Four Movements of Diffusion

Around midnight on November 10, 1979, a Canadian Pacific freight train carrying a deadly cargo of butane, toluene, caustic soda, and chlorine derailed, caught fire, and exploded in the city of Mississauga. The sky turned red as flames towered forty storeys high, and shockwaves spread for fifty kilometres. A total of 240,000 people were evacuated, an effort that was (until Hurricane Katrina in 2005) the largest peacetime evacuation in North American history. Astonishingly, no one was killed that night, and the event came to be known as the Mississauga Miracle. Retrospective accounts focus on the swift and heroic action of railway workers, first responders, officials, and citizens alike, but narrating this massive industrial disaster as the “Mississauga Miracle” obscures something that was in fact so starkly revealed by the plumes of chlorine gas that billowed into the eerily illuminated night sky: Mississauga is an exemplary site in the contaminated ecology of extractive capitalism—an ecology that is always also bound to projects of colonialism and state violence through industrial infrastructures that constitute “the sinews of war and trade.”11Laleh Khalili, Sinews of War and Trade: Shipping and Capitalism in the Arabian Peninsula (London: Verso, 2020).

Drawing on an archive of contemporary reports as well as oral histories conducted on the occasion of the fortieth anniversary of the disaster in 2019, we tether ourselves in what follows to this “miracle” as an anchor point from which to trace the diffuse violence and toxicity of late capitalism as it moves through a seemingly peripheral place. Diffusion is key to these movements—perhaps most immediately the diffusion of chemicals combusted and aerosolized and seeping into the watershed of the Credit River. But these are not just “wayward particles behaving badly.”22Max Liboiron, Manuel Tironi, Nerea Calvillo, “Toxic Politics: Acting in a Permanently Polluted World,” Social Studies of Science Vol. 48, No. 3 (2018), 333. That spectacular moment of chemical diffusion has historical and material conditions, a choreography that make the movement of diffusion possible—most notably, the rail infrastructure that is an essential technology of the twinned forces of settler colonialism33Manu Karuka, Empire’s Tracks: Indigenous Nations, Chinese Workers, and the Transcontinental Railroad (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2019). and global capitalism.44Deborah Cowen, The Deadly Life of Logistics: Mapping Violence in Global Trade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

The train itself, Canadian Pacific (CP) train number 54, was 106 cars long, 38 of which carried hazardous materials.55Peter Timmerman, The Mississauga Train Derailment and Evacuation: November 10–17, 1979: Event Reconstruction and Organizational Response (Toronto: Institute for Environmental Studies, University of Toronto, 1980), 1. At the time, in 1979, there were 56,000 such cars moving through the area every year.66Anne Whyte, Final Report to Emergency Planning Canada (Ottawa: Emergency Preparedness Canada, 1980), 1, https://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/lbrr/archives/hv%20554%20f56%201980-eng.pdf. By 1990, that number had reached 67,000.77Julius Gorys, “Transportation of Dangerous Goods in the Province of Ontario,” Transportation Research Record, no. 1264 (1990): 61. “Self devouring growth” was already rolling along.88Julie Livingston, Self-Devouring Growth: A Planetary Parable as Told from Southern Africa (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019).

In 1979, the Iranian Revolution ended, people all over the world waited in hours-long lines for gas, Margaret Thatcher was elected as UK Prime Minister, a 500-mile auto race was broadcast on TV for the first time, a gas explosion at a Warsaw bank killed forty-nine people, politician and gay rights activist Harvey Milk’s assassin plead the infamous “Twinkie defence,” and the Ixtoc I oil well in the Gulf of Mexico blew out, causing the worst oil spill on record (a record that would stand until the Deepwater Horizon spill in the same gulf in 2010). This was a moment on the cusp of late industrialism,99Kim Fortun, “Ethnography in Late Industrialism”, Cultural Anthropology 27, no. 3 (2012): 446–64. but not quite there. A moment still in the thick of the Cold War, though perhaps past its nadir. A moment when the engineered hazards of industrial infrastructure and chemical production were beginning to become clear, but had not yet settled into the form of knowledge and expertise we know today as environmental exposure. That genre had yet to fully form in 1979—nine years after the first Earth Day, but still a decade before the concept of environmental health hit the mainstream. In 1979, industrial risks were largely articulated in a Cold War genre that attended to logistics but not ecologies, and neither to the diffusion of acute disaster. It was the genre of “duck and cover,” a muscular orchestration of fortification and mobilization that sought to protect major cities with the highways that are still with us today, many now notoriously congested thoroughfares spewing asthma-linked ozone and nitrogen dioxide.

