The best way to look at chromic acid is that it is much the same as deadly nuclear radiation. They both act the same and have the same effects except that chromic acid is a little bit worse. Nuclear radiation causes cancer in small to moderate doses. Chromic acid causes cancer in small doses. Nuclear radiation causes physical illness, permanent injury and death in large doses and chromic acid does the same in small to large doses. The effect of nuclear radiation is permanent and so is the effect of chromic acid. Nuclear radiation causes genetic damage but chromic acid is worse because we know now that nuclear radiation does not cause inheritable, trans generational genetic damage, but chromic acid does. There is no doubt in my mind that before too long the scientific community is going to come to the consensus that the worst thing mankind ever did to itself was to invent and use chromic acid.
This page is regularly updated with toxicity information about hexavalent chrome (chromic acid). The state of knowledge about this uniquely dangerous chemical is constantly changing. I regularly search the Internet and review other information about this dangerous chemical. Recent developments are that Chromic Acid is likely the most dangerous threat to mankind posed by any chemical.
If you don't have the time to read all of this page right now you can go immediately to a Material Safety Data Sheet for Chromic Acid prepared by a German company in 2007 using this link:
MSDS - Chromic Acid - Genetic Toxin
You can plainly see in the Hazards Identification Section on Page 1 of this MSDS that Chromic Acid is identified to be a trans generational genetic toxin. It has been a trans generational genetic toxin since the day it was first put onto the market over a hundred years ago. It has been affecting the entire human race and degrading the genetic heritage of mankind continuously since then and is doing so right now.
If this isn't enough to convince you of the danger presented to mankind by Chromic Acid you can review this recent BBC Article (3/4/2011) describing the rapid rise is testicular cancer in men and the decrease in male sperm counts thought to be caused by the wide release of industrial chemicals:
Rapid Decrease in Male Sperm Count
This short BBC article contains a link that leads directly to the entire study published in the International Journal of Andrology. This is a very authoritative detailed research report whose conclusions are alarming. I can think of only one chemical that can do this kind of damage and it is Chromic Acid or hexavalent chromium.
It is important to understand that while many people believe they understand the word "Poison" to mean anything that can damage the body or is not good for it this simple definition will get chopped into pieces by dishonest word magicians employed by their employer, the U.S. Navy or the Government if you engage in some kind of claim or adversarial process about an injury you experience as a result of being exposed to a poison of some kind, particularly Chromic Acid. I have had the experience of hearing a U.S. Navy Occupational Safety and Health expert witness state the lie under oath that nothing is a poison by itself and that the only thing that matters is the dose. However, this insane testimony evades one crucial point and this is there are some substances to which human beings should never be deliberately exposed at any level of exposure because their damaging effect is cumulative, permanent, and can be passed on through subsequent generations. First and foremost among these is Chromic Acid. I believe that currently available evidence and the evidence yet to come will conclusively demonstrate it to be the most toxic thing there is.
I have been studying Chromic Acid from my earliest days in College. Over this time I have seen how the general understanding of its extreme toxicity has slowly grown. The way it works in the scientific literature with a dangerous chemical is that at first it is stated the substance "May" cause a certain serious damage. Then, as evidence builds up things change it gets identified to be a "suspected" agent of some kind of serious damage to human health and finally it is confirmed. For a long time Chromic Acid was identified to be an irritant, but was also a "suspected' human carcinogen and there were a lot of arguments about this and so some literature said it "may" cause cancer and other said it was "suspected". Then, as time goes by, and as more and more studies build up that demonstrate the suspicion is a fact, an authority body such as the United Nations, the U.S. EPA, the U.S. Department of Health or the International Agency for Research on Cancer will officially conclude and declare the hazard. Then everyone falls into line and the word "suspected" disappears" from the literature and the danger is confirmed. As late as 1995 Chromic acid was a "suspected" human carcinogen. Now it is a confirmed human carcinogen.
