Here are a few of the worst man-made problems
out there!
8 - Huangpu River pig problem
It's no secret that there are plenty of people
out there who loooove their pork.
The booming demand for meat in general has
created ever more crowded farms, ripe for
the spread of diseases.
Have you ever watched that movie "Contagion"?
It’s definitely not out of the realm of
possibility.
In 2013, over 16,000 pigs were found in the
Shanghai Songjiang section of the Huangpu
River, which supplies the city of Shanghai
with its drinking water.
Early tests showed that the pigs carried a
common disease among hogs not known to be
infectious to humans.
The pigs were dumped by farmers in the neighboring
Zhejiang province, a major pig farming area
that’s upstream of Shanghai.
The farmers claimed they had thrown the bodies
into the Huangpu River because burying was
too expensive.
Really?
That was their excuse?
Official sources stated that the quality of
Shanghai's drinking water still met regulations.
For some reason, I don't believe this!
During this time, there was an outbreak of
H7N9 avian flu in the Yangtze river delta.
Authorities have denied any connection between
these two events, but scientists have established
that the pigs themselves could have served
as hosts.
I’ll let you guys do the math!
7 - Citarum River
The Citarum River, the biggest river in West
Java, runs 190 miles from the Wayang Mountain
to the Java Sea in Indonesia.
It provides drinking, cleaning and irrigation
water for 30 million residents in and around
Jakarta and other cities.
The River is also a source of water power
plant that produces electrical power to Java
and Bali.
Industrialization came to the region in the
1980’s.
With unregulated factory growth, industrialization
has polluted the river with massive amounts
of waste.
The river is now known as one of the most
polluted rivers in the world.
Over 500 factories including 200 textile factories
line its river banks.
The dyes and chemicals used in the industrial
process get into the water.
The water has a distinct color and also gives
off an odor.
Supposedly sometimes the river can make people
around fall unconscious.
Plastic, packaging, and other trash float
in the dirty water, which makes the river's
surface invisible with everything floating
around.
Of course, the effect on the local ecosystem
has been devastating.
Local fishermen have turned to entrepreneurial
methods of survival, picking up plastic from
the water for recycling.
6 - The Aral Sea
The Aral Sea used to be the fourth largest
lake in the whole world, with an area of 26
thousand three hundred square miles.
However, the Soviet government decided that
the rivers that fed the lake was better applied
to the desert region surrounding the lake.
The Aral Sea has been steadily shrinking since
the 1960s and by 1997, it had decreased to
only TEN percent of its original size.
The lake has basically split into four lakes.
The Eastern Basin of the Aral Sea has already
completely dried up by 2014, as shown by satellite
images from NASA.
The Soviets decided to change the course of
the two main sources of water incoming of
the Aral Sea, and now the ecosystems of the
Aral Sea and the river deltas feeding into
it have been nearly destroyed.
The region's once-prosperous fishing industry
has been essentially destroyed, bringing unemployment
and economic hardship.
The disappearance of the lake affected the
lives of millions of people in and out of
the region.
Many people suffered from health problems
associated with the chemicals left behind.
5 - Chevron-Texaco in Ecuador
Oil company giant Texaco, bought by Chevron
in 2001, operated in Ecuador from 1964 to
1992 after a large amount of oil was discovered
in the region.
Chevron has admitted that Texaco dumped over
18 and a half billion gallons of toxic water
into the rainforest during this period – about
4 million gallons per day at the height of
its operation, contaminating two million acres
of the Ecuadorian Amazon.
Despite existing environmental laws, Texaco
made deliberate, cost-cutting operational
decisions that, for 28 years, resulted in
an environmental catastrophe that experts
have dubbed the "Rainforest Chernobyl”!
In a rainforest area roughly three times the
size of Manhattan, Texaco carved out 350 oil
wells, and after leaving the country in 1992,
left behind close to 1,000 open toxic waste
pits.
Many of these pits leak into the water table
or overflow in heavy rains, polluting rivers
and streams that 30,000 people depend on for
drinking, cooking, bathing and fishing.
This is one of the world's greatest environmental
disasters, with the amount of pollutants dumped
or spilled estimated to be roughly 30 times
the amount discharged in the Exxon Valdez
disaster.
However, Chevron-Texaco has never carried
out a meaningful clean-up and today pools
of oily sludge still drain into water courses
used by the Amazonian communities.