CP train number 54 originated in Sarnia, ON—Aamjiwnaang land, then already the core of Canada’s Chemical Valley and now an epicentre of Indigenous research on and resistance to environmental racism.1010See the website of Aamjiwnaang Solidarity against Chemical Valley at https://aamjiwnaangsolidarity.org/. Its destination was Marathon, ON, a town birthed as a whistle stop during the construction of the CP rail, dispossessing the Anishinaabe of Biigtigong Nishnaabeg in the 1880s. A town whose fortunes were tied to colonialism, rail, pulp, and, later, gold mining. The movement of train 54—like the movement of the steel that made its tracks and the Chinese workers who laboured to make them reach the Pacific coast—is a historical inscription in and of the land.1111Karuka, Empire’s Tracks. This movement is a political geography: a writing of place, a making place, a putting of things and people in their place. But watch out. Because there is friction in this movement, and heat. Because movement means things do not always stay put in the way inscribers intend.

“Here” is what linguists call a deictic; it only makes sense if you know the situation, the where and the when. “Away” is something else, defined by the condition of being elsewhere. But whose elsewhere? Whose here makes my here (or your here, or their here) an elsewhere? What geographies and histories converge in such place making? In making such situations? In situating some of us in a here, and others in an away? In putting us in our places? Here and away are always part of the same situation—a situation of legibility that attempts to make elsewheres and otherwises disappear, no matter how much is displaced from here to there, accumulating in landfills and aquifers, no matter how many bad smells and body burdens build up. Despite the early twentieth-century sense that diffusion was the solution to pollution, diffusion is movement, not escape.

Mississauga is often conjured as a kind of away. A peripheral place defined by its proximity to, and difference from, Toronto. But peripheral places are anything but out of the way. Mississauga has long been criss-crossed by industrial rail and is today a major hub for intermodal shipping. It is positioned between the two largest ports of the Great Lakes (in Toronto and Hamilton) and hosts Pearson International Airport, which handles 50 percent of all air cargo in Canada; the Terrapure plant, which recycles the majority of the country’s spent lead-acid batteries; a Petro-Canada Lubricants refinery; and the St. Lawrence Cement plant. Mississauga is most definitely in the way, centrally defined by the movement of consumer capitalism’s toxic excesses.

The origin stories of the environmental justice movement are stories of here and away. Like the story of Warren County, North Carolina, a predominantly Black, low-income community that was designated as an away. In 1982, the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) dumped thousands of tonnes of PCB-contaminated soil there,1212“PCB” stands for polychlorinated biphenyl, used as a coolant. soil it was cleaning up from hundreds of miles of roadways that a transformer company had been using as a dumping ground for the contaminated oil collected by its tanker trucks. Borrowing tactics from the civil rights movement, environmental organizers protested, leading to over 500 arrests, but they could not stop the EPA and its relocation of 60,000 tonnes of contaminated soil.1313Commission for Racial Justice, United Church of Christ, Toxic Wastes and Race in the United States (New York: United Church of Christ, 1987). They could not make their here-ness heard. Remediation began in 2001 and was completed in 2004. Testing revealed that contaminants had been leaking into the water for decades, cross-contaminating a further 20,000 tonnes of soil.

