Partner In Crime (44 page)

He rushed to the restroom and splashed his face with cold water. After about an hour or so, things got back to normal.

“There doesn’t seem to be any long-term damage — that I can tell, anyway,” he laughs.

And years later, when he confirmed that sodium azide was about to be widely disseminated in airbags, Betterton figured, “Well these guys must know something that I don’t — it must have a very short lifetime in the environment.”

Morbid curiosity propelled him to the library to find out more about it.

“But there was nothing about the environmental fate of sodium azide, which really surprised me. Nothing. After that, I began tinkering around.”

It’s a hideous poison — ten times more deadly than cyanide. It kills just about every living thing it touches, and for humans unlucky enough to ingest roughly half a teaspoonful, it means certain death.

There is no antidote.

The amount of this dire substance has soared in our environment in recent years. That’s because Congress has mandated that about a pound of it be placed under the dashboard of nearly every American automobile and light truck made since 1994.

Sodium azide is the propellant in airbag restraint systems.

The deadly chemical is compressed into roughly hockey puck-sized “grains,” a term from the explosives industry, and sealed inside small canisters roughly the size of tuna cans.

When hit with a spark, the compound, NaN3, doesn’t explode exactly, so much as collapse into utter chaos — a ferocious entropy instantly transforming the highly formal crystal-lattice molecular structure of the salt-like sodium azide into a pulse of hot nitrogen gas, the most common element in Earth’s atmosphere. The nitrogen pulse inflates the airbag in a mere fifty-five milliseconds — less than the blink of an eye.

But it’s the airbags that don’t get deployed — and most of them don’t — that worry Betterton. He strongly urges Congress to revisit the airbag issue before we face some horrendous environmental consequences.

“I’ve estimated there are millions and millions of pounds of sodium azide out on our streets right now,” Betterton says. “And as our newer vehicles start to get junked, we’re going to wind up with millions and millions of pounds of sodium azide in the junkyards.”

That’s extremely worrisome, he points out, because the compound is classified as a “wide-spectrum biocide” in environmental terms. In less formal Hollywood hype, perhaps, it would be known as the Ultimate Terminator.

“It will kill practically anything,” Betterton says.

And according to extensive tests Betterton has performed in his UA laboratory, this deadly compound doesn’t readily decompose in the environment.

“If you take sodium azide and put it in water,” he says, “nothing happens to it for months. No detectable decomposition, implying that dissolved oxygen is ineffective in eliminating this stuff. I’ve tried adding some hydrogen peroxide, which is another naturally occurring oxidant. And that, again, was ineffective over a period of months.”

The nightmare scenario, for Betterton, involves this extreme poison washing into streams and rivers and percolating through the soil to contaminate aquifers, much as salt water easily contaminates fresh water when the two come in contact.

“You know, the Environmental Protection Agency regards this compound as being, in some circumstances, ten times more toxic than sodium cyanide,” Betterton says. “You may quibble about the EPA limits, but I don’t think the public would be interested in consuming even trace amounts of something that could be regarded as ten times more toxic than cyanide. How would you feel if you were drinking something like that, and somebody said, ‘Don’t worry about it, it won’t hurt you’?”

So what does the government say?

David Bary is a Dallas-based spokesman for the EPA.

“This is a new issue, and I’ve never taken a call on this before,” he says. “It’s been educational for me.”

At
Arizona Alumnus
’s request, Bary checked into the government rules. What he found was an odd juxtaposition of extreme caution and total denial: “Sodium azide is categorized by the EPA as an extremely hazardous substance,” he notes. “It has a reportable quantity of 500 pounds, meaning that should 500 pounds or more of the product be released, either through a spill or an accident of some kind, the responsible party must notify the National Response Center in Washington, D.C., so that appropriate action can be taken.”

This aspect of the government’s approach to the compound is completely understandable. Sodium azide is both highly toxic as well as prone to nasty surprises.

Some examples
:

Curteous, a famous German organic chemist of the late 1800s, was among the first to analyze this manmade compound, apparently synthesized in the rush to develop intense, highly profitable aniline dyes for use in the fabric industry.

“He was trying to determine the properties of azide,” Betterton says. “And, as a result, his assistant was seriously injured in the lab. So seriously that Curteous quit his work on it there and then.”

The heavy metal azides — lead, copper, and silver azides — are well known for their shock sensitivity. Lead azide is used as a primary detonator in military explosives.

In the past, laboratory workers used sodium azide to stop the build-up of algae in water baths, and it’s still used as a preservative in medical and biological labs.

“As a result, there were a lot of azide solutions being dumped down sinks,” Betterton says. “And in the sink the azide would react with lead or copper piping. After a few years, because azides are insolubles, you’d build up these solids. The solids precipitated out and tended to build up in the threads of the pipes. The drain would block, and they’d call in a plumber. And the plumber would put a wrench to the pipe and twist it, and the pipe would explode.”

In September 1994, a worker was killed at the TRW airbag plant in Mesa, Arizona. The grinder he was operating accidentally set off roughly fifty pounds of sodium azide in a nearby air filtration unit.

