Beach Trading Blog

If you thought hurricanes and plans for new offshore oil drilling platforms were sketchy… try this on for size.

The U.S. Army has admitted to dumping 64 million pounds of chemical weapons (from World War I to the early 1970s) off the New Jersey coastline. Everything from mustard and sarin gas to arsenic, cyanide and VX nerve gas was buried in containers and tossed into “dumpsites at sea.”

“If they were drilling down and hit, say, a 200 mm shell, they could have a real environmental disaster on their hands,” says Richard Albright, an environmental health scientist, lawyer and author. If New Jersey allows drilling for oil and natural gas off its coast, it may dredge up an ugly and dangerous past.

Now these corroding containers are lying there dormant just waiting for a nice seismic-testing-blast-wake-up-call – YIKES!