The most recent literature states that Chromic Acid "may" cause not only human genetic damage but "trans generational" genetic damage and that this damage may be cumulative within mankind itself. This means that if you are a woman or a man, and you are exposed to Chromic Acid, it is possible for you to have genetically damaged children who can then pass on their genetic damage to their children and on down through subsequent generations. This means that if you are poisoned by hexavalent chromium or Chromic Acid it is permanent and you will never recover from this. It is a simple step to conclude that Chromic Acid causes genetic damage. Chromic Acid causes cancer. Cancer is an extreme form of genetic damage gone rogue causing tumors that don't stop growing. So it's not hard to conclude that because Chromic Acid causes cancer it also causes genetic damage. But the use of the words "Trans Generational" is very very serious and the phrase "cumulative damage" elevates it to a threat against the entire genetic heritage of mankind. This is a huge red flag that cannot be ignored. The dangers posed to mankind by a trans generational genetic poison with cumulative effects are so very great that the mere suspicion of this form of toxicity should provoke the most serious forms of prevention of the release of Chromic Acid to the environment. I know one thing about chemical literature and this is simply that over time the word "may" always turns into the word "does". The word "may" never goes away. It always gets changed into a stronger word.
The one thing that kept the extreme danger posed by Chromic Acid hidden is that it is ethically prohibited to deliberately expose human beings to a known poison to find out what it does to a human being. Also, accurate methods in the ability to discern genetic damage at the DNA level have only been very recently developed. Chromic Acid was invented around the year 1880. By the time modern science arrived on the scene Chromic Acid had been in use for so long that the fact it had killed or maimed a lot of people when it first was introduced into industry had been long forgotten, and by and large safe handling practices has been built up around it so that although it did kill people, it killed them slowly enough so that no one was alerted to the danger. The big event that has changed things dramatically concerning the more modern understanding about the extreme danger of Chromic Acid to humanity itself has come out of China.
China has recently undertaken a huge process of export driven industrialization that began in earnest about 10 years ago. Chrome plating is a huge part of all industries. China may have some environmental regulations but if anything they are completely ignored. Chrome platers in China have regularly discharged concentrated chromic acid to open waterways, allowed chromic acid to poison wells and other drinking water supplies. Workers in the plating industry there have died, their families have been poisoned, and entire villages have had their health ruined by airborne and land discharges of Chromic Acid. These episodes have become the subject of modern scientific study. This Wild West of Chromic Acid discharges in China has produced a perfect storm of Chromic Acid poisonings. In the past, in the western world, all of the data concerning Chromic Acid poisoning and the fact is was carcinogenic was considered by scientists to be anecdotal or merely good stories not useful to allow valid scientific analysis. The massive Chromic Acid poisonings in China are so widespread and so prevalent they cannot possibly be scientifically ignored and have provided a much clearer understanding of the unique, deep, genetic toxicity of this unimaginably toxic chemical.
When the U.S. Navy closed the Mare Island Shipyard metal plating shop the general consensus maximum allowable concentration of Chromic Acid in air that people could breathe was 0.05 mg/m3. This is five hundredths of one milligram of chromic acid per cubic meter of air. Today federal regulations stipulate this to be 0.000005 mg/m3. This is a level 10,000 times lower. Federal regulations go on to state that the "no harm" continuous exposure level is 0.000001 mg/m3. Now I know one thing and that is that these allowable exposure levels are purely a guess. They are not only a guess but they are a politically and practically adjusted guess. These are exposure levels that have been adjusted and massaged by the U.S. Navy and by other industrial users of Chromic Acid who are concerned about the cost of living within regulations and also by the difficulty of carrying on profitable and effective processes that use and release Chromic Acid into the environment. The simple fact of the matter is it is still ethically forbidden to deliberately exposure humans to controlled levels of Chromic Acid to find out what happens. The federal regulators responsible to formulate and publish regulations concerning Chromic Acid are working in the gray dark, subject to intense pressure by politically powerful and wealthy pressure groups and individuals, and actually have very little actual human data with which to work. The fact that industry users have commenced to publish warning documents (MSDS or material safety data sheets) that protect them from lawsuits and within which they state clearly that Chromic Acid "May" cause trans generational human genetic damage means simply there can be no possible level of exposure to Chromic Acid that does not cause harm. The fact that the most recent regulations are 10,000 more powerful than previous regulations means simply that Chromic Acid is frightening indeed to the people who know the most about it.
If you want to review the most recently published OSHA Book concerning Hexavalent Chromium regulations you can use this link
Chromic Acid suffers from one big problem when it comes to the human mind getting a good understanding of the danger it poses. This is its usefulness otherwise known as human greed. There is an analogy to this in asbestos. Medical experts and occupational safety and health experts knew asbestos caused severe lung damage and cancer for many decades before its use was finally banned. What can possibly excuse this delay and omission? The answer is asbestos was absolutely necessary to support our highly industrialized western way of life and our military. There was no substitute for it. Then, in the 1970's substitutes for asbestos became available on the market. As these were accepted and put into use and found to be a good and reliable asbestos substitute the dangers of asbestos became highly publicized and asbestos was banned. This cumulated in many lawsuits which were finally consolidated into a compensation fund which is currently active and disbursing funds to asbestos victims.
