The Seveso Disaster

Causes
The factors that caused the series of events to happen and the dangers were foreseeable and could have been prevented. The ICMESA plant was property of Givaudan S.A., which was located in Geneva, Switzerland. ICMESA produced the intermediate compounds that Givaudan needed to produce its cosmetics, pharmaceuticals, and soaps. The compounds produced at this plant ranged from benzyl chloride and cyanide to phenylacetic acid and TCP [4]. The reaction of interest was the one that produced TCP, which was commonly used in surgical soaps. This was not the first plant that produced TCP that had an accident, but it was the first one that severely affected the villages surrounding the plant. TCP was already known to be toxic in its surgical soaps and was already banned from being used in the USA [1]. Though there were rumors about the safety of TCP at the time, TCP itself is only moderately toxic. The real culprit of the toxicity that was experienced in these soaps was a byproduct called 2,3,7,8-tetrachlorodibenzo-para-dioxin (TCDD, but commonly referred to as dioxin). This compound was significantly more toxic than TCP, but not very much else was known about the compound before the Seveso Disaster.
The events started to happen when the leftover contents of Reactor B from the previous night’s shift were not fully cooled. According to Italian law, all factories and plants were to be shutdown over the weekend and only cleaning and maintenance could be performed [1]. The batch reaction was almost completed on Friday night, but the final step of removing the ethylene glycol from the reaction mixture was not performed and the plant had to shutdown [1]. The reactants remained in the reactor and the residual heat left over from the reacti...

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... these people included chloroacne, reduced white blood cell count, liver cancer, leukemia, and in a few cases, death [5].

References
[1] Fuller, John G.. The Poison That Fell From The Sky. New York: Random House, 1977.
[2] Carson, Rachel, Lois Darling, and Louis Darling. Silent spring. Boston: Houghton Mifflin ;, 1962.
[3] "Seveso-30 Years After: A chronology of events Alleviating the consequences of the accident: milestones between 1976 and 2006." The Roche Group. http://www.siznursing.be/index.php?preaction=joint&id_joint=71790 (accessed April 21, 2014).
[4] Fara, G. M.. "The ICMESA accident. First intervention for the protection of man and environment." Chemistry, Man and Environment 1 (1999): 3-16.
[5] Axelson, O.. "The epidemiologic evidence of health effects of tetrachlorodibenzodioxin (TCDD) in human beings." Chemistry, Man and Environment 1 (1999): 29-38.