Despite a class action filed in 1993 against
Chevron-Texaco in the US to demand repairs
to the environmental damage as well as compensation
to the Amazonian communities, Chevron has
never paid the damages.
4 - Bhopal Gas Leak
The world's worst ever industrial accident
happened in Bhopal, the capital city of Madhya
Pradesh, India.
Fumes drifted into the sleeping city and people
woke up with burning eyes and lungs.
Over 520,000 people were exposed to methyl
isocyanate gas and other chemicals when 40
tons of highly toxic gases leaked from the
Union Carbide pesticide plant, which is now
known as Dow Chemical.
The cause of the disaster remains unknown,
but the Indian government and local activists
argue improper management created a situation
where routine pipe maintenance caused a backflow
of water into a gas tank, triggering the disaster.
Over 700,000 citizens were affected.
A total of 36 wards were marked by authorities
as being gas affected.
In the years after the accident, pollutants
continued to seep out of the accident site
into groundwater.
After 33 years, Bhopal kids are still being
born with twisted limbs and other physical
and mental deformities caused by their parents'
exposure to the accident.
3 - Electronic Waste
Almost every single person in this world has
owned some sort of an electronic device in
this day and age.
There will forever be newer and shinier things
to replace the old ones, but what happens
to the electronic devices that’s left behind?
Electronic goods are made up of hundreds of
different materials, containing toxic substances
such as lead, mercury, cadmium, and arsenic.
Once in a landfill, these toxic materials
seep out into the environment, and obviously
contaminates the surrounding land and water.
In 2016, almost 15 pounds of electronic waste
was generated for every single person on the
planet, which basically amounts to 50 million
tons of electronic waste worldwide!
At the top of the list of producers of e-waste
is China, who generated 11.1 million tons,
followed by the US with 10 million tons.
The global volume of electronic waste is expected
to grow by 33% in the next four years, when
the waste is going to weigh the equivalent
of eight times the weight of the great Egyptian
pyramids!
But really though, someone decided to use
the weight of Egyptian pyramids as a reference
point?!
2 - Varthur Lake
Bangalore, which is pretty much India's Silicon
Valley, was once upon a time called the "city
of lakes", although that’s most likely not
the reason why you’d want to visit Bangalore.
Bangalore's lakes receive over five hundred
MILLION liters of untreated sewage catchment
every day.
I personally can't fathom the level of toxicity
this produces, but scientists believe that
Bangalore will have to be evacuated before
2025, because it's basically uninhabitable
supposedly because of the pollution.
This is no surprise if you've heard about
the Belladur and Varthur lakes.
Recently, Bangalore people noticed lots of
smoke coming from the middle of Bellandur
Lake.
There were so many different chemicals in
the lake that it was able to catch fire!
In order for this to happen there has to be
a ridiculously high level of chemicals in
the lake.
The water burned for at least 12 hours and
left behind a sinister black patch over the
waters.
On the other hand, there's Varthur Lake.
After heavy rains, Varthur Lake continually
ends up covered in snow-like foam, which swirls
up in the winds, engulfing nearby villages.
The fumes from the lake supposedly are toxic
enough to damage the paint on cars and get
this somehow crack windshields?!
What?!
Yeah, this is definitely one of the last places
to go on vacation.
1 - Fukushima
If you haven't been living under a rock for
the past 10 years, then it’s highly likely
that you've heard about The Fukushima nuclear
disaster.
It was the most significant nuclear accident
since the Chernobyl disaster and the second
one to be given the Level-7 event classification
on the International Nuclear Event Scale,
the highest ranking on the scale.
Back on March 11th of 2011, there was an earthquake
immediately followed by a tsunami.
The nuclear reactors had an emergency sequence
for automatic shutdown.
Unfortunately, the tsunami disabled the emergency
generators that would have provided power
to control and operate the pumps necessary
to cool the reactors.
The insufficient cooling led to three nuclear
meltdowns, hydrogen-air explosions, and the
release of radioactive material to open ocean.
The Pacific Ocean's water is still contaminated
because there’s no way of taking out radioactivity
from the water.
The accident could have been prevented had
proper safety measures been done.
The Fukushima Nuclear Accident Independent
Investigation Commission found that the causes
of the accident had been foreseeable and that
the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company,
had failed to meet basic safety requirements
such as doing a risk assessment, preparing
for containing collateral damage, and developing
evacuation plans.
Here’s what’s next!
