So wild and sad, reading the article and discussing the subject with a “knowledgeable entity”. (It’s great having smart “friends” that don’t mind when you pester them with rabbit hole questions at 3am.)
The “Erin Brockovitch” (hexavalent chromium groundwater poisoning) story in Hinkley CA describes harm that went on for a couple decades. The underground plume spread about 8 miles, affecting a couple thousand people.
The Peak District case was a whole mining region exposed through dust and fumes for maybe _850 years_, with the airborne lead spreading so far it showed up in Alpine ice and Scandinavian lakes.
Dust brought in to homes by workers, and fumes over the whole town and countryside, bringing sickness, early death, craziness and lower intelligence to men, women and children. And nobody could figure it out.
Same for the mediterranian island of Elba. It was the most important source of iron first for the Etruscans and later for the Romans, but the deposits contained significant quantities of lead, which can also still be found in Alpine glaciers. It was known to the greeks as the sooty island, the Etruscans called it the island of a thousand fires. The last mine was closed in the 1980s after over 2000 years.
Reminds me of the Ystwyth valley lead mines in Wales which were worked from the Bronze Age until about the 1950s. The valley is breathtakingly beautiful (as is basically all of Ceredigion) but to this day the river Ystwyth remains pretty contaminated in places.
The “Erin Brockovitch” (hexavalent chromium groundwater poisoning) story in Hinkley CA describes harm that went on for a couple decades. The underground plume spread about 8 miles, affecting a couple thousand people.
The Peak District case was a whole mining region exposed through dust and fumes for maybe _850 years_, with the airborne lead spreading so far it showed up in Alpine ice and Scandinavian lakes.
Dust brought in to homes by workers, and fumes over the whole town and countryside, bringing sickness, early death, craziness and lower intelligence to men, women and children. And nobody could figure it out.