Uranium Skies

by Gar Smith

Plane crash in Holland exposes a global health threat

Picture added by GLF

Winter '99/2000
Vol. 14, No. 4

Within minutes of clearing the runway at Amsterdam's Schi-phol airport at 6:25 PM, October 4, 1992, El Al flight LY1862 was in trouble. Engine #3 was not only on fire, it had broken free of the wing and taken engine #4 along with it. Ten minutes later, Captain Yitzhak Fuchs radioed his last message: "Going down, going down."

The 400-ton Boeing 747-200 careened into a block of 12-story tenements in Bijl-mer, on the outskirts of Amsterdam, killing all three crew, an unidentified "non-revenue passenger," and at least 43 people on the ground. The exact number of deaths remains unknown, since many of the incinerated victims were undocumented immigrants.

Seán MacCárthaigh, an Irish Times reporter who arrived shortly after the crash, described the scene: "The El Al plane had scythed through the top five stories of two buildings; about 40 flats took a direct hit. Then a huge fireball rolled through the complex and apartment after apartment popped into flames.... A giant cloud of choking white smoke engulfed the area."

Seven years later, the exact chemical composition of that choking white cloud remains a mystery. Since the crash, 850 Bijlmer survivors - residents, police and rescue workers - have sought treatment for a host of maladies including fatigue, breathing problems, hair loss, neurological ailments, mental confusion, depression, encephalomyelitis and disabling joint pains. They ascribe their ills to the crash.

As rescue crews rushed to the crash scene that night, El Al, Israeli and Dutch officials rushed to assure the public that the doomed flight carried nothing but "perfume and gift articles." El Al insisted that the plane carried "a regular commercial load." As late as April 22, 1998, Israeli Transport Minister Shaul Yahalom maintained that there were "no dangerous material on that plane. Israel has nothing to hide."

The denials collapsed on October 4, 1998, when the Dutch daily NRC Handelsblad printed a leaked copy of a page from the plane's cargo manifest. According to the previously secret freight document, Flight 1862 was hauling 10 tons of chemicals, including hydrofluoric acid, isopro-panol and dimethyl methylphosphonate (DMMP) - three of the four chemicals used in the production of sarin nerve gas.

The DMMP had been supplied by Solkatronic Chemicals Inc. of Morrisville, Pennsylvania. The shipment was destined for the Israeli Institute for Biological Research (IIBR) in Nes Ziona, outside of Tel Aviv.

While the export of DMMP is strictly controlled by the US government, the US Department of Commerce had no problem granting Solkatronic's license to ship DMMP. (In fact, after the initial shipment was consumed in the flames of the Bijlmer crash, the Commerce Department quickly authorized a replacement shipment.)

Mouin Rabbani, writing in Middle East International, describes the IIBR as "the Israeli military and intelligence community's front organization for the development, testing and production of chemical and biological weapons. It was IIBR that provided the poison (and the antidote) used in the attempted assassination of a Hamas leader in Jordan in 1998."

On October 4, 1998, a former IIBR biologist told the London Sunday Times: "There is hardly a single known or unknown form of chemical or biological weapon... which is not manufactured at the institute." The IIBR is so secretive that it does not appear on any maps and is off-limits even to members of the Knesset, Israel's Parliament.

Israel maintains that the chemicals were to be used to test gas masks but this explanation is puzzling since it only takes a few grams to conduct such tests. Once combined, the chemicals aboard Flight 1862 could have produced 270 kilos of sarin - sufficient to kill the entire population of a major world city.

Picture added by GLF

Pressing the Question

The Dutch dailies pursued the Bijl-mer story with a vengeance. Vincent Dekker, a reporter for De Trouw, interviewed dozens of Amsterdam police officers who claimed that they had been assisted by rescue specialists who arrived in cars bearing French license plates. But France never sent any rescue crews. Dekker noted that Israel's secret service, the Mossad, maintains an office in Paris. Mossad denied involvement.

There were 126 tons of freight aboard the doomed flight but El Al refused to supply information on 6 tons of "military" cargo. Schiphol cargo handlers told reporters that the plane had been loaded with seven pallets of "unspecified munitions."

Recent disclosures revealed that the disaster could have been much worse: Among some 83 tons of cargo off-loaded at Schiphol was a shipment of "oil industry" explosives.

