Word: soiling
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Florida's Everglades, a unique mixture of rain forest, wildlife refuge and the world's largest cultivated organic soil bed, stretches 100 miles from Lake Okeechobee in the north to Florida Bay at the state's southern tip. Once the marshland measured an average 45 miles in width; today it extends 35 miles. Little of the land is in its pristine state. Huge tracts have been drained for agricultural and residential development, and thousands of miles of man-made canals have diverted the water from natural channels. Even much of the 62% of land lying within...
Then, two days before Christmas, the Federal Government released Environmental Protection Agency findings that oil mixed with the deadly poison dioxin, sprayed on unpaved streets a decade ago as a seemingly harmless means to hold down dust, had left dangerous concentrations of the chemical in the soil. But since the EPA samples were taken before Dec. 5, it is still unclear whether the flood waters washed away much of the chemical, making Times Beach safer, or unearthed more dioxin, spreading it throughout the town. The EPA plans new tests, scheduled for this week...
...town meeting last Tuesday with state and federal politicians and health officials, Dr. Henry Falk, an epidemiologist with the federal Centers for Disease Control, advised residents who had left Times Beach after the flooding to stay away. He told those who had returned to avoid exposure to soil and debris until new tests were completed. Falk said that scientific studies with animals show that dioxin, an acutely toxic substance that is produced as an unwanted byproduct in the manufacture of herbicides and other chemicals, can have extremely adverse effects on the skin, liver and immune system. Many of the residents...
...site of the U.S. Army's Rocky Mountain Arsenal, which produced weapons and chemical agents until 1969. It now harbors corroded canisters of mustard gas, lethal phosphorus wastes from incendiary bombs, unexploded rockets and mortar shells embedded in a former firing range, millions of cubic yards of soil peppered with pesticides and an abandoned five-story production plant contaminated with nerve gas. Two vast man-made lagoons, once used as dump pits for toxic chemical and biological wastes, are the worst menaces of all. Toxic wastes have leached out of both ponds, infecting the area's ground water...
...occasion had an artificially mysterious air about it. Two weeks ago, telephone calls were placed to journalists from New York City to Caracas urging them to dial a Miami number for information about an upcoming meeting on U.S. soil of the Fuerza Democrática Nicaragüense (F.D.N.), a coalition of Nicaraguan exile groups that are opposed to the leftist Sandinista regime in Managua. When leaders of the F.D.N. showed up at a Fort Lauderdale resort hotel last week, the conclave turned out to be about as clandestine as a charity clambake. The real purpose of the get-together...