Friday, December 19, 2014

Ye Olde Toxic Waste Disposal, 1947

In January 1947 the War Assets Administration dumped a trainload of metallic sodium into Washington's Lake Lenore. This is why we can't have nice things:


1 comment:

Clayton Hanson said...

This is quite bad but Lake Lenore was chosen precisely because it was already alkaline. So the greater ecological impact was probably less from very slightly increasing the pH and more from disrupting the trophic layers of the lake through a bunch of exothermic reactions (those explosions).