At the comments section at Lost Nomads again I went looking for an article for a reader I had lost track. The article was about Korean lumber companies dumping tons of fromaldehyde into the Han as runoff from their treatment of timber.

I found the article here.

My memory was a little faulty. I thought the chemical they used was concentrated fromaldehyde, but it was not. I also thought the companies were fined for years before some owners were finally arrested. It isn't clear if they were fined first or not, but it did say the dumping had been going on for 3 years.

Regardless --- the case still stands out big time as a sign of the hypocrisy.

A US base worker orders the dumping of 20 gallons of fromaldehyde into the sewer system, which was treated 3 or 4 times before it touched the Han, and Korean society goes batshit from top to bottom - and they kept at it for a few months - and they kept the case in the courts and thus reminding newspaper readers a couple of times a year about it until 2005. And that case is still one of the cornerstones in Korean thought of how USFK is a cancer on Korean society. And the success at sticking it to the US in Korea over that specific dumping case has made The Environment one of the best tools in the anti-US civic group arsenal.

But, Korean companies a couple years later are found to have been sending TONS of the stuff directly into the tributary streams and river, and the society hardly makes a peep. It is just another pollution story. Ho-hum.

From the editorial on the timber companies:

It is shocking news that 29 timber companies were found to have released 271 tons of formalin over the past three years into streams feeding the Han River, the main source of drinking water for Seoul and Kyonggi Province.

Formalin is basically a watered-down version of the highly toxic formaldehyde.

As a result of the investigation, the prosecution has arrested the owners of 15 firms for dumping more than 6,000 liters of formalin each. In addition, 16 suppliers of the toxic solution were indicted without physical detention.

The prosecution said that most of the foreign workers at the timber firms quit their jobs after less than one month because of the nauseating smell of the chemical and the fear of being poisoned.