think African squatters, rotting, open-air bedrooms, illegal dumps, and toxic stand-water pools. Asbestos Student Center: In West Milan, a wide redbrick building entirely laminated in asbestos used to serve as a student center. It’s in the background there. It’s closed now, but 100 yards from it, there’s a kids’ park with swings and slides.

Grazie. Ciao, bella! Now, what say we take a little jaunt on over to Brussels?

THE CHURCH OF ST. JACOB, ANTWERP

The Zenne, Brussels: The Zenne enters Brussels an attractive river and leaves it a biologically dead garbage chute. It’s underground in this picture. Military Hospital, Antwerp: Cleaning products used in the now-closed hospital’s laundry have filtered into the groundwater, making this the military’s No. 1 most polluted wasteland.

Cokeries du Marly, Brussels: A few years ago, a fire broke out in one of the factory’s towers and spewed benzene and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons into the air for a week. You could smell it 110 miles away.

Dang. Well, let’s head for the Big Apple to take a dip in the Atlantic.

COMBINED SEWAGE OVERFLOW SITES

New York City has a very old “combined usage” sewer system. That means that rainwater from city streets and buildings goes through the same pipes as sewage, so when it rains a lot and the system is overloaded, the pipes spew human and animal shit, trash, and loads of heavy metals and toxic chemicals into the waterways. THE FUCKING WATERWAYS. That’s why beaches are closed after it rains—to prevent swimmers from swallowing mouthfuls of fecal bacteria.

OK, fine, we won’t swim, but somebody should tell those guys who are fishing in the East River every day, right? Samara Swanston helped assemble the EPA’s study of “subsistence fishermen” in Williamsburg and Greenpoint. She said, “A lot of people eat everything they catch. For most local waters, you are not supposed to eat more than one fish meal a month. Women of child-bearing age or children 16 or younger shouldn’t eat it at all.” So what happens if they do? They get really sick and then if they keep doing it, they die.
  Ferries: They emit 100 times more cancer-causing stuff and 1,000 times more smog per passenger-mile than SUVs. 

  Harlem Bus Depot Asthma Cluster: One in four people living near the 126th Street bus depot has asthma.   High-Impact Zones: Migratory birds fly into New York’s glass buildings and die.

Ouch! I think I’m ready to go Japanese! They are smart enough to not shit where they eat, right?

DEMONIC TRASH-BIRDS

Suginami Disease: Suginami Waste Station processes 100 tons of waste daily. Suginami Disease is what the residents around the facility have. Symptoms include coughing, dullness of arms and legs, and headaches. Dioxin in Toshima, Tokyo Bay: The bottom layers of Tokyo Bay are contaminated with various toxins including mercury and dioxin. Mercury freaks Japanese people out because Nippon is home to a type of mercury poisoning called Minamata Disease. Symptoms include vertigo and psychosis.

Tsukiji Market: The Central Wholesale Fish Market is being relocated to Toyosu, the former site of Tokyo Gas. The soil in the future site has shown high concentrations of lead, arsenic, chromium hexavalent, cyanogens, mercury, and benzene.

GROSS! OK, let’s keep going. Who’s next? Amsterdam?

HEMWEGCENTRALE

People in Amsterdam are very concerned about buildings that block their view (“horizon pollution,” they call it). However, they don’t often worry about the 176-foot-tall, continually smoking exhaust pipe of the Hemwegcentrale factory. Every year it releases 4.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, 4,000 tons of nitrogen oxide, and over 40 micrograms of some fucked-up particle matter that causes lung disease. And the water that cools the ever-burning toxic flames is dumped warm into the North Sea Canal, killing everything in the vicinity.

This is Amsterdam, so if there is a factory releasing cancer into the air and death into the water, there will be a community of broken bohemians squatting in its shadow and calling it Hedonia. The people of Hedonia live in shacks, eat garbage, and bathe in wastewater. One of the inhabitants, Ardje, told Vice, “You can’t drink the water, but it’s nice and warm!”
  Oostergasfabriek: The former site of a gas plant is now home to a suburb and a pet asylum. The residents complain of nausea and respiratory diseases. The pooches complain that they’re in an asylum.

