Caroline Fraser

Very heavily, you know, during the 40s and 50s, they were putting it all over apple orchards and cherry orchards and cotton crops.

So those places were then contaminated with arsenic.

And Washington state now has four plumes of this pollution.

The big one was in Buget Sound from the smelter.

which was like 1,000 square miles of Puget Sound that was contaminated.

But also Wenatchee, which is over in eastern Washington, where they have all these apple orchards.

There's another plume there from those pesticides and insecticides.

And there's a couple more.

There's another plume up in Everett where there was what they called an arsenic kitchen.

The Rockefellers used to own mines up in the Cascade Mountains.

And they had a smelter in Everett that was then bought by the Guggenheims and they moved their arsenic kitchen to Tacoma.

But it left all this pollution in Everett.

And so they discovered all these people had built houses and condos and things on top of where the arsenic kitchen had been, which that stuff was never cleaned up.

And so they had to...

I think they had to buy those properties and remediate so-called.

Yeah.

In Tacoma, what they did, that was where the worst of the pollution was because the smokestack was sitting right near the water.

The smokestack was blown up in the 90s.

Blown up?

Yeah, they exploded the smokestack.