Scientists say the health and environmental effects of Israeli strikes on oil depots in and around Tehran could be severe, impacting water and food sources long after the smoke and black rain clears.
The World Health Organization (WHO) issued a warning Tuesday about toxic pollutants in the air after the Saturday strikes on four oil storage facilities and an oil production transfer centre sparked pillars of flames and thick, black clouds that later produced black, oily rain.
Residents in the city of 10 million reported having trouble breathing and said they experienced dizziness and burning sensations as the rain, mixed with chemicals from burning oil, fell from the sky.
“The black rain and the acidic rain coming with it is indeed a danger for the population, respiratory mainly,” WHO spokesperson Christian Lindmeier told a media briefing in Geneva.
Andrew Chang explains how burning oil from depots hit by U.S.-Israeli airstrikes is falling as black rain over parts of Iran, and the danger it poses.
Images provided by The Canadian Press, Reuters and Getty Images
The UN health agency says it has received multiple reports of black rain since the attacks, which came just over a week into the U.S.-Israeli war against Iran, and supports Iran’s advisory urging people to remain indoors.
The Iranian Red Crescent Society warned that the rain can cause serious lung damage and chemical burns to the skin.
‘Very, very toxic’
Peter Ross, a pollution specialist and senior scientist at the Sidney, B.C.-based Raincoast Conservation Foundation, says petroleum mixtures can contain thousands of petroleum hydrocarbons including some, like benzene, that are “very, very toxic.”
“The potential for long, severe, long-term consequences is very real,” he told CBC News.
When those toxic gases are dispersed into the atmosphere through fires, Ross says they pose an acute risk to humans breathing them in that “can make them very dizzy, can render them unconscious, it can kill them.”
Ross says reports of people experiencing burning sensations in their eyes underscores the likelihood that the fires created sulfur and nitrogen oxides, which were the primary drivers of acid rain in the 1970s and 80s.
He says there are a number of compounds with the potential to be carcinogenic, raising concerns of longer-term health effects for residents, especially as petroleum disperses into waterways and groundwater.
Ross says people downwind and downstream of the explosions will be particularly vulnerable.
“That has potential to really seriously threaten public health and the safety of drinking water for quite a while,” he said, adding it will also impact fisheries and agriculture.
Some have drawn parallels to the 1991 Kuwaiti oil fires, when the Iraqi military set fire to hundreds of oil wells during the Gulf War, causing similar black rain.
While those fires didn’t burn in such densely populated areas, people in the region reported similar respiratory problems, and Ross says those incidents also led to die-offs of fish and marine mammals.
Iran alleged chemical warfare
The UN says WHO is monitoring the health risks of the “massive release” of toxic hydrocarbons, sulphur oxides and nitrogen compounds into the air.
WHO’s Lindmeier says the U.S.-Israeli strikes raise serious questions about humanitarian law, stressing the sites that were hit don’t appear to be used exclusively by the military.
Iran’s ambassador to the UN, Amir-Saeid Iravani, called the attacks a “manifest environmental crime,” while Iranian Foreign Ministry spokesperson Esmaeil Baghaei said in a post on X that the strikes amounted to “intentional chemical warfare.”
The Israel Defence Forces claimed responsibility for attacks on “fuel storage complexes” in a March 7 post on X.
Israeli military spokesperson Lieutenant Colonel Nadav Shoshani defended the strikes, telling reporters the depots were used to fuel Iran’s war effort, including producing or storing propellant for ballistic missiles. “They are a legal military target,” he said.
Doug Weir, director of the U.K.-based Conflict and Environment Observatory, told CBC Radio’s As It Happens that Tehran is known for its poor air quality because of its geography — being “hemmed in” by mountains means pollutants are pushed down toward ground level.
Coupled with the fact that it’s a “very densely built city,” he said this means air “doesn’t move around as much as it should,” which raises risk factors.
“Often, we see these oil storage depots being targeted in conflict, but they are usually outside of cities.”
He said the Israeli policy decision to bomb the facilities in Tehran “was quite extraordinary in terms of civilian risk.”
‘Unknown’ effects concerning: scientist
Peter Hodson, an ecotoxicologist and retired professor at Queens University in Kingston, Ont., says there could be “all sorts of weird, wonderful compounds that were liberated … or created during the explosion,” through the combustion of explosives and other materials at the facilities.
Lungs are “incredibly efficient” at picking up fat soluble materials, he says, which elevates concerns that people exposed to the air when oily rain is falling could experience direct lung damage.
Hodson also worries about contamination of vegetation, which could also expose humans and animals to the toxic compounds.
“The contamination of plants and soils and water present the possibility of a chronic exposure, and the unknown effects of an acute exposure, to things that we just don’t know about,” he said.
The environmental fallout of the war is spreading throughout the region and beyond, according to the Conflict and Environment Observatory, which has tracked 232 incidents with an environmental risk since the conflict began.
In particular, they note attacks on military facilities in multiple countries, as well as marine pollution related to the U.S. navy sinking vessels off Iran’s southern coast and causing an oil spill by torpedoing an Iranian ship off the coast of Sri Lanka.
