Liberty Aircraft

And like California, New York had its spectacular groundwater contamination. During the war, wells near two aircraft plants on Long Island were closed when they were polluted with chromium. The two factories discovered their problems in very different ways. At Liberty Aircraft, county health officials who observed chromium wastes poured into a pit took the precaution of testing a nearby private well. The well was closed when its water was found to contain ioo parts per billion of chromium. But the second case, one year later, was detected only when workers at a Grumman Aircraft plant in Bethpage noticed yellow water in their drinking fountains. 

New York City, which drew some of its water supply from a point three and a half miles to the south, installed seven shallow test wells near Liberty Aircraft in 1945 and initially found no contamination. When the war ended, further investigations began, with dozens of new monitoring wells installed. In 1948, chromium was detected in three of the city test wells near Liberty, and a plume of contamination was traced for a mile from the plant. At Grumman, chromium had been found in public supply wells more than 100 feet deep. By 1949, all of Long Island s aircraft plants had installed treatment systems to remove chromium from their wastewater.31... 

A third example [28] involved a Superfund site. Octolig was used in a bench test of material from the Liberty Industrial Finishing Superfund site, a 30-acre parcel in the village of Farm-ingdale, Nassau County, New York state. At this location. Republic Aviation produced military aircraft for the US government from the late 1930s until the 1960s. Operations involved... 

The effort to stop drug abuse and trafficking raises a number of important general civil liberties issues, including whether persons are being stopped without probable cause that they have committed a crime, whether racial or ethnic profiles are being used instead of specific evidence involving a particular individual, and whether the use of intrusive search techniques (such as use of aircraft or heat detectors) violates privacy. 

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