Legacy of Agent Orange

Re:Legacy of Agent Orange by jacquesm on Friday April 24, 2015 @06:55AM (#9432432)

A component of Agent Orange, 2,4,5-T was produced by Philips-Duphar (A chemical subsdiary of the industry giant) in the Netherlands. At the end of the Vietnam war the remaining stock was dumped in a polder just North of Amsterdam. When the scandal broke it was too late and the chemicals had reacted to form various dioxins which had leached in a gigantic plume into the ground water around the town of Broek In Waterland.

To this day the area where this all happened is off-limits, even though the soil has been excavated to many meters depth. This will likely be a permanent feature in what used to be one of the Netherlands nicest areas to recreate.

Photo of the site during the cleanup:

http://siebeswart.photoshelter.com/image/I0000jbBzIgQOwR4

This is the entrance to the site as it approximately looks today:

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.42447,4.991151,3a,75y,103.82...

It's one of the most expensive toxic waste operations ever in Europe and the most expensive one to date in NL.

People were living within 100 meters of this dump!

And that dump is a small fraction of what was dropped over Vietnam.

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Re:Legacy of Agent Orange by nate_meurer on Friday April 24, 2015 @12:39PM (#9434417)

Bloody hell, thanks so much for this, I had no idea. What would be the word for this, "collateral war crime"?

FWIW, even though far larger quantities were sprayed over Vietnam, the spraying made the contamination less permanent than in the Netherlands. Hopefully most of what was sprayed in the war has been run off into the ocean, with no pluming and relatively little groundwater contamination.

Although "relatively" is rather less comforting when the contamination involves dioxins.

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Re:Legacy of Agent Orange by jacquesm on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:31PM (#9434771)

> Although "relatively" is rather less comforting when the contamination involves dioxins.

Yes. It's incredible how toxic that stuff is.

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Re:Legacy of Agent Orange by data_scientist on Friday April 24, 2015 @12:36PM (#9434399)

I can't find anything about it in English. Do you have any link?

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Re:Legacy of Agent Orange by jacquesm on Friday April 24, 2015 @01:27PM (#9434755)

No, all I can find about it is in Dutch, but google translate is your friend.

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Re:Legacy of Agent Orange by hn_ on Friday April 24, 2015 @10:14AM (#9433401)

What do the signs shown in Google maps say?

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Re:Legacy of Agent Orange by cies on Friday April 24, 2015 @12:46PM (#9434455)

Here Amsterdam works on the sanitation and construction of the Volgmeerpolder (= the name of the area).

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