Currently there is no acceptable substitute for Chromic Acid and other forms of hexavalent chromium. It is just too necessary industrially and also most particularly militarily. Military equipment of all kinds must be hard chrome plated in order for it to stand up in warfare service. Military victory can depend entirely on hard chrome plating. When the M-16 rifle was first introduced in Vietnam it had a huge jamming and accelerated wear problem. Soldiers were getting killed because their M-16 rifles jammed often. The Russian made AR-15 had no such problem. It could be subject to every kind of abuse and it would still fire. The difference between the two rifles was chrome plating. The M-16 had not had its crucial parts hard chrome plated as an economy measure. The AR-15 was full of hard chrome plated parts. When the decision was made to hard chrome plate the internal parts of the M-16 it became the reliable winner it is known to be today. Critical parts in the landing gear of fighter aircraft also fail prematurely if they are not hard chrome plated. The military effectiveness of hard chrome plating is as simple as this. This usefulness means there is never going to be a shortage of well paid highly educated mouthpiece apologists who will write and say anything to defend Chromic Acid just as there were the same for asbestos. The real danger posed by Chromic Acid is not going to be disclosed properly until a suitable replacement is found, has been tested in military service and found to be just as good.
There are a number of recent studies that conclusively demonstrate just how widespread the lack of regulatory compliance is with regard to the control of the release of hexavalent chromium and Chromic Acid to the environment. These studies measured the amount of hexavalent chrome present in municipal drinking water throughout the United States. These studies found that the level of hexavalent chromium present in average tap water is disturbingly high and of concern to local and federal authorities. Here is a link to one of these reports:
High Levels of Hexavalent Chromium in Tap Water
Regulators and other authorities are at a loss to understand as to exactly how all this hexavalent chromium has gotten into the water supplies all over the United States. I think this question can be answered by the Mare Island experience. Mare Island has a large building which once served as its power plant. This building has a huge smoke stack that was later converted to be an air suction for cooling air. The power plant had been converted into the air compressor station for the shipyard and it contains two house sized air compressors. The air sucked through the huge stack was used to cool water used to cool the compressed air from the gigantic air compressors. There was always a big problem with the cooling water discharged from the power plant building. This water had very high levels of hexavalent chromium. The Public Works and Occupational Safety and Health Departments could not understand how this could be happening and so it remained a mystery for many years. Finally when the Building 225 Plating Shop was closed the abnormal levels of chrome in the cooling water suddenly disappeared and everyone understood that the power plant stack had been sucking in large amounts of the Chromic Acid that was being belched into the air from the metal plating shop. I believe that the main reason there is so much tap water contaminated with high levels of hexavalent chromium is purely that state and federal regulations intended to control its discharge into the air and into the land and water are being ignored by users who have absolutely no fear of punishment for ignoring the regulations. I believe this fact of tap water poison is a clear demonstration that all of the federal and state regulations are effectively meaningless and are mostly un enforced.
When a tremendous amount of anything is produced, transported, used and dispersed in an economy a good fraction of it is going to be spilled and will be released into the environment that is populated by people who will be exposed to it. In 1985 the total US production of the basic hexavalent chromium chemical used as a basis stock for the manufacture of all other forms of hexavalent chromium was 300,000,000 pounds. There can be no doubt that much of this wound up in the air, on the land, and in the water.
Here are some links to Chromic Acid Material Safety Data Sheets and other Studies showing how recently the "suspected" Trans Generational Genetic Toxicity of Chromic Acid has been developing:
1. This MSDS published in 1998 has no mention of genetic damage: Chromic Acid MSDS 1998.
2. This National Institute of Health Report on Cancer identifies Chromic Acid Genetic Damage in 2004: Report on Cancer Chromic Acid 2004
3. This International Program on Chemical Safety states Chromic Acid MAY cause Heritable Genetic Damage to HUMAN GERM CELLS:
Human Germ Cell Damage Identified 2004
4. This MSDS published in 2006 states that Chromic Acid "MAY alter genetic material: MSDS Chromic Acid 2006.
5. This MSDS from Germany published in 2007 clearly states "MAY cause heritable genetic damage: MSDS Chromic Acid 2007
6. This MSDS published in 2008 states "May cause heritable genetic damage": MSDS From England 2008
7. This MSDS published in 2010 adds "Danger of Cumulative Effects" to "May cause heritable genetic damage"": MSDS Cumulative Effects Identified
As you can see the understanding of the extreme genetic toxicity of Chromic Acid is developing very quickly in comparison to the understanding of its toxicity as a carcinogen.
