← Witness History
Witness History
Seveso Disaster
00:10:12
On the afternoon of 10 July 1976, there was an explosion at the ICMESA chemical factory near Seveso, in northern Italy.A cloud containing a poisonous gas called dioxin spread over the town. For days, residents didn't realise they were in danger.They...
Loading summary
Transcript35 lines
- [00:05]
A
Hi, this is Witness History from the BBC World Service with me, Rachel Naylor. If you're a regular listener, you have great taste. You can skip the next few seconds, but if you're new here, welcome. I'd just like to tell you a bit more about us. We're the podcast that brings history to life by hearing from those who are there. Episodes are only nine minutes and they come out every weekday. If that sounds like something you'd like to listen to, why not hit subscribe and turn your push notifications on. Today, I'm taking you back 50 years to the Severso disaster. An explosion at a chemical factory in Italy. More than 220,000 people were put under medical surveillance and thousands of animals were slaughtered to prevent the chemicals from entering the food chain. I've been speaking to a counsellor who helped coordinate the aftermath. It's 12:37pm on the 10th of July, 1976. A white cloud of poisonous gas is being released over Severso in northern Italy due to an accident at a nearby chemical plant. And the worst part, no one in the town has any idea.
- [01:11]
B
There weren't many people around. Most businesses were shut for the summer.
- [01:17]
A
That's Giuseppe Cassina, a Seviso councillor. He's off to a friend's wedding. There's people picnicking outside. Everyone's enjoying the summer break. But that's all about to change at the Igmesa factory, which makes chemicals for disinfectants and herbicides. In nearby Maida, a safety feature on a reactor has ruptured. There's a whistling sound and a cloud of vapor containing a highly toxic substance called dioxin is released into the air for about 20 minutes, covering an area of 18 square kilometers.
- [01:48]
C
The dilemma facing the Italian authorities is unique. Never before has a populated area been contaminated like this. At first, local people thought the poisonous vapor was no more than the everyday pollution they're used to.
- [02:02]
B
Life that day carried on as normal. We had no reason to be alarmed. There was no evidence to suggest otherwise. Next to the factory, there were fields used by local farmers to grow crops. And because it was July, it was warm, so all the families that lived there were eating lunch outside. So after the explosion, a cloud of dust settled on the fields, including the tables set by families and the children who were playing outside.
- [02:31]
A
But no one is concerned. It's just a bit of dust. In fact, the public still don't know about their exposure to dioxin. Three days later, Giuseppe went to his weekly Tuesday council meeting in high spirits.
- [02:46]
B
I showed up with Pastry and prosecco, because my eldest son had been born the day before. None of us knew about the factory. So in the meeting we celebrated the birth of my son and didn't even discuss the explosion.
- [02:59]
A
But Giuseppe had always had concerns about the factory.
- [03:04]
B
I was half joking because I'd raced this with the mayor several times before and said to him, if you're meeting the management of the factory, can you ask them about dumping dirt waste in the stream and polluting it? He answered me very yes, yes, right.
- [03:22]
D
It was not until six days after the accident that the Ikmesa factory closed down, and then only at the workers insistence. And it was not until eight days had passed that the owners, Givaudin, a subsidiary of the giant multinational drug company Hoffman Laroche, admitted that the gas contained four and a half pounds of dioxin, a byproduct of herbicide manufacture and one of the deadliest poisons known to man.
- [03:47]
A
How did you feel when you found out and you had a newborn son?
- [03:53]
B
Well, I was certainly concerned. My son and my wife moved away for two months and he didn't come home to server. So until it was safe, nobody had heard of dioxin before.
- [04:07]
D
A further week passed before anyone decided that evacuations were necessary or that people should be warned not to eat or sell their vegetables, as they had been doing for the past fortnight. Only after three weeks, when cattle began to die and children began to show signs of the appalling skin disease known as caracne, did it begin to sink in that a disaster had happened.
- [04:30]
B
The children who had been playing outside showed symptoms of chlorocne and boils. It was the first warning sign. The second was the death of birds. There were dead birds on the street. It was very unusual.
- [04:44]
A
Residents also developed nausea, headaches, eye irritation, and 19 children were admitted to local hospitals with skin lesions.