But even this origin story is not just a story of here and away. Here and away obscures movement and the diffusion that happens along chemical infrastructures. Reactivity has cascading effects, and fugitive emissions catalyze new chemical relations. The contaminated soil came from roadsides, places where moving through provided cover for the diffusion of PCBs, which then became concentrated in Warren County, a place the US government deemed sufficiently away.1414Eileen McGurty, Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2007). Here and away is an all too convenient static geography. A colonial and cartographic imaginary of territorial enclosure that diffusion refuses to abide by.

In her articulation of an Indigenous environmental justice, Dina Gilio-Whitaker points out that environmentalism’s here and away imaginary also carries with it an assumption of settled domesticity.1515Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock (Boston: Beacon, 2019). Here, in that imaginary, equals home. But, as she points out, such an imaginary obscures not only the movement of toxicity but also the movement of people such as the migrant farmworkers exposed to biocides with whom Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta organized the United Farm Workers of America. Unfree itineraries—whereby workers are uprooted to follow the work—illustrate the ongoing displacements of precarious labour. Here is not always home. In attempting to give an account, to map, to trace the diffusions of the derailment, perhaps the language of here and away—the language of dilution and concentration, the language of territory anchored in violence—must come off the rails.

Mississauga is here, in the midst of a landscape scarred by rail and extraction and convenience. Mississauga is some place between Sarnia and Marathon. Mississauga is a location of empire.

The train came off the rails at a place of friction. The train came off the rails at Dundas Street and Mavis Road. Dundas, named for Henry Dundas, Viscount Melville, British Secretary of War. The friction of an improperly lubricated wheel on tracks laid over so many bodies is what threw it off. A historical friction. A friction that, it was said, put Mississauga on the map. A place where things came off the rails.

Language: it derails.

A. The nature of chlorine is brine. The chlor-alkali process pumps up underground salt deposits and then electrolyzes them.

B. The nature of chlorine is replacing mercury-cell production plants, the previous method of manufacturing chlorine, only eight years before the derailment. Before this, discharging mercury into the St. Clair River was seen as a necessary part of the nature of chlorine. Companies boasted that the mercury released had been “reduced to less than a tablespoon per day.” Diffusion was seen as the solution to pollution and “total elimination [as] not economically possible due to the nature of the process.”1717“Companies in the News: Dow’s New Sarnia Plant Will Eliminate Mercury Pollution,” Globe and Mail, November 2, 1971, B16.

C. The nature of chlorine is eighty workers hospitalized in Sarnia before the derailment, when a tank at the Dow plant leaked. Chlorine dissipated. The hamlet of Froomfield evacuated. No mention of the nation of Aamjiwnaang, just 100 feet away.

D. What is the nature of chlorine, glimpsed in green, propelled 1,200 metres into the sky, assumed to be dispersed and diluted over a 100 km radius?1818The Mississauga Evacuation: Final Report (Toronto: Ontario Ministry of the Solicitor General, 1981). Diffusion of fumes, vapours, and particulates is not the solution to pollution.

E. The nature of chlorine is a pillar of fire and heat like a sunrise. While the chlorine was reportedly sucked to a high altitude, there were “reactions to something in the air reported outside the evacuated zone at various points in the circumference” of the bedroom community.1919The Mississauga Evacuation: Final Report, sec. 2-43.

F. The nature of chlorine is a delayed and difficult measurement that defies numerical empiricism. What is not quantified is assumed to not be exposure: lost gaseous diffusions between the midnight crash and the following afternoon.

G. The nature of chlorine is toxicological genres of expertise that occlude the corporeality of a crowd of hundreds intent on watching fireballs: the greenish-yellow Boiling Liquid Expanding Vapour Explosion. BLEVE, an evening spectacle that could imprint in lung tissue for decades.

H. The nature of chlorine is not separate from the pre-existing palimpsests of industrial exposures in Mississauga, including the experimental incineration of PCBs at St. Lawrence Cement. A Trace Atmospheric Gas Analyzer provided “instantaneous monitoring of the Mississauga emergency,” because it was already nearby to measure this burning.2020The Mississauga Evacuation: Final Report, sec. 2-30.