There is another analogue to Chromic Acid. This is tetraethyl lead "Lead" used as an anti-knock gasoline additive. In the late 1920's automobile manufacturer's knew they could not continue to develop the automobile engine to higher levels of performance based upon the gasoline available at the time. The reason for this was that silent high speed (high RPM) knocking was destroying engines and severely limiting their lifetime. A lot of money was poured into a development program to find a gasoline additive that would solve the problem of high RPM knocking. Tetraethyl lead was found to be cheap, easily produced, highly effective and effective in small quantities even though it was highly toxic. Without any study of its toxic effects as a tail pipe source of airborne lead it was put into use and was adopted throughout the world. Over time as science became modern the toxic effects of lead generally were discovered and finally studies concluded that tailpipe emissions of lead constituted a very severe health risk causing a decrease of IQ scores in children throughout the United States. This resulted in another crash development program to find a gasoline additive that did not use lead. Once this was developed and put into use lead was quickly discontinued and finally banned as a gasoline additive. The result has been, on the average, a 1 point increase in the average IQ of children in the USA for each year since lead was banned as a gasoline additive. Note that when tetraethyl lead was introduced there were many poisonings and fatalities that by now have been long forgotten. Practices were built up around the handling of "Ethyl" so that its toxicity was diffused until finally science caught up with it. Ethyl was adopted and put into widespread use without any study concerning its effect on the population. The problem with Chromic Acid is science is catching up with it, but there is still no substitute.
There is a startling recent development concerning the extreme genetic toxicity of Hexavalent Chromium that is very important. It has only very recently been discovered that vitamin C that is within a living cell promotes increased genetic damage caused by Hexavalent chromium ten fold. This is a big surprise because previous studies had shown the vitamin C contained in the stomach acted to neutralize hexavalent chrome and decrease its toxicity. Researchers had concluded from this that vitamin C in the cell would act in the same way, but they were wrong. Now that mercury and vaccinations have been thoroughly proven to not be a cause of autism scientists are looking for other wide spread environmental contaminants that can be the likely cause of the recent epidemic of autism. An ever increasing number of scientists are listing hexavalent chrome as a possible cause that needs to be studied. Because the epidemic of autism is a recent development the feeling is that something that has recently (within the past 20 years) been released into the environment will likely be found to be the cause. But this might not actually be the case. Autism could possibly be the first final stage result of the massive trans generational cumulative genetic poisoning of mankind with hexavalent chromium that has been in progress for the past 100 years.
Hexavalent chromium is of concern to everyone because when metallic chromium is generated in the form of small particles at high temperature, such as when stainless steel is welded at a U.S. Navy shipyard or when it is worn out of automobile engine components and emitted from the tail pipe, the tiny particles are mostly in the hexavalent form of chrome. The removal of lead from gasoline about 20 years ago has resulted in an increasing use of chrome inside automobile engines. This is because the lead additives provided considerable lubrication that the unleaded gasoline lacks. This lack of lead based fuel borne lubrication resulted in excessive wear to engine valves and piston rings. The automotive industry has compensated for this by hardening these parts by using an increasing the amount of chrome in alloys used to make engine valves and piston rings. Engine valves and piston rings also have increased chrome content due to demands for higher fuel efficiency requiring higher engine temperatures. The result of the ever increasing amount chromium used in engine valve and piston ring alloys results in ever increasing and large amounts of small particulate hexavalent chrome being emitted as automotive wear products out of the tailpipes of all the millions of cars on the road in this country. No one has yet estimated the total amount of hexavalent chromium emitted out of all the tailpipes in this country but it must be an extraordinarily large amount. Given that it is now obvious there is no safe level of exposure to hexavalent chromium, it is very likely that the large amounts being emitted from automobiles is having a profound, cumulative adverse trans generational genetic effect on human health.
