End of the Dream Read online

  I knew the Kansas battle was supposed to be won. And I knew they’d only managed delays, on the Niobrara, in the first years of the scrap with the gook up there. But I believed what the President said in his latest TV, “Candid to the People”—that they were going to stop the alga in Lewis and Clark Lake, by a dam and screens, chemicals, what not, short of Vermillion, South Dakota, by ditching and pumping the sludgy waters to the Nebraska Sands for final extermination. But did you know it turns out that the plan isn’t going to work? So they’re going to use three “defoliants,” stuff that kills everything green, in massive doses on the entire infested area. Secretly. That is, they’ll say publicly they’re using some new and harmless chemicals and then put on the killers. That’ll theoretically wipe out the last of the pest, the last damned green one-celled horror. But—what else it’ll do, the three defoliants, as they continue downriver, when the dam’s opened, God knows.

  As you can imagine, this whole tale merely reinforced the program of the evening. If the alga got into the entire area—the Mississippi—why, that would doom those rivers and their tributaries, if also infested. So there’d be nothing to get hurt by their intended project. If, though, the defoliants worked and the pest was halted, but the rivers were full of that deadly trio of plant killers—why, their planned effluents wouldn’t matter either. They couldn’t lose, either way. That did give the rivers-for-dumps majority quite a lift.

  Six of us, Dwaite, Pauling, Rayne, Smith, Cassinti, and I, went to bat against the proposal on the grounds already noted by various speakers, and on the standard grounds. I won’t say we had zero effect. But the two basic arguments they came back to, every time, were not easily opposed:

  1. The rivers are going to be lost no matter what.

  2. In eight to ten years USA has got to have every drop of pure water it can get from every source for distribution in what then will be roughly two thirds of the nation’s area facing water famine.

  The second one can’t logically be refuted.

  Trying to combat the first with that bunch, their majority, wasn’t easy. They’re not fools. And they brought up all sorts of expert opinion. They’re pretty sharp on public attitudes, too, since they all have departments for the sociological and psychological study of the folks, so as to predict what they’ll buy in the future if urged by advertising. And all their charts show there’s a deep, growing and not too conscious depression in the American people right now. They feel the environmental recovery, or salvage, will be a flop—and rightly. More and more, too, the average citizen expects technology to save the world, if it’s saved.

  But none of the tycoons, barons, czars and powerhouses in that meeting—if I can immodestly accept myself—has a broad enough and also deep enough knowledge of the over-all picture, the sciences involved and especially the biologies, to think for himself with any value. A man in pharmaceuticals, like me, has to have a mass of biology and chemistry in his head. Nobody else there needed such a background. Petroleum chemistry, metallurgy, yes. Physics and engineering, quite a bit of savvy. Nothing much on ecology.

  The meeting broke up before dawn. Nothing settled, really—that is, not openly. But, plainly, the Kelley-General Gode position had majority support.

  If it’s all going to materialize, I cannot stop thinking, My God! My God! There won’t be any rivers any more!

  We couldn’t budge the big majority with our insistence that the rivers had to be saved, cleaned up, not devastated, in the eight to ten years ahead. The past and present ratios of efforts and outlays to achievement simply show, to such men, that we’re losing, in spite of all we’ve spent and done. We cannot afford much more—so the price tag on a real cleanup isn’t acceptable.

  Are we going to lose, Miles?

  You’re the only guy with the organization to block this nightmare “project.”

  I’m so damned angry that if need be, and you say so, I’ll crack the whole classified thing and tell the media what I’ve told you, confidentially.

  However, since six of us went away at least unconvinced, maybe you could act from a “leak” and not say who leaked—which would protect me, perhaps or even probably.

