THE very things that make our homes cosy鈥攕oft furnishings, carpets,
wooden floors and the like鈥攃ould be magnets for benzene pollution from car
exhausts, claim scientists at the Salvatore Maugeri Foundation in Padua, Italy
(快猫短视频, 11 March, p 6).
Because I am especially fond of my creature comforts, I sought a reaction to this finding
from Keith Hill of the Department of the Environment, Transport and the Regions鈥攈is
ministerial responsibilities cover 鈥渆nvironmental protection at the local level鈥�.
Hill replied that the DETR commissioned the Building Research Establishment
to carry out a study of volatile organic compounds, including benzene. For most
of the homes studied, the report found that the concentrations of benzene
presented a negligible risk. In most homes the annual average concentration of
benzene is less than the maximum of 16.2 micrograms per cubic metre recommended
by the DETR鈥檚 Expert Panel on Air Quality Standards. He went on to say that the
Institute for Environment and Health concluded in its report, Benzene in the
Environment (1999) that current environmental levels of benzene presented a
negligible risk of any adverse health effects, including cancers.
From l January, the level of benzene permitted in petrol has been restricted
to less than 1 per cent. Now the government is considering bringing in new
legislation to control petrol vapour emissions from petrol station forecourts.
And the DETR is to undertake further research in which volunteers considered to
be 鈥渟usceptible to air pollution episodes鈥� will wear sampling equipment. The
work should be completed by mid-summer.
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RICHARD HASZARD of Milford, Staffordshire, wrote to me after reading my
comments on the revelation that scrap metal from Second World War nerve gas
laboratories near Camborne in Cornwall had been dumped down local mine shafts
(快猫短视频, 11 March, p 55).
Haszard is retired now, but he has a life-time knowledge of methane drainage in coal
and gold mines around the world. To dump such rubbish down a mine shaft is illegal, he
writes, even if it has been decontaminated. Things like pipes and structural steelwork
are certain to jam across a shaft, and cubicle fronts and the like can form a false floor.
Any further filling can cause the shaft and surrounding land to collapse, with fatal
results.
In Staffordshire, for instance, a car fell into an old mine shaft, as did
part of a house, all because the shaft had not been correctly filled in many
years before. During the 1940s, a shaft opened up near Wigan, taking 13 railway
trucks, a locomotive and the driver into it鈥攖he driver was never found.
And in the same period in the US, a mine tunnel collapse at Idaho Springs might
even have prolonged the Second World War. The old Central City gold mines in the
Rocky Mountains were being reworked for the pitchblende they contained. Uranium
was extracted from the pitchblende for the Manhattan Project to build the atomic
bomb. The old mines were a major source for that, explains Haszard. While miners
were busily working several miles along a passage to improve mine drainage,
water burst in with such force that they were all drowned.
Filling or draining old mine shafts and tunnels can be hazardous work and
must be undertaken with meticulous care. If it is done carelessly or without
respect for any long-term effects, the results can clearly be horrendous.
