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Oct. 19, 1977: Protesters greet the first Concorde SST as it lands at New York’s JFK Airport. The Air France supersonic plane had departed Toulouse, France, less than four hours earlier.   The protesters object to noise from the sonic boom and had predicted massive bird kills from the aircraft. However, the Concorde (at right, in 1987) operates for nearly three decades before being felled by its own high prices, slow demand, and a tragic crash in the year 2000.

 

Oct. 19, 1982: After a month of nonviolent protests against PCB dumping in a predominantly black area of Warren County in North Carolina, Gov. Jim Hunt pledges to clean up the site.

 

Oct. 19, 1998: A partially built ski resort near Vail, Colo., burns to the ground. There are no injuries, but the site suffers $12 million in damages. Four members of the Earth Liberation Front or ELF are indicted in 2006. Chelsea Gerlach is sentenced to 10 years; Stanislaus Meyerhoff gets a 13-year stretch; two others are fugitives who have not yet faced trial. ELF said it had targeted the ski resort because it was being built on the habitat of the endangered lynx.

 

Photo: Wikimedia Commons

 

This feature is compiled by Peter Dykstra, an MNN contributor and publisher of Environmental Health News and The Daily Climate.