BY INGE HINNEMO
STOCKHOLM, Sweden - "First they took our water. Then they injected poison into the hill. There are no words hard enough for devils ravaging like that," dairy farmer Gosta Gustavsson told the daily Dagens Nyheter, describing the effects of a railway tunnel being built through the small mountain Hallandsasen on the Bjare peninsula in southern Sweden. The environmental disaster has sparked protests of up to 5,000 people.

The project became a public scandal in early October when another farmer's cows were paralyzed by highly poisonous acrylamide in water being pumped out of the tunnel project. Meanwhile, it was reported that the 150 workers building the tunnel had been exposed to levels of acrylamid in the air 10 times those considered safe.

Acrylamide and methylolacrylamide, another toxin, are components of Rhoca-Gil, a substance used to seal the tunnel walls from leaking water. A representative of the French chemical company Rhone-Poulenc "convinced us that the mixture was totally harmless," construction worker Peter Carlsson told Dagens Nyheter. "It wouldn't be harmful to the environment, and we would absolutely not need any protective mask working with it, just gloves and oilskin clothes. She asserted that you are exposed to greater risks if you put too much salt on your food."

Carlsson is one of the workers who injected Rhoca-Gil into the tunnel walls. Like many of his co-workers, he has symptoms of being poisoned: smarting pain on the skin, a prickling sensation in the legs, dizziness, and nausea. Twenty of the 77 workers examined showed signs of damage to their nervous systems. So far only 10 workers have been tested with blood samples. Of these, the tests from seven workers who were exposed to Rhoca-Gil contained levels of acrylamide 100 times higher than the tests from three workers not exposed. Besides hurting the nervous system, acrylamide can cause cancer and genetic damage.

According to the farmers organization LRF, the water supplies of five full-time farmers and about 20 part-time growers are directly affected by toxins from the tunnel. But products from the whole Bjare area has become unsalable.

Hundreds of people demonstrated October 5 demanding that construction on the tunnel be stopped. The company halted work on the project October 7.

About 5,000 people marched from the small town of Bastad October 12 to the northern end of the planned tunnel. Bastad and the surrounding area have only 3,000 inhabitants. Some of the demonstrators came from the larger city of Helsingborg, where excavated earth from the tunnel had been dumped close to a water reserve. The same day 30 farmers blocked roads to stop an attempt to return this earth to the building site.

The tunnel is being built by the Swedish firm Skanska for the state organization Banverket. It is intended to allow the use of trains with 30 percent greater weight. Together with having two tracks instead of one, this would make the railroad more competitive in meeting the needs of industries that have adopted "just in-time" production systems as part of cost- cutting measures.

The difficulties in building a tunnel through Hallandsasen were well known before the project was started in 1993. A first attempt to drill through the mountain was made by a subsidiary of the state-owned Vattenfall company. Using a machine 150 meters long, the project progressed only 20 meters in two months.

In 1996 Skanska started to dig the tunnel from both ends. They also dug a tunnel straight down from the ridge of the mountain, causing several wells to go dry. Skanska had to pay damages and drill new wells -which are now poisoned. Last February, the board of Banverket decided to use Rhoca-Gil as a way to solve the problem of ground water leaking into the tunnel. But the water flow didn't allow the injected substance to harden properly as some of it leaked back into the tunnel, and was pumped out into the surrounding area.

Banverket and the Swedish government have promised to fully compensate those directly affected by the poison. But they refuse to make any promises to growers who lose income because they cannot sell their products.

The scandal is a big embarrassment to Swedish capitalists and government, who claim to have a good record on environmental protection. The front page of daily Svenska Dagbladet October 19 ran the headline "An Untimely Environmental Scandal." The article asserted, "This affair is untimely and not at all representative."

Inge Hinnemo is a member of the metalworkers union.  
 
 
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