  EDITORIAL NOTE: What Miles did was to call on the President, state that he had added up some meaningful items sband was guessing the scheme they implied. The President had to acknowledge that “some such” a plan was among the “dozens” being “winnowed for a solution” of the waste-waters problem, now, admittedly, desperate. Miles then stated he had enough about the program he pretended he had deduced to make a public statement, condemning it. The President didn’t try to prevent that, and Miles realized why not. He would be sending up a “trial balloon” which would serve the supporters of the plan pretty neatly. They’d get a free reading of public reaction without being involved—because Miles, as the President well knew, would not name names or point to the White House, specifically, or the Army Engineers, save generally. Miles had honor. But he tried.

  The Foundation bought the first hour available on the networks, and Miles went on the air over NBC, CBS and ABC, nationwide.

  He is a very impressive speaker and his face is great on TV.

  He wrote his own speech and it was ingenious.

  First, he pointed out the failing effort to catch up with pollution in the waters of USA. Next, he showed the water dearth that would lead to, in eight to ten years. Then he asked what could be done.

  And then he said the Foundation had come up with a dramatic and fascinating plan—after which, he set forth the project he wanted to throw a block at. But he made his own organization the alleged originator of the whole thing.

  He had ninety million or more people on their chair edges, by that point.

  So he told them why the Foundation proposal, brilliant as it sounded, would not work.

  Recovering the rivers, Miles said, by a many times greater effort than all those past, present and planned, was the only way to save the show, even save America. His solution was documented with Foundation facts and figures so even morons in the viewing multitude could see his plan.

  The broadcast was a three-day wonder.

  Then the other side started hacking at it. The tax cost would be so great that the national living standard would be cut by at least twenty-five per cent. Construction industries would be slowed or stopped for the long period while the materials they used would be going into the “Smythe scheme of river and lake recovery.” With the purified waterways and lakes, the cost of the GNP would perhaps double because every industry would either have to clean its wastes completely or else transport them a thousand miles and often more, to the desert deposits then gaining in use. Moreover, Americans would inevitably be “set back to the 1950s for power” and “rationing would be general and last for decades,” while “available electric current would cost triple present prices.”

  By Christmas, the majority still wanted clean rivers but it wanted, far more, no such misery for attaining that end. The Foundation tried hard to refute such exaggerations. But the truth was, they were only that: blowups of what clean rivers would demand of America.

  Nothing, in that countercampaign of industry, was said about the Canadian water purchase scheme or the total use of rivers for sewers. That was the clever part of the act.

  Miles realized soon enough that his efforts had been blunted, even demolished. The American public, nearly en masse, wasn’t about to go for river recovery at that cost. So the general public was psychologically ready to accept the schemes that Miles had ripped apart on that expensive broadcast.

  What actually happened, however, was different, occurred in a few years and related to neither program.

  12. An Incident

  The Cleveland Straight Speaker

  Ohio’s Greatest Newspaper

  Monday, August 6, 1979

  RIVER EXPLODES!

  WORLD’S WORST DISASTER

  EXTRA

  Cleveland, O. August 6, 1979. At 10:10 this morning Cleveland was devastated by
an explosion so cataclysmic it was attributed to an atomic bomb. A ring of fire as much as two miles across now rages on the perimeter of an area of total ruin and thousands of smaller fires elsewhere in Greater Cleveland are still burning. More than one hundred thousand people are dead or missing and the number of the injured cannot as yet even be estimated. Beyond the area of total destruction in the city core is a ring of fire, and farther out building walls are still collapsing and flames are still spreading, both taking their toll. Cleveland Memorial Shoreway, from the West 25th Street Exit to its juncture with Interstate Routes 71 and 77, and the stretch of the combined throughways partly bounds an area where everything is, simply, gone—everything those routes enclose and much beyond.

  The disaster was not due to an “atom bomb” as has been generally assumed up to now. The presumption was reasonable. No known agent of blast except the sort used on Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the end of World War II could have caused such massive and far-ranging devastation.