Tony Fox’s death, and the subsequent state investigation that found lax procedures resulting in azide contamination at the plant, prompted the largest corporate fine ever leveled against an Arizona manufacturer, $1.7 million.

Fox’s death, and several other incidents — including alleged illegal dumping of azide wastes, which TRW denies — also triggered a criminal investigation, which is ongoing, according to Denise McConagy of Arizona’s Department of Environmental Quality.

As a result of that fatal explosion and numerous smaller ones, residents near TRW’s Mesa facilities have filed a class action lawsuit seeking to force the giant defense contractor to provide free medical monitoring. They claim toxic plumes from explosions at TRW facilities have sickened plants and animals and kicked up cancer rates — a charge the company denies.

The matter is in preliminary stages in federal court.

In 1997, a load of Japanese-made sodium azide being trucked from the docks of Los Angeles to an airbag plant in Promontory Point, Utah, overturned on a Utah stretch of Interstate 15. The resulting fire and toxic plume closed the interstate for two days and forced the evacuation of the nearby town of Mona.

A subsequent Utah Highway Patrol report on the matter noted that despite the presence of 25 different government agencies and input from numerous experts, the best solution seemed to be simply to let the highly toxic chemical burn itself out, and “Not put anyone in harm’s way.”

There are a number of reports of deaths due to azide ingestions.

In one tragic case, two college students were conducting a biology class lab project. The procedure involved drinking about 500 milliliters of saline solution and then analyzing their urine.

“Unknown to anyone, the saline solution they’d been given had been preserved with sodium azide,” Betterton says. “It came out of the stock room. One of the students took a few sips and she didn’t like it much. She started feeling dizzy, I guess. And she collapsed right then and there. Her partner drank the whole beaker, probably about 500 milliliters. And that was the end. She died about two days later.

“It appears as though once you have a mega dose like this, there’s no turning back, even when you get into intensive care, you can’t stop it.”

The compound interrupts the body’s ability to extract electrons from oxygen, causing the respiratory system to shut down.

“You basically smother,” Betterton says. “Although I’m not sure that’s the only route — it seems the human toxicology is not well understood.”

While the government requires strict procedures in the manufacture, storage, and disposal of the raw compound, the EPA’s Bary says he found nothing at all regulating sodium azide once it goes into an automobile airbag assembly. In this situation, “it’s not regulate,” he says flatly.

“As a product in your automobile or light truck, it’s not a waste product, so it’s not subject to hazardous waste laws. And when a car or truck reaches the end of its useful life and goes to a salvage yard, the product is still not entirely out of commerce.”

The thinking, Bary explains, is that airbags in junked cars can be pulled out and installed in other vehicles. It seems to make economic sense, because the assemblies cost roughly $200 each, he estimates.

But Betterton argues this approach makes no sense at all — from a safety standpoint, or an economic one.

In the first place, he points out, “there’s no market for used airbags right now. So they’re just stacking up. I got e-mail from a guy in Sweden, and they have the same problem there — the junkyard has to remove the airbags, but there is no market for them after they take them out, so they’re just stacking them up on shelves. Eventually we’re going to run out of storage space.

“Or worse, they don’t get removed and they go to the crusher, and then you’ve got the potential for azide spilling out. Some of the crushers use a water spray, a mister, to keep the dust down. So there’s a potential for washing sodium azide into wastewater systems and into streams and, eventually, into the groundwater systems.”

In the second place, Betterton says, who would want a used airbag assembly in a car?

“Airbag manufacturers are reluctant to recycle these inflators because they don’t know where they’ve been — these things could have gotten wet, or been otherwise damaged. And then to take them back and repack them and send them off to General Motors? The liabilities these companies would incur if these recycled airbags didn’t deploy amount to an enormous financial risk.”

Betterton’s research, which he’s performed bit by bit over the last decade, is not funded, except for help from the occasional graduate student temporarily supported by the NASA Space Grant program.

The result of his “tinkering” is this:

It appears there are only two ways to destroy this deadly poison effectively, at a reasonable cost.

One is through ozonation, a chemical process often employed in the treatment of municipal water supplies. TRW and other manufacturers neutralize their sodium azide-contaminated wastewater using this method, according to Arizona Department of Environmental Quality records.

The other method presents perhaps the only bright spot in an otherwise bleak picture. It’s a relatively simple method that promises to be highly effective.

Betterton recommends that Congress pass a law requiring that all junked airbags be deployed.

“That’s the most practical solution,” he says. “The azide is instantly converted to a harmless nitrogen gas.”

It’s also the most stunningly obvious solution. But whether Congress will mandate that procedure, of course, remains to be seen.

In the meantime, all those airbags are piling up.

Dan Huff is a freelance writer based in Tucson. This article appeared as “The Ultimate Terminator” in the Fall 2000 issue of
Arizona Alumnus
magazine.

J.A. Jance is the author of the J.P. Beaumont series, the Joanna Brady series, and two standalone thrillers. Born in South Dakota and brought up in Bisbee, Arizona, Jance lives with her husband in Seattle, Washington.

Designer: Richard Aquan
Photographer: Judith Rosenbaum / Nonstock

For those of you intimately familiar with Cochise County, please be advised that occasionally I use my literary license and tweak geography in favor of storytelling.

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