Toxic Utah: A land littered with poisons

Not long after the incident, Peck said he began experiencing violent headaches, numbness, a feeling of burning in his legs and "bouts of paranoia." He said others in his family also have suffered violent headaches ever since.

Peck's family suffered another problem not reported in scientific studies — high numbers of miscarriages. "We come from large families and never had problems with that before. But the girls (who were children at the time of the incident) have a real struggle with miscarriages," Peck said.

In recent years, Peck also suffered skin cancer and heart problems. "I wonder if the tests didn't have something to do with that," he said in December.

Germ tests

Documents obtained by the Deseret News through the years show Dugway conducted at least 328 series of open-air tests of germ weapons during the Cold War.

Some tests used agents that cause such diseases as anthrax, botulism, the plague, tularemia and Q fever.

Rolland Bivens, who now lives in Colorado, was intentionally attacked by germ weapons spreading Q fever in one 1955 Dugway test along with 29 other Seventh-day Adventists who had avoided combat as conscientious objectors.

"It was night. I remember hearing in the distance some motors running. We were told they were creating a cloud of Q fever germs. The cloud came toward us and passed by. It was invisible, though; all we saw was clear air," Bivens remembered in a 1991 Deseret News interview.

Documents said the clouds headed toward the old U.S. 40 (now I-80), along which the Army had placed guinea pigs in cages in what the Army called "peripheral sampling stations."

The soldiers were flown to Ft. Detrick, Md., where some became sick with Q fever — which can be deadly, but usually is not.

Bivens and others seemed not to have suffered long-term effects.

Dugway commander Col. Edward A. Fisher said earlier this year, "Presidential directives, originating in 1969, forbid open-air testing with any toxic chemical or biological agents. For this purpose, we have built state-of-the-art test chambers and laboratories" that he says safely contain deadly germs.

Other threats

Not surprisingly, the military says a third of Dugway Proving Ground may be contaminated with old unexploded bombs, rockets and artillery shells and most of the vast Utah Test and Training Range is considered contaminated by similar ordnance from airplanes.

However, it likely would surprise most Utahns that 1,421 square miles of public lands off of military bases — all on U.S. Bureau of Land Management areas — are also considered possibly contaminated with unexploded ordnance, according to a BLM study completed in 1994.

The total square miles believed to be contaminated adds up to an area roughly the size of Rhode Island.