TOXICITIES - PART 4We're All Fucked!
PHOTOS AND TEXT BY VICE STAFF
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HEMWEGCENTRALE
People in Amsterdam are very concerned about buildings that block their view (“horizon pollution,” they call it). However, they don’t often worry about the 176-foot-tall, continually smoking exhaust pipe of the Hemwegcentrale factory. Every year it releases 4.2 million tons of carbon dioxide, 4,000 tons of nitrogen oxide, and over 40 micrograms of some fucked-up particle matter that causes lung disease. And the water that cools the ever-burning toxic flames is dumped warm into the North Sea Canal, killing everything in the vicinity.
This is Amsterdam, so if there is a factory releasing cancer into the air and death into the water, there will be a community of broken bohemians squatting in its shadow and calling it Hedonia. The people of Hedonia live in shacks, eat garbage, and bathe in wastewater. One of the inhabitants, Ardje, told Vice, “You can’t drink the water, but it’s nice and warm!”
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Oostergasfabriek: The former site of a gas plant is now home to a suburb and a pet asylum. The residents complain of nausea and respiratory diseases. The pooches complain that they’re in an asylum.
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D’Oude Raai: People who live near this company’s cell-phone antennae have blamed them for persistent coughs, nausea, chronic fatigue, and cancer. |
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Houthaven: The site of 300 years of unmonitored industrial construction, this harbor is so polluted that you can get fined for digging into the ground a meter deep and throwing the earth in the air.
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That’s nice, Ardje, you fucking retarded Dutch squatter hippie. Get your bath there. Nice and clean. All sparklin’. We’re going to gay Paree.
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TOUR MONTPARNASSE
The Tour Montparnasse is the second-tallest building in Paris. It’s filled with offices, stores, tourists, restaurants, and asbestos. Serge Jullineau, president of the Agence des Risques de la Santé, says, “Cancers related to asbestos are hard to trace, so it’s hard to convince 5,000 people to clear out of the building.”
A Montparnasse security guard pointed to the ceiling and said, “It’s everywhere. But I’ve been here for 25 years, and it’s never been a problem.” Some computer engineers said they hadn’t been aware of the asbestos in the building, but they didn’t really care. We told them it only takes ONE asbestos fiber piercing your throat to get cancer. Just one! A bartender overheard and said, “Bof, there’s been asbestos in this place for at least 40 years.”
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| Lead paint in la Goutte d’Or: Thirty percent of all Paris’s lead-poisoning cases come from 200 lead-paint-slathered buildings in the Goutte d’Or. This is one of them. |
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The Seine: Paris’s water-purification plant dumped 80,000 cubic meters of untreated water (sewage) a day into the Seine for a month last year. They wanted to do it for six months, but the Green Party convinced them to take it easy.
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Air: Get up into some tall building and look down. You can see the smog from above. It’s a pretty shade of orange, like LA’s. |
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Sacre bleu! “People still live here, so I guess there’s no problem”? We’re going down under, where the water is blue and the accents are… tolerable.
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TO BE CONTINUED:
TOXICITIES... | 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | Next>
 Anonymous, on Nov 2, 2008 wrote:
there is such a high frequency of homosexuality among males in hamilton, then it gets balanced out with BET on basic cable, its a fucked social sistuation. i’ve lived it my whole life, i can’t leave the house because of it. | | |
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