The Dutch press raised a host of vexing questions: Why were the 12 hours of videotape made during the rescue and clean-up operation (42 cassettes in all) erased and shredded? Why were police audiotapes also run through the shredder? What happened to seized El Al documents that subsequently disappeared? Why had the cockpit voice recorder (CVR) mysteriously disappeared?

In January 1996, the US-based Flight Safety Foundation concluded that "the possibility has to be considered seriously that the CVR was stolen from the area."

Not-so-Depleted Uranium

In the months following the crash, the Dutch citizens' group Onderzoeksgrep Vliegramp Bijlmermeer revealed that, "in addition to the cocktail of toxic chemicals that came free during the disaster," traces of uranium, zirconium and lanthanum had turned up in soil samples taken from the crash site. More alarmingly, the OVB found traces of uranium in feces samples taken from survivors.

One year after the crash, the Laka Foundation, an independent Dutch nuclear research group, revealed that the El Al jet - like all Boeing 747s - carried 1,500 kg of depleted uranium (DU) onboard in the form of cadmium-clad counterweights hidden in the aircraft's tail fins, horizontal stabilizers and wings.

Depleted uranium is an extremely dense metallic by-product of the production of U235, the fissionable uranium isotope used to manufacture nuclear weapons and fuel. Despite its name, DU contains residual amounts of radioactive U235, along with less radioactive U238 and trace amounts of U236.

The journal of the American Society for Metals explains that DU counterweights "are used in the aerodynamic controls of planes, rockets and helicopters to maintain the aircraft's center of gravity... in many civil and military aircraft."

"For many years," reads a December 20, 1984 Boeing document uncovered by Dutch investigators, "aircraft manufacturers have used 'depleted' uranium to balance ailerons, rudders, and elevators on certain jet aircraft and rotor blades on certain helicopters."

The document acknowledges that swallowing or breathing DU dust can cause "a significant and long-lasting irradiation of internal tissue." DU has been implicated as a cause of Gulf War Symptom - a series of physical and mental debilities remarkably similar to the symptoms reported by the Bijlmer survivors.

DU counterweights are manufactured by Nuclear Metals, Inc. Nuclear Metals (which became the Starmet Corporation in 1997) claims to be "one of the leading suppliers of low-cost DU ammunition for US government weapons systems" and boasts that it maintains "the only FAA approved facility for the repair and refurbishing of DU aircraft counterweights." (Starmet's facility in West Concord, Pennsylvania is a toxic superfund site involved in a $6.5 million effort to remove 28 years worth of radioactive sludge containing 175 tons of DU.)

While DU does not burn readily, Starmet admits that its wing and tail-fin counterweights could "oxidize rapidly in a long-lasting fire" at temperatures above 500 C.

Batelle Laboratory experiments have shown that DU begins to oxidize at temperatures as low as 350 C. Above temperatures of 700 C, DU begins to burn on its own. Batelle estimated that an hour-long fire could vaporize from 4 to 20 percent of the DU and that, with the kind of "heavy turbulence" associated with larger fires, incineration losses could reach 30 percent. The kerosene-fueled inferno at Bijlmer reached temperatures around 1100-1400 C.

In an article in Nature, physicist Robert L. Parker estimated that a worst-case 747 crash could expose 250,000 people to health risks from inhaling uranium oxide particles.

When a long-awaited Dutch government report assured the public that the counterweights had remained intact and never posed a threat to health, the Laka Foundation went public with its findings that only 163 kg of the 430 kg of depleted uranium aboard the downed 747 had been recovered. Laka's stunning disclosure helped to trigger the demand for a full Dutch Parliamentary inquiry.

The Bijlmer Hearings

The Bijlmer hearings were chaired by Christian Democratic opposition deputy Theo Meijer. Carried live on Dutch public television, they transfixed viewers, who likened the weekly series to The X-Files. The emotional impact of the broadcasts was so intense that Dutch TV began flashing a special number viewers could call if they felt they needed psychological counseling.

The committee discovered that every Sunday evening a mysterious El Al cargo flight routinely touched down at Schiphol en route from New York to Tel Aviv. These flights were never displayed on the airport arrival monitors and the documentation for the flights was processed in a special, unmarked room. Unlike other Israel-bound flights, the cargo on these flights was not subjected to tests in a buried vacuum bunker (designed to trigger bombs set to explode at high altitudes).

On January 29, 1999, Dutch Attorney General Vrakking testified that the El Al security detachment at Schiphol was a branch of Mossad.