I. The nature of chlorine is its near instantaneous desire to transcend molecular valences, to become body, its “properties as an oxidizing agent, reacting with the water on the moist linings of bronchial and lung tissue to form hydrochloric acid.”2121The Mississauga Evacuation: Final Report, sec. 2.3.12, 2-31. Sixty-one residents’ complaints about exposure “checked” and designated benign.

J. The nature of chlorine is a pungent bleach odour while gaseous. A smell cloaking an entire city, spreading heavily along the ground, drifting into basements, lingering all Wednesday night, two and a half times heavier than air. Collecting into low-lying pools, creeping into cavities and depressions in the land.

K. The nature of chlorine is tears. Lachrymator (“tear gases”) forming from pools of water, chemicals, and sunlight—an ironic departure from the intentional diffusion of chlorine into municipal drinking water as a disinfectant.

L. The nature of chlorine is speculative in its combinatory potential, as a substance necessary to manufacture polyvinyl chloride, most pharmaceuticals, and titanium dioxide. “I thought it might be a spaceship from another galaxy,” said thirteen-year-old Wayne Zimmer, whose family lived close to the crash site.2222Warren Gerard, “Mississauga Nightmare,” Macleans, November 26, 1979, https://archive.macleans.ca/article/1979/11/26/mississauga-nightmare.

M. The nature of chlorine’s fugitive release is a cascade of chemical relations. The explosion likely could have interacted with the “chemical factory” to the southwest of the derailment site: “Here it was hoped that frozen ground would prevent penetration by styrene and toluene.”2323Timmerman, The Mississauga Train Derailment and Evacuation, 40. Melding with polymers at the three resin factories located within half a kilometre of the derailment site.

N. The nature of chlorine could have been the halogenation of benzene from petroleum refined at the Texaco refinery in Port Credit. Polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, styrene, and toluene derived from oil sat in tanks on the ground south of the site, and might still be sitting in groundwater there.

O. The nature of chlorine could have been one liquid tonne of PCBs, the amount stored, for example, in 1991 at the Mississauga Brick company, 500 metres away. Despite the Ministry of Environment’s official discounting of the rumour that PCBs were released in the explosion,2424Timmerman, The Mississauga Train Derailment and Evacuation, 94. PCBs were being stored very nearby at G.T. Wood (3354 Mavis Road), with one liquid tonne; Mississauga Hydro (3240 Mavis Road), with almost five liquid tonnes; and Peel Board of Education (3214 Mavis Road), with nearly nine liquid tonnes.2525PCB Site Inventory, 96–99.

P. The nature of chlorine could be its reaction with plumes, leachate from hundreds of substances mixing together underground at old dump sites with unrecorded contents. Many of these sites are now parks: like the park at Dixie Road and Dundas Street, or A. E. Crookes Park, or Port Credit Memorial Park, or J. C. Saddington Park, or Erindale Park. Or nondescript places like the intersection of  Church and Ontario Streets, or in a pit north of the Queen Elizabeth Way.2626Site Inventory Study (Toronto: Ontario Ministry of the Environment, June 1980), 84–85.

Q. The nature of chlorine could be interacting with waste solvents and glycols from refrigerants and paints being recycled at Fielding Environmental, just up the street from the crash site.

R. The nature of chlorine could be the spilled cars of styrene and chlorine dioxide combining to form 1-phenyl-2-chloroethanone, 1-phenyl-2-chloroethanol,  (1,2-dichloroethyl)benzene, (2-chloro-1-phenyl)ethene, and (1,2,2-trichloroethyl)benzene.

S. The nature of chlorine could be its reaction with perfluorooctanesulfonic acid, or perfluorooctanoic acid, or with sodium alkyl sulfate, each found in firefighting foam, like the kind used to control the explosion, which was purported to run off toward Wolfedale Creek.