  D’Oude Raai: People who live near this company’s cell-phone antennae have blamed them for persistent coughs, nausea, chronic fatigue, and cancer.   Houthaven: The site of 300 years of unmonitored industrial construction, this harbor is so polluted that you can get fined for digging into the ground a meter deep and throwing the earth in the air.

That’s nice, Ardje, you fucking retarded Dutch squatter hippie. Get your bath there. Nice and clean. All sparklin’. We’re going to gay Paree.

TOUR MONTPARNASSE

Lead paint in la Goutte d’Or: Thirty percent of all Paris’s lead-poisoning cases come from 200 lead-paint-slathered buildings in the Goutte d’Or. This is one of them. The Seine: Paris’s water-purification plant dumped 80,000 cubic meters of untreated water (sewage) a day into the Seine for a month last year. They wanted to do it for six months, but the Green Party convinced them to take it easy.

Air: Get up into some tall building and look down. You can see the smog from above. It’s a pretty shade of orange, like LA’s.

Sacre bleu! “People still live here, so I guess there’s no problem”? We’re going down under, where the water is blue and the accents are… tolerable.

COODE ISLAND

G’day mate. Welcome to Coode Island, just four kilometers from Melbourne’s city center. The island was created in 1886 as a sanatorium for people with bubonic plague. Today, it’s Victoria’s major petrochemical-storage facility as well as the main import and export point for hazardous materials used in industry.

With the nearest residential area only 500 meters away, we’re just crossing our fingers we don’t see any more mistakes like the one we had in 1991, when an employee left the cap off one of the tanks of waste, lightning struck, and 8.5 million liters of chemicals went up in flames, producing a massive toxic cloud over the city! Doesn’t that sound made up? It’s totally true!
  Clenaway Landfill: This site has been used as the main dumping ground for toxic waste from major industries in Victoria since 1973. People living in houses across the road have complained of health disorders including cancer, miscarriages, and multiple sclerosis.

  Lonsdale Power Plant: After almost 100 years of operation, the Lonsdale power plant closed in 1982, leaving behind asbestos, diesel particles, and a rent-free home with electricity and running water for Melbourne’s squatters.   Yarra River: Like the chief body of water in any thriving metropolis: an E. coli-laden soup.

Meh. Call us when you have AIDS. In the meantime, we’re going to take a quick jaunt through the hellhole known as London.

KENSINGTON OLYMPIA TRAINS STATION

Clapton Square, Hackney: In this unofficial city dumping ground, you’ll find all sorts of domestic waste. Sofas, fridges, broken chairs, beer cans, condoms, and sanitary towels. It’s like the rear end of England’s middle class splayed out before you. Nice. The River Thames: Thanks to London’s Victorian sewer system, untreated sewage is released into the capital’s river every week. Olympic Village, East London: The 450 residents of the Clays Lane Estate are being vacated to make way for the Olympic Village. Clays Lane inhabitants have uncovered information suggesting that radioactive waste was dumped on land next to their estate in 1959. (This is part of their case for why residential homes should stay?)

Well, bugger all. London is fucked too (as if we couldn’t guess). How about their cold, cold neighbors to the north in Sweden?

RINKEBY

Nobody is overweight in Stockholm, except the kids of a town named Rinkeby, where 18.7 percent of them are lardballs. Monika Dosai works in the health service and spends her days trying to convince Rinkeby parents to make their kids walk instead of riding in strollers. But why do fat six-year-olds ride in strollers? Monika: “To get out of Rinkeby, you need to get on the commuter train, and to get to the train you need to take the bus. And the buses are free for everyone with a kid in a stroller.”
  Thunbergsgatan Walkup: A building run by “Worst Landlord of the Year” three years running. The windows are broken, the electrical cords have not been replaced for 60 years, the insulation is rotting. Tenants complain of daily electrical shocks and injuries from the collapsing façade.