There is one other analogy that explains why the extreme toxicity of hexavalent chromium is only now being discovered. This involved the explosive TNT. Around the time just before the start of the First World War there was an active disagreement between Occupational Safety experts in England and Germany concerning it. The English experts believed it was not poisonous and the German experts believed it was poisonous. The argument was decided by the war itself when many people were hired off of the streets in England to fill cannon shells and other munitions with TNT. These workers dropped like flies because TNT is poisonous. It was only when proper handling procedures were developed that workers lives were spared in England. After the war the matter was examined. It was found out that the Germans had been using TNT a lot longer than the English. They had already experienced their fatalities and had implemented safe handling practices and procedures long before the English decided to use TNT as a military explosive. The Germans knew it was poisonous because they had used it and the English did not know it was poisonous because they had not used it. What this bit of history teaches us first and foremost is that when it comes to a useful chemical the way the mind of a person who will profit from its use is biased by greed and the chemical is "innocent until proven guilty". This always means proven guilty by someone else being poisoned and being killed or maimed.
One day when I was an engineer working at the Mare Island Shipyard Post Closure Detachment I was assigned to oversee the removal of PCB's at the long closed Hunter's Point Naval Shipyard in San Francisco. PCB"s are a class of substances that were very useful for a long time. They were a completely effective fire prevention additive used in electrical transformer oil and were used and leaked into the ground just about everywhere that electrical transformers were located. There are a lot of transformers at a Navy shipyard. It took a long time for scientists to figure out just how bad PCB's are. A PCB starts out fairly harmless and is essentially non toxic, but over time when it is released into the environment, bacterial action changes it and increases and magnifies it's power as a carcinogen by as much as a million times or even much more. These "activated" PCB's are so extremely carcinogenic that the EPA has named them to be an entirely new class of human poisons called "Dioxin Like Toxins" and they are subject to very strict regulations. Dioxin is the most powerful carcinogen there is.
I had been trying, without much success, to convince my supervisor, this kind man, to implement more stringent safety procedures, which were more than the none he had implemented, for the workers who were actually doing the cleanup work and for him to more closely follow the applicable federal regulations, which he had not been doing. His shouted response to me was the "He had not seen one speck of evidence by himself that PCB's were harmful and that I was an idiot for thinking so". To this day I still have not figured out how to make an effective response to a total ignoramus of this magnitude. His attitude is much the same elsewhere in the U.S. Navy. If you are in a community located close to a U.S. Navy Shipyard or other Navy industrial facility or if you actually work at such a place please keep in mind that the U.S. Navy high officials have a knack for selecting out monsters just like this man to "monitor" their regulatory compliance. There's no doubt in my mind that the new lower emission limits are in the capable hands of people just like him.
Here is a document that demonstrates the U.S. Navy attitude when it comes to regulatory compliance. It deals with the sampling conducted at sites suspected to be contaminated in some way at the closed Mare Island Shipyard. The thing to understand is that if a sample is not properly handled and documented it can be thrown out and an entire case can fail because of this. This sort of thing was amply demonstrated at the infamous murder trial of a football star. The Los Angeles Crime lab had not observed proper chain of custody procedures with its sampling of the murder scene with the result very important evidence was not considered by the jury.
If you think the Navy has changed anything between the issuance of new hexavalent chromium regulations and now, is operating honestly and is a good steward of the environment please read this Consent Agreement between the Navy and the State of California Department of Toxic Substances Control in 2004 regarding the way the Navy conducted chemical sampling at Mare Island in violation of just about every regulation there is:
You Can't Trust the NAVY - Consent Agreement
The most important thing to understand about this Consent Agreement is that it is completely worthless. The U.S. Navy has a long standing policy of doing everything in its power, honestly or dishonestly, to avoid having to live with a court judgment. When the Navy is sued the first thing is does is to collect the evidence and then hide it. Then it engages in a campaign of accusing the other party of overloading the Navy with "excessive and burdensome" data requests for data it no longer has Finally, when the other party has run out of money or patience or both the Navy offers a generous consent agreement that appears, on its face, to give the other party much of what he wanted to begin with. The reality is that once the Consent Agreement is signed it is turned over to a low ranking employee who is well known to be a management pleaser to administrate. He, of course, does nothing to change anything and everything goes on much as it did before except now the navy has a disposable fall guy in place if things go wrong again.
