It's Been Awhile; Some History

Luckily, the museum had a very busy summer, and the museum has a really busy winter planned. It still isn't any excuse to not check in with some random history stories.

One of my first stories will be about the environment and sawmills. An author contacted the museum to ask about the environmental impact of sawmills on the environment.

Not surprisingly, you won't find too many ex-sawmills in the Midwest labeled as Brownfield sites. In the West though, you will find that the sawmills have left their mark on the land in more ways than just barren forests (or in the more modern case, an engineered forest).

The impact of sawmills come from two main sources, the organic byproduct of sawmills and then the chemicals used to treat wood. So why won't you see too many sawmills in the Midwest labeled as environmental wastelands? Well our timeline. Remember that the logging of the Northwoods and Clinton's reign as a lumber capital was mostly in the late 19th century. So you can bet that the waste caused much damaged on the environment up and down the river. In fact, a future article will touch on this. But with time, it seems that environment has adapted with time.

The biggest reason you don't see a plethora of Brownfield sites, or lesser sites that are considered contaminated, was because the largest impact on the environment came from early wood treatment chemicals. Pentachlorophenol (PCP) and other chemicals were largely invented, or used widely, in the 1930's.

What's amazing about the impact sawmills had on the environment is how incremental it all was. All points of contamination: The leaking oil. The hydraulic fluids. The building pile of bark and sawdust. Then the dripping of PCPs off the wood as the dunked lumber went from tank of preservatives to the kiln. Most wood was either dunked in vats of fungicides or sprayed. You can imagine the urge keep up with the pace of a working mill. Then the kiln would dry the wood but evaporate more of the PCPs.


The result was over the years, chemicals infiltrated the waterways, infected fish and got into the drinking water. As a future post will show, it wasn't as if Clinton's sawmills left the environment untouched. We just see though that during the WWI-1970's time period, there were many chemicals used in the process that over years, turned the waterways and soil into a contamination zone.

Now the author who contacted the museum just wanted to know some background information to make a juicy plot point.







Sources:

http://yosemite.epa.gov/r9/sfund/r9sfdocw.nsf/86ca16814d20532b88256f0000092935/6b12e009c5be470f882570070063c2ec/$FILE/McN&P8_00.pdf

http://www.mfe.govt.nz/publications/hazardous/assessment-dioxin-contamination-sawmill-sites-2008-10/assessment-dioxin-contamination-sawmill-sites-2008-10.pdf

http://idosi.org/wjz/wjz1(2)2006/5.pdf

http://www.ecorights.org/mill_sites/mill_toppage.htm