Pictures: Worst Man-Made Environmental Disasters
An explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant sent clouds of radioactive particles into the air creating a 1,100-square-mile evacuated area into a nuclear dead zone in Chernobyl, Ukraine in 1986. (VICTOR DRACHEV/AFP/Getty Images)
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The tanker Exxon-Valdez ran aground on March 1989, spilling 11 million gallons of crude oil into Prince William Sound off Alaska. (CHRIS WILKINS/AFP/Getty Images)
Love Canal is a neighborhood in Niagara Falls, New York, which became the subject of controversy after it was discovered that the community was built over an area was originally the site of an abandoned canal that became a dumping ground for 22,000 tons of toxic chemical waste produced by the Hooker Chemicals and Plastics Corporation in the 1940s and 50s. (Photo by Imagno/Getty Images)
The worlds biggest oil spill occurred during the Gulf War in 1991 when Saddam Hussein purposely pumped from 240 million to 460 million gallons into the Persian Gulf. (BOB PEARSON/AFP/Getty Images)
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The Bhopal disaster happened in 1984 near the Indian city of Madhya Pradesh, when a pesticide plant released large amounts of toxic gas that killed upward of 30,000 people in the surrounding area. It is reported that Indians were still dying from the exposure 25 years later. (DIBYANGSHU SARKAR/AFP/Getty Images)
The Aral Sea began drying up in the late 1960s after the Soviet Government diverted rivers that fed the sea toward the desert to irrigate cotton. Communities around the former sea now struggle with little groundwater and suffer respiratory problems from dust particles in the air. (VYACHESLAV OSELEDKO/AFP/Getty Images)
The Great Pacific Garbage Patch is a floating collection of trash in the central North Pacific Ocean that is estimated to cover an area the size of the state of Texas. But the exact size is unknown. (JAY DIRECTO/AFP/Getty Images)