  Årsta Bay: The Årsta Bay is a popular swimming hole and soup of bacteria and chemical waste. According to biologist Anders Stehn, “The colon-bacteria count is so high, there’s really no use in measuring the chemicals. They all get drowned out. And anyway, you’re not supposed to go in the water.”   The Stockholm Sluice: The Stockholm Sluice is the pride of the 1930s slide-rule generation. It was the first escalator built in Sweden and hasn’t been restored since. From a height of about 1,000 feet it looks great. Up close, it’s a nightmarish labyrinth of ancient eroded concrete, rebar, and bleeding rust.

Wait, that isn’t so bad. Let’s leave Sweden on the list of possible places to wait out the apocalypse. But just in case, let’s take a gander at Spain.

COLLSEROLA WOODS, TIBIDABO

Sant Adrià Depurating Plant, Coastline: This dreary industrial landscape boasts a thermal-power station, an urban-waste incinerator, and a sewage-treatment plant. Industrial Poble Nou: They’re building some shitty apartments on top of a former industrial site. According to a landlord, the flowers in front of his building have an average lifespan of two weeks. Fake Beaches, La Mina Ecoparc: Fake beaches interrupt the natural sand flow. In some places, such as the Maresme coast, the sand has vanished so now the sea is threatening the railway track. Great.

Not so much with the ecological nightmare, Spain, but roving wild dog packs? Fuck that! We’re outta here. What do the Jerrys have to offer…

JÄNSCHWALDE POWER PLANT

In June of 2005, the German branch of Friends of the Earth pressured the government into banning the dumping of toxic waste. The gov said, “Sure, OK,” but this meant that, on July 1, the state suddenly had thousands of tons of illegal toxic waste to get rid of ASAP, and dumping was no longer an option. So they paid the Jänschwalde power station, run by the multinational energy company Vattenfall, 25 to 30 euros a ton to take the toxic waste and BURN IT.

Jänschwalde, being a lignite power plant, had no waste-burning emission standards. They also lacked the equipment to filter out the dangerous chemicals involved, such as mercury, which Jänschwalde is releasing into the atmosphere right this very second, along with carbon monoxide, nitrogen oxide, and sulfur dioxide.
  Steglitzer Kreisel: This skyscraper was built in the late 60s with asbestos. A quantity survey done in 2004 said that by 2007 entire wings of the building should be off-limits to human beings.   Dachsbau at Heiligensee: In the especially hot summer of 2006, the water table sank by 30 centimeters and its flow changed direction. Some manure leaked into the pond, and ammonium nitrate killed everything.   Potsdamer Platz: While they were digging the foundations, the planners embedded sodium silicate gel 20 meters deep into the ground. It leached into the water table and increased the pH levels in the water in the surrounding area to bleachlike levels of hardness.

Wow. Gold medal winner here. Yay, Deutschland! But, let’s not forget Canada like the rest of the world usually does. Whaddya got, tabernacs?

HAMILTON SMOG DAYS
Sunnyside Beach: During the 1920s, Sunnyside used to be where Toronto’s affluent Parkdale residents congregated for tea and socializing. Now, during the warm season, Sunnyside is unswimmable most of the time due to high traces of E.Coli. Oh, and sometimes you can even find weird skinned rodent carcasses lying around. Surf’s up!

Chinatown: During the summer of 2004, public health officials shut down the entire Dragon City food court citing such health violations as rat- and roach-infested kitchens and food containing traces of salmonella and other hazardous bacteria. Pickering Nuclear Power Station: At the beginning of each year, teachers in the Pickering area hand out potassium iodide pills which are supposed to help prevent radiation poisoning to the thyroid gland if a meltdown ever occurs.

Fuck this. We need a cabin in the Yukon after all. And we’re going to buy some tea-tree oil to put in our hair while we’re at it.

Yeah, we quit washing it. It’s like the government makes you think you have to wash your hair, but you totally don’t. Same with buying food. Ow, my overalls are pulling. Anyway, I can’t believe I used to have Windex in my house. Hey, wait! Where are you going?