When I visited the California EPA offices in San Francisco and examined the Mare Island file I saw a letter addressed to the Shipyard Commander. It's topic was the Mare Island Naval Shipyard sewage system. The letter demanded that the Shipyard Commander specify to the State of California the date by which it was either going to fully treat all Mare Island sewage for cyanide and hexavalent chromium contamination using a permitted treatment facility or, if it didn't want to do that, when it planned to upgrade the Mare Island sewage system to meet the design requirements of a certified hazardous waste pipeline. There's no doubt the State of California knew that Mare Island sewage was actually also hazardous waste. What the Navy did was to ship all of the shipyard sewage, about 200,000 gallons per day, out of the State of California to a disposal facility in the State of Utah. The way this was done was to deliberately and falsely call the sewage "bilge water" or water from the bilges of ship. They did this because under California law there is a specific exemption for bilge water. This is that it must be manifested and shipped as hazardous waste inside California, but once it leaves the State it's no longer considered hazardous waste. Many railroad tank cars were used to ship all of the Mare Island sewage, falsely called bilge water, to a disposal facility in Utah that did not know it was sewage. At this facility all of the railroad cars were dumped into a huge lagoon that was allowed to stagnate in the desert sun. This sewage did what all sewage does when it's allowed to just sit, went rotten and began to give of huge amounts of hydrogen sulfide gas. This "rotten egg" gas is more toxic to human beings than the cyanide gas used in the prison gas chambers. The facility operators thought it was just bilge water which is basically clean fresh water with a little oil in it and were very surprised to find out it was actually raw sewage. The result was the disposal facility had to be abandoned, was severely damaged and the owners suffered huge financial losses and sued the Navy. The court ordered the Navy to turn over all of its hazardous waste manifest documents for all these thousands of railroad car loads. The Navy refused and replied with its usual "excessive and burdensome" routine. The many boxes full of these documents were cleverly hidden about 20 feet from where I worked and were never turned over. The story the Navy finally concocted would be funny if it wasn't such a huge lie. The facility operators were finally put off by being told the big lie that all of the water that had been shipped to them was actually bilge water, but it has been taken from a super secret spy submarine, and the sailors on that submarine routinely urinated into the bilges. So many rail cars were used to transport this sewage that the post closure activity at Mare Island took three years to clean all of the cars, certify them clean, and then disperse them throughout the United States.
The subject of this Memorandum of Understanding was a professional topic of mine while I was employed at Mare Island after it closed. I was asked to write sampling recommendations for the people who did the sampling and did so according to the specified Federal and State requirements. The first thing that happened after I turned this in was that I was made subject to a campaign of harassment, intimidation and entrapment schemes designed to put my employment in jeopardy. I was told by the sampling personnel that there was no way they were going to conduct sampling according to my "stupid s..t". My understanding of the matter at that time was that the U.S. Navy wanted Mare Island to be sampled dishonestly and in complete violation of applicable rules and regulations and were happy with the results that came from this policy.
Anyone who believes the U.S. Navy has changed its ways must also believe in the tooth fairy.
Abraham Lincoln once observed that the way the mind of a property owner works is that he does not question and only appreciates anything that will make his property more valuable no matter how adverse it may be to the property of others. We have to watch out for this perfectly human way of thinking when we use toxic chemicals because some of them are toxic enough to ruin the entire genetic heritage of the entire human race. I firmly believe hexavalent chromium is first and foremost among these.
I had an experience that demonstrated to me the kind of regulatory enforcement one can expect from the U.S. Department of Labor and doubtless OSHA and any other federal or state regulatory authority. This was during the time just prior to closure of the Shipyard. The Navy was actively destroying a building that was full of liquid mercury. A long time ago this building had served as the location where measuring instruments that used mercury had been serviced. The building was saturated with liquid mercury. As the building was being destroyed and torn apart from the inside pockets and pools of liquid mercury were being found inside the walls and underneath the floors. The Navy was naturally anxious to destroy this building because it would have been a huge problem for all the people who had worked in that building over the decades to find out they had been breathing harmful amounts of mercury vapor all of their working lives. This was a problem that had to be wiped out prior to the shipyard being closed and the Navy loosing a lot of control over the situation. The problem that developed was the working people who were doing the tearing down were beginning to freak out because it occurred to them that they were being exposed not only to mercury but to criminal liability for being ordered to simply throw highly mercury contaminated material into the dumpster's in violation of state and federal law. So someone called the Department of Labor anonymously to complain. The result was that a DOL Investigating Officer came to the Shipyard and convened a meeting at which I was present. He demanded to know just how anyone could demonstrate that the level of mercury that people were being exposed to inside that building and during its demolition exceeded federal standards. No one could demonstrate this because the Shipyard had conveniently conducted no sampling and kept no records. The DOL investigator left the meeting, went back to his comfy office in San Francisco and the end result was the supervisor of the closure of that building commenced to drive a fork lift through the walls of the building so that it eventually collapsed and was trucked off in pieces to the municipal dump in dumpster's I strongly suspect that this is how industrial users of chromic acid are being treated by the regulators. They are probably not sampling the output of their poorly maintained scrubbers and hence have no problems with the regulators.