On February 5, a Dutch Air Guidance Organization employee told the hearing that the "policy" since 1973 was to keep quiet about all El Al activities. Schiphol workers testified that El Al planes were never inspected by customs or the Dutch Flight Safety Board.

Two technical maintenance officers told the committee that their supervisors sometimes ordered them to clear El Al flights for take-off when they were not comfortable that it was safe to do so. They testified that the 25-page maintenance sheet for Flight 1862 was filled with numerous "carry-over items" that had not been corrected.

The Dutch press reported that security officials had been waving Israeli air cargo through Schiphol since the 1950s. While shipping the kinds of chemicals aboard LY1862 ordinarily would be a violation of the Chemical Weapons Treaty (which the US has signed), sending cargo jets to commercial airfields for refueling (rather than to a NATO airfield) apparently circumvents the Atlantic Alliance's military treaties.

"Schiphol has become a hub for secret weapons transfers," charged Henk van der Belt, an investigator working on behalf of the Bijlmer survivors. "Dutch authorities have no jurisdiction over Israeli activities at the airport."

A Televisieproduktie Amsterdam (TVA) report identified Schiphol as one of several European airports that allows El Al to transfer cargo without supervision. TVA claimed that Belgian politicians now fear that "a disaster like the crash in Holland in 1992 is possible at [Belgium's] Zaaventem. This airport is, like Schiphol, under control by the secret police of Israel."

Secret Tapes Show Cover-Up

In February, the Meijer committee uncovered secret tapes of phone conversations between El Al and Schiphol Air Traffic Control (SATC). On these tapes (recorded within minutes of the crash and hidden in a safe for more than six years), an El Al employee warns: "There is poison on board: ammunition and flammable liquids." In reply, SATC personnel are heard promising: "We will keep these things under the lid."

The lid remained sealed as Dutch authorities ordered workers to clean up the contaminated area without benefit of protective clothing. The cover-up was so complete that even the Netherlands' Queen Beatrix was not informed of the danger. Unaware of the risks, she was allowed to undertake a "sympathy visit" to the impact site the day after the crash.

For six years, Dutch officials had claimed that the flight carried only "video-record-ers, flowers and perfume." Shortly after the hidden tapes surfaced, Prime Minister Wim Kok suspended three SATC employees for withholding information and several ministers were threatened with firing. On, February 18, Israel finally agreed to hand over top-secret information on the 20 tons of "missing" cargo aboard the El Al jet. (Ironically, only one week earlier, Israel authorities had told Dutch investigators that "the papers are probably destroyed.")

Meijer's 2,000-page report, released on April 22, concluded that there was "a direct link between health complaints and the Bijlmer disaster" and accused the health and transport ministers of providing "unclear, incomplete, late or incorrect information."

The Meijer report also blasted Israel's cover-up as "incomprehensible," especially "given the public concern in the Netherlands over the past six-and-a-half years, the requests for cooperation at a high diplomatic level and the bond of friendship between the Netherlands and Israel."

Hazmat on the Horizon

Seven years after the deadly crash, Robert Jan van den Berg of the Laka Foundation's Bijlmer Project informs the Journal that "El Al is still flying the same routes." Despite calls for greater controls, the public still has little idea of what kinds of cargoes are passing overhead - a matter of mounting concern since the Geneva-based International Air Transport Association (IATA) expects air freight shipments to increase "at an average rate of 5.3 percent per annum between 1998-2002." Air cargo loads are expected to increase 5.7 percent in North America and 7.9 percent in Central America - nearly double the anticipated traffic in Europe's busy air corridors.

Because regulations for carrying hazardous materials ("hazmat") are more stringent for passenger jets, dangerous goods increasingly are being shipped via less-regulated air-cargo jets. Currently, the only source of information on a plane's cargo is the pilot notification (NOTOC) form carried aboard the plane but, as Air Cargo World magazine observes, this is "hardly the best spot for details while the plane itself may be burning."

The National Transport Safety Bureau (NTSB) recommended that carriers "provide consolidated, specific information about the identity" of hazardous cargo "within two years." In the meantime, the NTSB admits that even these regulations won't address the greatest risk in the $143 billion-a-year air-cargo industry - the shipment of "hidden" cargo.

"Transportation of undeclared hazardous materials on airplanes remains a significant problem," the NTSB warns. According to the IATA, nearly 26 million tons of air cargo were shipped in 1997. While hazardous materials comprised a significant portion of that cargo, no one knows how much "hidden" hazmat the world's air freighters carry.

