Jun 11
6
Last Thursday a subsurface investigation, by a joint team of 16 Koreans and 10 Americans, began to locate drums of Agent Orange allegedly buried at Camp Carroll U.S. military base in South Korea. This started after decades of silence and suffering that Steve House links to exposure to the dangerous herbicide in 1978 when he helped bury this toxic agent. Two other former soldiers who served with House said in interviews that they buried an estimated 250 drums.
The team is using ground-penetrating radar (GPR) to locate drums of toxic chemicals in suspected locations and is taking groundwater samples to check for water contamination. They will focus their investigation in the vicinity of the helipad and two other locations, that soldiers called “Voodoo Land”, where allegedly hundreds of drums were buried. Plans are to complete the investigation on the helipad by June 21st.
House claims that soldiers at Camp Carroll took a large number of rusted 55-gallon drums stamped with the words “Agent Compound Orange” from the restricted warehouse and carried them to a deep ditch the length of a soccer field. “This is a burden I’ve carried around for 35 years,” House said in a phone interview with AP from his home in Arizona. “It’s bugging the hell out of me. I don’t want to take this to my grave.”
It’s been our experience that the ground penetrating radar survey will be able to confirm if the drums are buried in these areas. However, it will take extensive testing of soil and water samples in this and surrounding areas to determine the extent of the damage to the local environment.