This mercury adventure is, to my mind, a perfect example of Navy Environmental Stewardship, Navy Core Values in action, and the U.S. Navy scrupulously observing the regulatory compliance to regulations applicable to a severe human poison. I am sure they are doing much the same with hexavalent chromium these days. When the Navy has a serious poison problem it simply refuses to do its duty and collect samples and have them properly analyzed. If there are no samples there cannot possibly be any regulatory problems.
Regulatory enforcement is based upon sample analysis results. It is the legal duty of the abatement equipment (scrubber) operator to conduct sampling operations, pay for sample analysis (expensive) and maintain records. The craziness of the law is that it is the duty of the maker of the complaint to prove the regulatory non-compliance using sample data which cannot possibly be gotten from any other source than the abatement equipment operator. If the abatement equipment operator refuses to collect samples and have them analyzed or if he does this and destroys or hides the records it seems there is no recourse of any kind. Shortly before the Shipyard closed I filed a Grievance against the U.S. Navy for unsafe operation of the Building 225 metal plating shop. The local Occupational Safety and Health people responsible for sampling and record keeping promptly hid all of their records and refused to give them up to me as federal law required them to do. They all lied under oath and submitted false data during the arbitration hearing for this Grievance. I was unable to obtain any help from any federal agency to force the Navy to give up its sample results. The entire issue was just a huge black hole into which work disappeared and nothing came out.
You must watch out for Navy mouthpieces because they are very highly trained and extremely dangerous to listen to. The Navy spends a lot of money and time on them to make sure they are effective public speakers who can make convincing arguments out of pure wind very quickly. At Mare Island this person for environmental matters was the Assistant to the Director of the Occupational Health and Safety Office. Records that I was able to see before the Shipyard closed demonstrated that hundreds of thousands of dollars had been spent on grooming this person to be the perfect public spokesman. He was sent out for every kind of training in public speaking. He even became a Deacon of the Catholic Church and this certainly increased his intrinsic believability. And I have to say that he was so good at the BIG LIE it astounded me, which is a thing that doesn't happen often. His office was directly above my office. On the day when my analysis of all the available data convinced me that the scrubbers on the top of the Building 225 Metal Plating Shop were a big problem I went up to his office and confronted him about this to see how he would react. Here's how the conversation went
Then I walked out.
I was completely blown away by the ability of this man to instantaneously formulate such an elegantly expressed sophisticated big lie with absolutely no warning. Because he chose to lie to me at that instant you are reading this now. My plan, when I went up to his office, was to see how big of a fight it was going to be to get justice for the innocent people (victims) who had been secretly poisoned. I figured that if he sat down with me, showed me data, and convinced me my conclusions were incorrect it would be safe to drop the matter and go on with my life. But, if he engaged in any kind of evasion this would mean that I was right and should take things as far as they could go because the subject was mass murder on an unimaginable scale. The reason for this is very simple. Too many people at Mare Island have been poisoned. Many have been killed. Many more have had their health robbed from them by stealth. Children have been orphaned. Many have had their careers cut short prematurely. All of these victims have a statutory right under federal law to be paid and compensated for their work related injuries. By deliberately covering up all of this murder and maiming the U.S. Navy has effectively perpetrated an unimaginably huge mass robbery on top of its vicious assault on the bodies of the victims and mass murder. Having been put into a state of knowledge concerning all this it seemed simply logical to conclude that anyone who knew what I knew and who did nothing would be siding with the Murderer Robber U.S. Navy and would actually become a perpetrator having full liability in this world and the next for all the malice, injury, robbery and other crimes associated with this Crime Against Humanity.