- [04:54]
D
Almost immediately, the officials of the Lombardy Regional Authority began to minimize its significance as much as possible. Only the few hundred people nearest the factory were to be evacuated and they were to be allowed to take their polluted possessions with them.
- [05:10]
B
The first evacuation concerned a rather large area, but not many buildings. The family had been notified that they had to abandon everything by 12pm I went with the police and soldiers to knock on the door and tell them it was time to leave. What did we find? We found families that were quietly having lunch as if it was the last supper.
- [05:34]
D
In Zone B, further away, pregnant women should leave and children stay out, but only during the day. And a motorway, which ran right through the poisoned area, remained wide Open.
- [05:47]
B
The second evacuation was more difficult because there were more families and they were sent very far away from Sevso to a motel near the motorway, about 40 km away. These families were severely tested because they found themselves away from home, with no space or garden, in hotel rooms for several months. It really affected them psychologically.
- [06:11]
C
There's an eerie, sinister atmosphere in the contaminated area near the chemical plant. The streets and houses are empty. Police and army patrols work only for short spells to reduce the risk to their health. The invisible poison has withered trees and plant life, killed a cow, rabbits and chickens. Many cats have been stricken. As the full health threat becomes apparent, workmen erect barriers around the 170 acre zone.
- [06:35]
E
Dioxin stays dangerously in the topsoil for up to 14 years. There are still locals who resent the publicity and the army presence. Lives in this small industrial fringe community have been shattered by an invisible enemy.
- [06:49]
A
Meanwhile, despite abortion being illegal in Italy, the government specifically permitted them. For the 600 pregnant women affected by the disaster, 26 were performed. According to the British Health and Safety Executive. A later study found no evidence of increased birth defects due to exposure to dioxin. But the data set was too small to rule out a small risk. Twelve months after the disaster, many families remained displaced.
- [07:15]
D
A market garden town stripped of its soil, surrounded by troops and 10 foot fences, and overshadowed by a heap of poison, which no one is quite sure what to do with.
- [07:25]
E
Something like 3,000 local animals have died. Tens of thousands have been slaughtered. This unlovely but inoffensive township is doomed, its prosperity gone, its products shunned by the rest of Italy.
- [07:38]
B
The immediate negative impact was the blocking of all productive activity. In Serveso, it was known for its woodwork and furniture making. But because of the dioxin, almost all the holders from around the country and abroad stopped because they suspected that the wood products were polluted.
- [07:58]
A
Long term health side effects for those exposed to dioxin included decreased fertility and increased risk for cancers. But the disaster did lead to stronger industry regulation. In 1982, the European Union adopted the Seviso Directive, a law aimed at improving the safety of sites containing large quantities of dangerous substances. Roche paid out an estimated $168 million in damages. In 1983, four former employees were found guilty of willful failure to prevent the explosion and a fifth was found guilty of involuntary negligence. They were sentenced to between two and a half to five years in prison, but three were later acquitted after appealing back in Sevisso, the contaminated area was made into a park known as Bosco delle Cuerche or Oak Forest. The houses which once stood there have been demolished and are buried beneath its small hills and two tunnels alongside the remains of 80,000 animals.
- [08:55]
B
I could gladly show you the system for storing the polluting material. We had people come from Sweden to learn how we store it, and thanks to Oak Forest, the phone has returned there. Life has returned to the environment.
- [09:11]
A
Giuseppe Cassina went on to be mayor of seviso in the 1980s. He was speaking to me, Rachel Naylor for Witness History from the BBC World Service. If you'd like to hear more stories about industrial accidents, search for our episodes about the cleanup of Chernobyl. Or we also have one about the Bhopal gas disaster in India in 1984. But before you go check those out, please leave us a review wherever you can and make sure you hit subscribe thanks for listening.
- [09:39]
B
We did something that no one else had ever done. There was such a excitement and energy about this moment.
- [09:46]
E
It opened the door for everything that rapidly followed.
- [09:48]
A
Witness History.
- [09:50]
E
History as told by the people who were there. I was walking in space, the first man ever to do so. I felt almost insignificant, like a tiny
- [10:00]
A
ant compared to the immensity of the universe.
- [10:03]
D
Witness History from the BBC World Service.
- [10:06]
A
Listen now. Search for Witness History wherever you get your BBC podcasts.