THE DESTRUCTION OF SILVER LAKE

PHOTO BY GEORGE J. HILL, M.D.

HECKEL STREET POLLUTION: Residents of Heckel Street successfully suedThomas A. Edison, Inc., for the discharge of carbolic acid into a stream (nowcovered by Brook Street) that intersected Heckel Street just to the left of the houseon the left in the photo. The successful litigants in the 1916 case, Salvatore Crilloand Angelo D'Alessio, lived a few houses to the right.

The Death House

One of Edison's chemists tells how careless and disrespectful the Edisoncompany and its employees were regarding the health and safety of theimmigrant Italian families who lived near the Silver Lake Plant. As we shall see,some of William Hand's comments do not reflect well on his own performanceas an employee and as a manager, yet he is also harshly critical of Edison. Inassessing his credibility, therefore, I weighed all of his comments to determinewhether he was exaggerating or speculating. In this regard, I compared Hand'sremarks with the statements and written reports of others about Silver Lake.Although some of the scenes and situations he described are particularlyegregious, I concluded that Hand's comments are consistent with those of othersthat I have quoted in this section of Part II:

Silver Lake was divided into the primary battery works and theEdison Chemical Works which produced potash, phenol and things

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like that, and the organic chemical plant which produced theseso-called German chemicals, and then the fourth was the Edison plant

46that produced phonograph cabinets and things like that.

a contest, as a test -problem:

You start with carbolic acid, and formaldehyde in solution, in anautoclave .... In Silver Lake today there's probably hundreds of tons ofthis stuff which was taken out to the dumps all because they lostcontrol of the rate of reaction .... he couldn't get people to work on that

job because it was explosive, and if something gave way, they'd getkilled. Two investigators were killed on it. One tightened a flange andthe bolt split off. He had too long a handle on the wrench - he waskilled by the gas, phenol formaldehyde, coming out at great pressure.The other was sent to a sanitarium, about the same time.

So the;Chemical P-queue a bland chic-explosion _with all 1-child anidead.whole -_throue.

After summarizing Edison's operations at Silver Lake in general, and hisproduction of phenol in particular, Hand then delineated the chemical reactionsthat he supervised in 1926. This chemical operation was, we may say, awesome:

Hand clearly recognized the danger and environmental hazards of his work:

I actually had many explosions and I had found plastic overthree or four blocks of houses, in Silver Lake. My laboratory wasknown as Hand's Death House or Hand's Mad House. Now, the firstis obvious because people had been killed on it.... Now plastic would

fill up on the inside and block the pipes and the valves, and ... then itwould break through the froth and this glass like material would shootup a couple of hundred feet into the air, and then the wind would carryit over Silver Lake. And it caused an awful lot of trouble. Theinhabitants of Silver Lake were largely Italians on filled-in land, notnecessarily squatters, but when that solution with a lot of free

formaldehyde and phenol was blown over their area, they couldn'tstand it. They couldn't breathe.

As a senior employee and the responsible chemist in this laboratory, Handwas an important representative of the Edison Company at Silver Lake. But hewas also a brash young man, who thought it perfectly appropriate to have aderisory attitude toward the immigrants who lived near the plant. In this regard,Hand presumably reflected the attitude of Edison and other managers offactories at Silver Lake. In spite of his cavalier attitude regarding theenvironment and his neighbors, Hand seems not to have been surprised by theirresponses - fighting fire with fire, as it were. Hand looked at the entire issue as

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