T. The nature of chlorine is the future. In 1987, an air-quality study by Anachemia Solvents, a waste-solvent recovery plant just up the block, screened for fugitive emissions. Odours detected were “attributed to the chlorinated compounds (ether and chloroform-like odours), and aromatics (sweet, solvent-like odours).”2727Ronald Bell, Mississauga 1987 Air Quality Survey in the Vicinity of Anachemia Solvents Limited Mavis Road, Mississauga, July 1987 (Toronto: Ontario Ministry of the Environment, 1980), 1. Methylene chloride, methyl chloroform, trichloroethylene, perchloroethylene were released continuously into the surrounding newly developed residential area. Average total organic compounds were measured downwind at 1,153 µg/m3. Today, above 500 µg/m3 is considered high.

The nature of chlorine is expansive.

In 2021, Google Maps labels the location of the derailment as the “Mississauga Miracle.” Clicking on the spot reveals a description as a “tourist attraction.”

While no doubt intended to be uplifting and to signify the successful efforts to protect the city’s inhabitants, the language of “miracle” is not neutral. Its Christian history is linked to white-settler notions of manifest destiny: the justification of imperial expansion on the basis of religious or divine right. The miracularization of the Mississauga train derailment is an erasure. An erasure of extractive settler infrastructures that had already diffused toxins throughout the land. An erasure of the Mississaugas of the New Credit, Seneca, and Huron-Wendat, in favour of some myth of a pristine “environment” that can then be returned to, rather than Traditional Territories that have their own knowledges, sets of relations, and laws governing their purpose.

Eurocentric sciences of physiography have classified this land as “the Iroquois Plain” to describe how the shoreline of “glacial Lake Iroquois” continues to be smoothed over time by wave action, a thin veneer of glacio-lacustrine sand and silty sediments.

It is unclear why, but reports written in the aftermath of the derailment describe this land as an industrial zone near “open waste ground,”2828The Mississauga Evacuation: Final Report, sec. 2-8. rendering it as waste even prior to the event.

Tonnes and tonnes of contaminated soil around the crash site were removed to a landfill after the explosion and evacuation. Through this action of soil removal, the “waste ground” is then reabsorbed into the liberal imaginary of the industrial area as “non-toxic,” thereby reproducing chemicals in the white space of “settler industrialism.”2929Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows. Before the soil was removed, residents worried about onlookers and playing children “wandering through the equivalent to liquid Drano”—but not after.3030Zuhair Kashmeri, “Peel Councillors Reject Ministry’s Soil Warning,” Globe and Mail, December 5, 1979, 10. “Clean-up” is another miracularization.

The “clean-up” of contaminated soil meant moving it elsewhere. To protest their backyard being made into that elsewhere, “about 20 angry farmers” lined up their tractors,3131“Caledon Farmers Halt Dumping,” Globe and Mail, November 28, 1979, 50. blocking dump trucks from entering the Chinguacousy landfill site, after 8,800 cubic metres of soil from the derailment had already been deposited there.

The watershed under Chinguacousy landfill flows south. South, well past the derailment site, ending in Lake Ontario. Leachate drifts restlessly in lively groundwater plumes, diffused over an even wider aqueous area than it would have had it been left at the derailment site.

The train came from Sarnia. Petroleum was refined there to make toluene, styrene, and propane. Brine was electrolyzed there to make chlorine. Mississauga Mayor Hazel McCallion wondered if the contaminated soil could just go back to Sarnia, “which has several chemical companies and has developed expertise in handling such wastes”;3232Kashmeri, “Peel Councillors Reject Ministry’s Soil Warning.” Sarnia is where most of the hazardous waste in Ontario is incinerated or landfilled. Today, Sarnia continues to be exceptionalized as a space of hazardous-waste production and disposal.3333Michelle Murphy, “Chemical Regimes of Life,” Journal of Environmental History 13, no. 4 (2008): 695–703. Logics of exposure to communities there proceed from the sacrificial logics of chemical infrastructure.

Here and away—but away is somebody else’s here.