Engineer and Environment

Chapter 9 Engineers and the Environment

1

In this chapter

Three engineering codes on engineering and environment. Reserved attitude of engineering codes towards environmental issues. Lack of consensus on how to implement protection of the environment. Environmental laws. How to define ‘clean’. How to set the criteria? Trade-off between development and environmental protection. The Degree-of-Harm Criterion. Philosophy of Environmental Ethics. Professional obligations of engineers. Minimalist Standpoint and Organizational Disobedience related to environmental issues. 2

Aberdeen is a US Army facility where, among other things, chemical weapons are developed. The US Army has used the Aberdeen Proving Ground to develop, test, store, and dispose of chemical weapons since World War II. Periodic inspections between 1983 and 1986 revealed serious problems at the facility, known as the Pilot Plant, where these engineers worked. These problems included:

Flammable and cancer-causing substances left in the open. Chemicals that become lethal if mixed were kept in the same room. Drums of toxic substances were leaking. There were chemicals everywhere — misplaced, unlabeled, or poorly contained. When part of the roof collapsed, smashing several chemical drums stored below, no one cleaned up or moved the spilled substance and broken containers for weeks.

When an external sulfuric acid tank leaked 200 gallons of acid into a nearby river, state and federal investigators arrived and discovered that the chemical retaining dikes were unfit, and the system designed to contain and treat hazardous chemicals was corroded and leaking chemicals into the ground.

3

On June 28, 1988, the three chemical engineers, Carl Gepp, William Dee, and Robert Lentz, now known as the "Aberdeen Three," were criminally indicted for storing, treating, and disposing of hazardous wastes in violation of RCRA at the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland after about two years of investigation....