Document M4zQ1GJZwDQa2kO5bLoDLaQv7

PRESS CLIP SERVICE New killer chemical leaks from poison tip INSIGHT A NEW PERIL has been discovered at Maendy Quarry, the South Wales Industrial lip which, as Insight revealed last week, contains at least 31 chemicals, half of them toxic to some degree. Last week --as the Welsh Office sought to play down the dangers--Govern ment scientists had already found another deadly chemical leaking from the tip. it Is tri-orthocresyl- phate, known aa TOCP. 0CP it an additive used In machine oil. The lethal dose is two grammes, but according to standard works on toxicology, very low amounts in water cause-de pending on concentration--nausea, vomiting, diarrhoea, paralysis and Anally, death. In the most recently known case of TOCP poisoning, 180 people died In Assam, India, from using contaminated cooking oU. In 1959 in Morocco, 10,000 people were affected from the same cause -- nearly 2,000 were crippled. In a similar outbreak in India, 430 people were permanently PT__o_S!sPedw. as found in water from Maendy Just over a week ago by analysts at the Water_ Pollution RiMarch Laboratory at Stevenage. The laboratory, an agancy of the Departmant of the Environment, ha, been tailing Maendy discharge, for some time. The TOCP the laboratory found was at concentra tion! of * wall over " 50 parts per million. ^ ' Playing it down The Government department responsible for handling the Maendy affair, the Welsh Office, has made several statements play ing down the extent of the chemical contamination In the Up. And they hoot aUent. about tbo IttCP.v . On Friday, after repeated ques tioning, the Welsh Office finally admitted: " We have been advised that a new substance has been found at Maendy quarry, and wc have arranged for a monitoring analysis to be carried out to estab lish its presence." The sudden appearance of TOCP In the Maendy discharge could be explained by the recent disintegra tion of buried drums. If TOCP concentrations now prove to be con stant, then the streams around Maendy will have to be declared a public health risk and the quarry sealed off immediately--at a cost oif up to a million pounds. The discovery of TOCP heightens the importance of the statement which the Secretary of State for Wales, Peter Thomas, is to make in the House of Commons to morrow. Mr Thomas may be in some difficulty, because it has emerged that the Welsh Office was told of pollution from Maendy by a local vicar three years ago. (Officials had assured Insight that they were only called in around March last year) We have also discovered that, in spite of Welsh Office assurances for the past year that its own monitoring of the Maendy effluent showed no worrying levels of chemical contamination, the Office has in fact never monitored the most worrying discharges. ' Private samples AH the Office has done is to take samples from pools on the surface of the filled quarry--they are mainly rainwater--and from one stream about the quarry and one stream below. But the most worry ing discharges -- which Insight revealed last week contained the persistent chemical PCB -- run through three dairy farms. Only on June 4 this year, we have learned, did the Welsh Office write to the three farmers asking for permission to take samples on their land. There has never been a testing programme by the Welsh Office to analyse the stream-bed silts or the surrounding pasture* In which PCB has concentrated. Yet the figures for concentra tions of PCB and other contamin ants from Maendy--which the Welsh Office has consistently dis puted--<ame from private samples taken ft) precisely these points. , At the welsh Office, officials were apparently confident enough last December to dismiss warnings from one of the world's acknowledged experts on PCB, a scientist from Canada, with the phrase: " Dr Platonow, you have a doomwitch mentality." ` ' H.S. Bergen - W.R. Corey W.E. Glenn E-V. John J.E. McKee W.B. Papageorge J.F. Stapleton E.P. Wheeler J.D. Carr - T. Claeys P.J.A. Marsh J. Mason S. Turover O.S. Tuygil D.S. Cameron - M. Chambers F.J. Cornwell D.B. Shearn - H.A. Vodden - St. Lou H " " " " " MBrussel M " M London " " Newport Ruabon THE SUNDAY TIMES June 10, 1973 HONS 07021?