REPORTER AT LARGE about man-made chemicals used to kill pests, which are contaminating our soil, air & water. It must have been by an underground stream that poisonous chemicals travelled from a manufacturing plant in Colorado to a farming district several miles away. In 1943, the Rocky Mountain Arsenal, near Denver, began to manufacture war materials. Eight years later, the plant was leased to a private oil company for the production of insecticides. Even before the changeover; farmers several miles from the plant reported unexplained sickness among livestock, and extensive crop damage. And there were reports of human illness. Tells about chemicals found in water drawn from shallow wells. It was concluded that some of these wastes had found their way into the ground water at the arsenal & that it had taken seven to eight years for them to travel under ground distance of about three miles from two of the arsenal's original holding ponds - mere depressions in the earth into which wastes were discharged - to the nearest farm. The investigators knew of no way to contain the contamination - to halt its advance. The most significant feature of the whole episode was the discovery of 2, 4-D in the holding ponds of the arsenal, even though no 2, 4-D had been manufactured there during any stage of operations. After careful study, the chemists at the plant concluded that the 2, 4-D had been formed spontaneously in the holding ponds, from other substances discharged from the arsenal; in the presence of tatalyzing air and sunlight; and quite without intervention of human chemists, the ponds had become laboratories for the production of a new chemical.
