re: #54 dat_said

One of my summer intern jobs while in college in the 80s involved going out in the field a few times to work on electrical substation maintenance. There were stickers on the side of the transformers about PCBs. I don’t remember the numbers but it was something like a green sticker if tested less than 1 part per million, a yellow sticker for between 1 and 5 parts per million, and a red sticker with the number written in sharpie. All had red stickers and numbers were thousands per million. Maintenance crews thought I was crazy to be concerned. It was the ” we’ve been working with this stuff for years”.

In the 80s my father was summoned to do affidavit for a number of lawsuits. In the 60s he’d been working on a property owned by ALCOA that contained old transformers that had later been found to be full of PCBs. ALCOA had not put them there, and ALCOA also did not own the property when the fact there were a lot of PCBs there were acted upon. But ALCOA happened to be one of the owners in sequence with deep enough pockets to be worth suing. (My father’s affidavits from what I can tell is that ALCOA effectively inherited the equipment, left it where it was, and did not add to it. Along with the company not being aware of the impact threat at the time.)

I presume these were Aroclor compounds of some type.

I still don’t quite understand people who think the pre-EPA 50s and 60s were some sort of Golden Age. Sort of like people who want to travel further back in time and don’t realize that pre-antibiotic medicine (or pre-germ theory) and pre-modern dentistry opens one up for a lot of bad things.

Aside: And I saw someone buying a gallon of raw milk (clearly marked as such) at the farm produce store the other day.