By Dr. Robert Thorson

My how things change … and how they stay the same.

That’s was my first thought after reading a riveting story about academic chemical pollution published in the March 7 Seattle Post- Intelligencer. A perfectly respectable professor from the University of Washington named Daniel Storm recently pleaded guilty in federal court to pouring dangerous chemicals down the sink to avoid the $15,000 cost of disposal. The article was sent to me by Stefan Wawzyniecki, manager of UConn’s Department of Chemical Health & Safety with the brief note, “This is worth reading.”

My next thought was what Stefan did with the dusty old cardboard box full of unlabeled chemicals his office picked up from my lab a few years ago. I’m confident it went somewhere safe.

This would not have been the case 50 years ago when UConn began dumping its academic chemical waste in shallow pits dug into a hillside north of campus. When I show students this area of loose yellowish soils, permeable sand and gravel and highly fractured ledges, they see no barrier whatsoever between the wooded surface and the bedrock aquifer below. This aquifer provided drinking water for residential and public water-supply wells until groundwater pollution by toxic metals and volatile organic compounds was detected.

UConn dumped its noxious solid and chemical wastes into these pits between 1966 and 1979, “including boron hydrides, cesium ampules that were broken apart and ignited, ammonium hydroxide, cyanides, arsenic compounds, phosphoric anhydride, toluene, benzene, chlorinated solvents, mercury and various pesticides” and God knows what. This laundry list comes from the website description for site CTD981894280, one of 511 toxic waste sites listed in Connecticut by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

Today, of course, UConn and every other university, municipality and industry are much more careful about waste disposal. UConn has done a great job cleaning up. But the damage was done, the aquifer tainted. The pits were backfilled in 1976 under orders by the state Department of Environmental Protection. They were excavated in 1987, with more than 5,000 cubic yards of soil hauled away for treatment and disposal. But the taint in the water will not go away, in spite of all the money spent on investigation, remediation, abatement, regulation and legal fees. Soon the waste pits will be history, part of the Hillside Environmental Education Park being developed near the abandoned landfill.

So why would an otherwise knowledgeable and law-abiding professor of pharmacology at the University of Washington pour bad stuff down the sink in 2006? The answer is money. In his case, the proper disposal of two canisters of ethyl ether found in his lab would have cost about $15,000, far too high in today’s money-driven, academic research market.

After an alleged cover-up and brief criminal investigation, Storm accepted “full responsibility” and pleaded guilty to “knowingly disposing of a hazardous waste without a permit,” based on the Post- Intelligencer story. Though he is eligible for a five-year jail term and a fine of $250,000, federal prosecutors are recommending probation. Professor Storm continues to teach and run his lab as the university’s disciplinary review runs its course.

By 2006, Professor Storm was aware that pouring hazardous chemicals into the public sewer was harmful. What I want to know is why, even as early as 1966, UConn seemed so unaware of the harmful legacy it would leave. Though the use of UConn’s disposal pits began four years before the National Environmental Policy Act, it began four years after Rachel Carson wrote these words in “Silent Spring”: “Every human being is now subjected to contact with dangerous chemicals, from the moment of conception until death.”

She was referring to “synthetic creations of man’s inventive mind, brewed in his laboratories, and having no counterparts in nature.” I’m sure that many of those whose wastes were being tossed into chemical pits had read this important book by then. Library and lab records could prove it.

What lesson do I draw from all this? That we humans will do whatever we can get away with, whether through commission or omission. We need environmental police, including the departments of environmental health and safety at UConn and at the University of Washington, to help us do the right thing. Though the short-term cost is high, the long-term savings are even higher.