  What is now known to be the cause, beyond any further speculation, is this: The Cuyahoga River blew up! Approximately a mile and a half of the Cuyahoga, a long-time “fire hazard,” became explosive and, like liquid nitroglycerine, the explosive content of the river for that distance detonated this morning with the effect a nuclear weapon would have. In a statement made a short time ago, Governor Wittley declared:

  “Panic and terror due to radioactive fears must stop. Such fears are groundless. Martial law has been declared. The President has (Turn to page 4)

  The Cleveland Straight Speaker

  Ohio’s Greatest Newspaper

  WHAT CAUSED THE CATASTROPHE?

  by Elmo Bateson

  Science Editor

  Cleveland, O., August 7, 1979. As this great city still writhes in the thrall of history’s most awesome industrial accident, with hundreds still dying in a continuing holocaust, the world is already asking, How could so appalling an accident occur?

  As the Straight Speaker’s Science Editor, I have been chosen to set forth what is known about the cause of the titanic blast that ripped the heart out of this great city and now threatens it with firestorm.

  The cataclysm occurred yesterday, Monday, at 10:10 A.M. Central Daylight Time. Approximately one and three tenths miles of the Cuyahoga River, upstream, from a point well above its mouth in Lake Erie, simply blew up. Virtually all buildings within three quarters of a mile were destroyed. In the next half mile damage was generally severe. Fire instantly erupted where devastation was total and in much of the severely shattered area beyond. This titanic and spreading conflagration has not yet been brought under control.

  Further details of the destruction, the fires, casualties, and related latest information will be found on Page One in adjacent columns. My assignment is to explain what is known about the cause, and to add such theories as I have managed to gather from the few scientists of appropriate disciplines I have been able to locate.

  The Cuyahoga River is a minor waterway that loops through northern Ohio, touches Akron and meanders lakeward at Cleveland. The lower miles of the Akron-tainted stream pass through Cleveland’s vast industrial complex and hundreds of industries, including iron, steel, coal, other heavy metallurgical types, huge chemical works and plants that are smaller but often “major” for their products. The Cuyahoga has been used for industrial (and other) disposal ever since the first water mill was set up on its banks, long before the city was incorporated in 1836.

  For more than a decade the Cuyahoga has been officially classified as a “fire hazard.” It was the first river in America to be given that novel but disgraceful designation. In the years between 1970 and 1976 industry and government, acting under public pressure, spent scores of millions in an attempt to clean up these waters. Several major plants were closed for varying periods while devices were installed to reduce their contaminating effluents. However, when legal efforts threatened to shut down certain smaller plants it proved that they were doing work essential for national defense, some of it so “hush-hush” that the products were never publicly stated.

  These plants were heavy polluters of the Cuyahoga and their effluents were of many exotic, highly corrosive, toxic or in other ways hazardous sorts—unless speedily diluted. When it was known that these factories could not be halted, enforcement of the recent and harsh anti-pollution laws languished. If the Defense Department wouldn’t or couldn’t stop fouling the Cuyahoga why should anybody stop? Plants and factories grew in numbers and in size, too, as new mills and complexes replaced old ones.

  In addition, some raw sewage entered the river when storm sewers in Cleveland flooded treatment plants. It was also and recently found that an enormous load of untreated human wastes was entering the Cuyahoga from the several new “boom time” developments south of the city, where suburban growth was so extensive and rapid that adequate sewage disposal facilities simply were not built.

  Finally, with the development of the Lieson-Carter film, a desperately needed means was found for “sealing” the river. The patented sealant, one of the silicones, with a silica gel component, was released on a segment of the river in May of last year and has been augmented as required, by automatic devices. The results were “excellent,” to the popular way of thinking. Mile upon mile of what had been a brownish-black, stinking, turgid movement of something having a thin-syrup consistency became a non-watercourse with a glittering, opaque surface, from the upstream farmlands where it was polluted only by Akron, by some sewage and by agricultural runoff, to its mouth. There, a surface barrier and “skimmer” system recovered 99.4% of the Lieson-Carter “glaze” for shipment back and for reuse.

