Abandoned and contaminated land - Environmental Deterioration and Contamination: Problems and their Management - page 79

company was mixed to the oil and sprayed around by the contractor. In 1981, the
spraying resulted in the death of 62 horses in a horse stable. In 1982, a huge flood
hit the town, dissipating the highly contaminated oil from the roads to the soil. In
the same year, US Environmental Protection Agency announced that it had identified
dangerous levels of dioxin in Times Beach's soil. By 1985, the town was evacuated and
quarantined.
Somewhat later in Hungary, Soviet military forces dissipated the content of huge
underground kerosene containers on their airfield into the soil and groundwater, before
marching out of the country. The extent of kerosene dumping was such that clean-up
was combined with kerosene “mining'' and utilization. Not only were the containers
to be removed emptied into the soil, but also the surplus due to non-accomplished
flight missions often ended up in the soil at the air-force base.
Leaking underground pipes and storage tanks, as well as surface-located trans-
formers and other storage facilities on industrial sites often caused long-lasting damage.
The pollution of gasworks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries is still present
on inherited brownfield sites all over the world.
Former gasworks provide a good example of how each other's experience can and
should be utilized regarding the problems arising in the same form and scale in every
country. Coal gasification aiming to produce coke and town gas is more or less based
on the same technology. It produced the same polluting residues everywhere: tars, oils,
hydrocarbon sludge, containing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs), petroleum
hydrocarbons, including BTEX (benzene, toluene, ethylbenzene and xylenes) and phe-
nols, spent oxide wastes with cyanide from gas desulfurization (complex cyanides and
metals), ash, ammonia recovery from wastes of nitrogen removal from gas (phenols,
nitrates, sulfates, sulfides, PAHs), asbestos, which all can be identified visually and
by their odor in former gasworks' environment. Tar is generally present in soil and
groundwater in the form of non-aqueous phase liquids, which are a range of contami-
nants that can either float on a water body or sink into the bottom of an aquifer. Most
of the wastes are typically buried at the gasworks site and remain there even after the
gasworks had been decommissioned. Underground tar wells, liquor wells, pipes and
purifier beds can still be found today at former gasworks sites (Gasworks, 2005).
Mining and metal processing have a huge environmental impact all over the world
due to contamination via atmosphere (metal, particulate matter, incineration, com-
bustion and smelters off-gases), via the surface water system (runoff and leachate)
and contamination directly on soil (from air, from surface water sediment and direct
emission from transport and waste disposal) at every stage of mining, processing, use
of the products and wastes. An overview in Chapter 5 deals with soil contamination
from metal ore and bauxite mining.
Agricultural storage and processing as well as chemicals added directly to soil
(fertilizers, pesticides, wastes) intensively contaminate soils used for food and animal
feed production. These problems are discussed in Chapter 4 in this Volume.
Soil has been improperly valuated for several years. Meanwhile, our knowledge
about soil contamination and specifically contamination via soil was scarce in spite of
intensive land uses applying and emitting huge amounts of toxic chemicals.
The microbial community of soil is extremely active, flexible and adaptable.
The high cell concentration of 10 6 -10 10 cells/g soil is capable of degrading, utiliz-
ing and eliminating degradable, utilizable and toxic chemical substances in the soil