For many carriers, keeping the wraps on one's cargo is tantamount to a First Amendment right. Air Cargo World notes that FedEx opposes reporting "undeclared" goods because "questions about shipment contents will infringe on customers' privacy rights and place an unreasonable burden on carriers." (The undeclared goods aboard a FedEx DC-10 that crashed in New York in 1996 included several bags of marijuana.)

The IATA has established global rules for the air shipment of dangerous goods but, until recently, compliance with these regulations has been voluntary. In 1998, compliance was made mandatory but the US Department of Transportation has created a loophole that allows carriers to receive an exemption from the IATA's safety rules.

With more hazmat traversing the skies, it's only a matter of time before another Bijlmer crash occurs. And, statistically, the next crash most likely will occur in the heavily-trafficked corridors of Europe, Central America or the US.

Gar Smith is the editor-in-chief of Earth Island Journal.

RADIOACTIVE CRASH SITES AROUND THE WORLD

Neither the Federal Aviation Administration nor the major aircraft manufacturers publish information about which planes and helicopters contain DU components. As one industry insider told the Journal, "No one brags about DU."

The Starmet Corp. website, however, states that "wide-body aircraft such as the Boeing 747, Lockheed L-1011, McDonnell Douglas DC-10 and Lockheed military C-130 all require the use of counter-balance weights for proper flight control."

DU weights have been installed on more than 1,600 jumbo jets operated by all major world airlines, including: TWA, United, Delta, Continental, Pan Am, Northwest, American, Air Canada, Lufthansa, Air France, Alitalia, BOAC, British Airways, Qantas, Air China, SAS and Swissair.

Since Boeing 747s were first deployed in 1968, 27 of the superjets have crashed. Several of these accidents, may have left crashsites contaminated with dangerous residues of incinerated DU.

The danger may have begun as early as 1974, when a Lufthansa jet crashed and burned at take-off in Nairobi, Kenya.

In 1977, two 747s burned in a horrendous landingstrip collision on the Spanish island of Tenerife. The Pan Am airliner blown out of the skies by a terrorist bomb over Scotland in 1988 may also have rained DU on the residents of Lockerbie.

Between 1991 and 1993, three 747s crashed after pylon-mounted engines fell off. One was the jet that crashed into Biljmer. The other incidents included a China Airlines jet that crashed in Wanli, Taiwan and a Japan Airlines jet that crashed in Anchorage.

On December 20, 1995, a Tower Air 747 crashed at JFK International. On July 17, 1996 a TWA 747 crashed shortly after take-off in New York. In 1997, a Korean Air Lines 747 crashed in Guam.

Between 1980 and 1997, two DU-equipped Lockheed L-1011s have crashed - in the Arabian Gulf and Malaga, Spain. In the same period, seven DC-10s have gone down - in Spain, Libya, Portugal, New York, Dallas, Boston and Iowa.

The airline industry, aware of the "stigma" of DU, has been quietly replacing the aging radioactive counterweights with equally dense but more expensive tungsten.

In light of the Journal's findings about the health hazards of on-board DU, the Environmental Protection Agency would be well advised to revisit all past 747 crashsites and test both the crashsite environment and the local residents for possible DU contamination.

Epidemiological studies of the neighborhoods surrounding crashsites would also be advisable. - GS

On the 4th of October 1992, an Israeli El Al cargo plane, flight 1862 (a Boeing 747-200F), crashed into a 12-story apartment block in the Amsterdam suburb of Bijlmer. At least thirty nine people on the ground, and all four people aboard the aircraft, were killed. During the following months, some eight to nine hundred people, including local residents and rescue workers, complained of health problems. For years, Israel and friends put pressure on the Dutch government to hush up details of the crash, especially, the contents of the cargo. However, in October 1998, Avner Yarkoni, a senior officer with El Al, revealed that the downed aircraft contained barrels of dimethyl methylphosphonate and the government was finally forced to set up a committee to investigate. It was eventually determined that the health problems were due to the airline illegally carrying dangerous chemicals, and a large quantity of depleted uranium, from the United States to Israel. It is worth noting, that among the 10 tonnes of chemicals aboard the plane, were hydrofluoric acid, isopropanol and the dimethyl methylphosphonate mentioned above, three of the four components needed for the manufacture of the lethal nerve gas Sarin.

As to the crash, it was determined that it was caused by the loss of both jet engines from the right wing, which made the aircraft difficult, and in the end, impossible to handle. The following is a photo of the El Al flight.