THE RUSTING CANS OF MERCURY

After WWII, tens of thousands of US troops occupied Japan’s largest cities. During their assignments they seized or bought countless souvenirs and mementos. Large mercury-based weather instruments (barometers and thermometers) were very popular. When their tours of duty ended, the soldiers returned to the US via troopships. 

On at least one long and uneventful seaborne journey home, bored soldiers on at least one troopship opened those weather instruments to play with the liquid metal inside. A participant (with whom Mr Egan met at a Smithsonian Institution function in the 1990s) reported how he and his shipmates, while in their below-deck bunks, spent hours watching large pools of mercury slosh around the deck in unison with the ship’s movements. Before reaching a US West Coast port, officers ordered all mercury to be collected by the sailors and poured into cans, which were later trucked to the local city dump and jettisoned. 

That troopship’s discarded cans have steadily corroded, and for over half a century their highly toxic contents have leached into groundwater and adjacent waterways. Since 1950, many hundreds of thousands of people (including pregnant women) in communities ‘downstream’ of that mercury-seeping dumpsite have unknowingly consumed neurotoxin-tainted shellfish and fish species caught in the region’s river and ocean ecosystems. One such prime indicator species was featured here.

This man-made crisis is technologically solvable. Excavating the dump site and removing the mercury deposits will rapidly reduce this invisible source of poisoning of countless people and aquatic species. Site excavation, toxin pinpointing, mitigation measures, and technical monitoring will require major funding from Federal and State programs.

Superb documentary film subject, plus multiple episodes in the AR series.