  That film or coat, some ten inches in thickness, in effect turned the river-sewer into a tunnel. Occasionally, to be sure, a great bubble or surge would erupt through the film. On other occasions chemical reactions beneath it created a “fountain effect,” spurting large volumes of chemical mixes on top of considerable stretches of the film. Some of the escaped “bubbles” have ignited, apparently spontaneously, causing brilliant but short-lived flares. And some of the material in the geysers has been noxious in different ways: highly caustic, flammable, putrid-smelling and nauseating, as well as productive of fumes which, in one case, were lethal and took seventeen lives before they could be managed.

  This was the general aspect of the Cuyahoga River last Monday morning. Perhaps a quarter million souls were in the range of possible death. Not one had the slightest warning.

  In addition to the main demolition and fire, heavy objects, parts of steel buildings, whole machines weighing many tons, trucks, bulldozers and cars were hurled outward for distances up to five miles or more, and lesser but still lethal missiles caused death, injury and damage to homes and other structures and also set several fires at distances out to nine or ten miles.

  The blast was actually “atomic” in its force. This force has been calculated by readings from gauges at three sites where such equipment was being used experimentally to test various pressures in gases. All three of these measurements agree the blast at “ground zero” had a force of twenty-one kilotons, plus or minus two. The explosion registered on countless seismographs and is now given a value of 6.7 on the Richter scale, that is, the power of a moderately severe earthquake.

  Since the explosion was relatively free to drive upward and outward, that downward force, measured as a quake, is astonishing.

  What caused the explosion? The “general” answer is by now surely clear. Following are some more specific, if inadequate, expert thoughts.

  Dr. Vandane Truesdale of Cleveland State Tech told your Science Editor: “In my opinion, an unknown catalyst in that unforgivable chemical brew suddenly separated the water molecules into their components—two parts of hydrogen, one part of oxygen—thus creating a massive quantity of tremendously explosive gas in a matter of seconds.”

  Dr. Bagley Sickle, Chief Chemist of Temper-Wickerson Hale Products: “My rather preliminary thoughts and hasty calculations sugg
est that the Cuyahoga, being a chemical factory of myriad potential products, laid down, over a long period, layer on layer of one of the trinitrotoluols, say, or perhaps nitroglycerine. This explosive accumulated till it pierced the Lieson-Carter film somewhere. Then a carelessly tossed match, anything of the sort, would set it all off.”

  Professor Raoul Weaver, of Cleveland State Tech, a chemist, added this interesting fact:

  “I drove over to the Cuyahoga at a little past eight on Monday morning. I often do on the way to the new campus, the one near Woodmere. An act that gives me morbid pleasure. This time, I noticed a new phenomenon which I truly relished. I parked and walked to the bank beside the Cone-Riverson Refining and Sintering Plant Number One, on East Dill Alley. There was a fissure in the film near that point, below the new bridge, and out of it boiled a mass of froth. A plant guard who was standing on the bank behind the stone wall, at that point, said the night watchman reported the ‘whole river had been bubbling and gurgling and hissing for hours.’ That sound was still clearly audible, a shushing noise that came from under the glaze, save where the stuff had broken out. Elsewhere, in both directions the film was heaving and bulging as if waves churned beneath it. This process was occurring as far as I could see.

  “I drove on to the campus, well aware that this unspeakably abused stream was acting in some new fashion. I was amused and hopeful. It did not occur to me that it might be fomenting a terrible explosive. I did think that, if the foaming continued, something grim enough to wake up the polluters might occur.

  “It may seem anti-social,” Dr. Weaver continued, “but I hoped this new activity would be sufficiently dramatic to get some action. As a scientist, I have given expert testimony for many local, state and federal bodies on a wide assortment of industry-environment subjects. I, like my colleagues, have usually lost our end of the argument. We had the true data—all they had was a big yen for profit, plus political influence. We have been proven correct whenever we could and did make firm statements. With what thanks? Some of us lost jobs, and in academe, where the loss is death. Some, like me, simply didn’t get the chair or the deanship we had earned. Most all of us have been ridiculed as well as vilified in the press and on TV. The public doesn’t know which side to trust but it prefers the side that promises more jobs, higher wages, cheaper products.