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When the Sea Poisoned a Town: The Slow Horror of Minamata
When the Sea Poisoned a Town: The Slow Horror of Minamata
The sea that fed Minamata became a silent killer: by the mid-1950s fish catches in Minamata Bay had fallen by 91% while a factory discharged methylmercury that bioaccumulated in seafood. How did a company that provided over 25% of local jobs and more than half the city's tax revenue become the epicenter of one of the worst industrial poisoning disasters in recorded history?
In this episode, we tell the sequence of events from the opening of Chisso's plant in 1908 through the spike in acetaldehyde production and the 1951 catalyst change…
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