Chemical Weapons
In 2007, a Boy Scout digging for crystals uncovered a collection of 7.5-inch vials containing chemicals such as mustard gas, lewisite, chloropicrin, and phosgene. The vials were part of World War II era military Chemical Agent Identification Sets. The burial of vials was standard procedure for removing them from service at that time. There was no record of a disposal site at the salt plains. Crystal digging was suspended from April 2007 until April 2009, while the risk of allowing digging again was evaluated. 171 vials and at least a dozen incendiary devices were removed from the location. The salt plains were also used as a bombing and strafing range during World War II. There are still remnants of this use left on the plains.
Read more about this topic: Salt Plains National Wildlife Refuge
Famous quotes containing the words chemical and/or weapons:
“If Thought is capable of being classed with Electricity, or Will with chemical affinity, as a mode of motion, it seems necessary to fall at once under the second law of thermodynamics as one of the energies which most easily degrades itself, and, if not carefully guarded, returns bodily to the cheaper form called Heat. Of all possible theories, this is likely to prove the most fatal to Professors of History.”
—Henry Brooks Adams (1838–1918)
“I have always been of the mind that in a democracy manners are the only effective weapons against the bowie-knife.”
—James Russell Lowell (1819–91)