On a warm October morning in 1995, about a dozen people shuffled into a meeting room at the Ramada Inn Bayfront hotel in Corpus Christi. Some were Corpus residents. Others were from around the Coastal Bend, hailing from Taft and Portland. All were there to talk about how, some 30 years prior, secret Army airplanes flew over their homes and sprayed them with chemicals.
For half a day, they spoke and gave presentations before a committee of scientists and researchers from around the country. The committee members listened as the residents, some who had lived in Coastal Texas for decades, detailed their lines of work. Others presented breakdowns of their dietary habits and family medical histories.
The picture that the Texans painted, according to reports from the Corpus Christi Caller-Times, was startling. A woman from Gregory, a town just a 15-minute drive across the Nueces Bay from Corpus, said six of her relatives had died of cancer. A Catholic priest from Taft said about 40 percent of deaths in his congregation in the past four years were from cancer. Another testified to the committee that 77 people, by her count, died of cancer in Taft. All, she said, had lived within the same 12-block radius.
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“Someone needs to point us in the right direction so we can get some answers,” Patty Flouerke, who lived in the area for 35 years, said, per the Caller-Times. “I don’t want my daughter to be able to sit down in 20 years and count 80 cancer deaths among her friends and family.
Flouerke and her fellow residents were there to help the National Research Council’s subcommittee on Zinc-Cadmium Sulfide determine if any of these deaths were related to a U.S. Army experiment in the 1960s. In 1962 and again in 1966, Army planes had flown over the Coastal Bend spraying zinc cadmium sulfide, a compound used for its fluorescent properties, in the form of tiny glass beads and corks coated in the stuff. Residents who discovered them were told they were part of meteorological testing related to air pollution and atomic fallout. But this was a cover story.
Under a glowing cloud
View of a United States Air Force Fairchild C-119 Flying Boxcar aircraft of the 314th Troop Carrier Group in flight, 1952. The C-119 was one of the aircraft types used in the U.S. Army’s zinc-cadmium experiments in the 1960s.
Interim Archives/Getty Images
In Corpus and cities across America throughout the 1960s, a different type of testing was going on: an Army Chemical Corps experiment, performed unwittingly on Americans on the effects of biological and chemical warfare at the height of the Cold War. Cities across the country and parts of Canada were sprayed with the zinc cadmium mixture to understand how chemical compounds would spread if dropped on population centers big and small. Collection stations were established both up and downwind of testing areas to detect the particles, which glow a bright yellow or green under ultraviolet light.
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These tests remained mostly unknown besides disclosures in the Clinton administration released in the 1990s, which assured the public that there had been no health impacts. In 2017, however, sociologist Lisa Martino-Tayor revealed in her book Behind the Fog that these tests were more widespread than previously understood and that children, pregnant women and minorities were exposed to radiation and other dangerous materials. The most famous of these tests occurred in St. Louis at the Pruitt-Igoe public housing complex. But to this day, little is known about the Corpus Christi tests.
“Could be dangerous”
The first of several tests conducted in Coastal Texas happened over seven days in June 1962. Army airplanes flew a 30-mile route north and south of Port Aransas, dumping 405 pounds of the zinc cadmium sulfide compound along the way, according to reporting on the tests by the Caller Times in 1995. Local officials were given no notice, nor was the public. Army personnel were under the impression that the mixture was safe. In 1997, the NRC’s final report concluded that the tests had “no adverse health effects.”
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A map showing the extent of aerial chemical spray tests that occured in the Coastal Bend of Texas in 1962, printed in a 1995 edition of the Corpus Christi Caller-Times.
Corpus Christi Caller-Times / Newspapers.com
But whether they really were safe is an open question. No health problems, including cancers, were reported to the local health department, and no cancer cluster studies were done in Port Aransas because “no one has called cancer investigators,” a local health official told the Caller Times. But scientists who spoke about the experiments in the wake of their disclosures said that exposure to zinc cadmium sulfide could cause all sorts of health problems; Arthur Spomer, a former Army researcher who worked on similar experiments in the ’70s, told the Caller-Times that he was alarmed.
“I went out on a test and saw some GIs dropping this material in a hopper. I yelled at them because they didn’t have any masks on, or any shirts for that matter,” Spomer recalled in one interview.
Leonard Cole, a professor at Rutgers University who wrote a book on Army biological warfare testing, told the Caller-Times that “even in the 1930s, there was knowledge that cadmium compounds could be dangerous.” The cadmium part of the compound, in high exposures, can cause kidney and liver failures, though the levels required were reportedly not sprayed. A government report found that “repeated exposures to zinc cadmium sulfide could cause kidney and bone toxicity and lung cancer.” But levels of zinc cadmium sulfide recorded in the area ranged from .002 to .007 micrograms per cubic meter of air, far below the 500 microgram threshold where tissue damage can occur.
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“Then there’s the ethical questions.”
The Bluff from roof of Carrier Building in Corpus Christi Texas.
DreamMedia/Getty Images
After the 1962 tests, another series of sprays occurred in 1966. From July 9 to July 31, 1966, the Army dropped 22 tons of tiny glass beads and cork particles coated in the cadmium compound over a 4,800-square-mile area between Corpus Christi and Freeport. Those tests were first revealed to the public in 1981, when the Church of Scientology filed a Freedom of Information Act request as part of its lobbying against chemical weapons testing in the ’80s. Testing was also done in the Abilene area, according to publicly available documents seen by Chron, but those tests are even more shrouded in mystery.
When the testing became public, scientists who looked over the results were dumbfounded. Spomer, the former Army researcher, told the Caller-Times that the spray study “wasn’t really good science.”
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“A lot of what they did was just stupid,” Spomer said in 1995. “They didn’t learn anything they couldn’t learn a lot cheaper from common sense about meteorology. And then there’s the ethical questions.”
In 1953, when the spray experiments are generally understood to have begun, the Army adopted an informal code that recommended against conducting experiments on people without their consent. That fact was brought up by many Coastal Texas residents who testified about the spraying in 1995.
“What I want to point out is that it isn’t fair for them to do this and never alert anybody,” Gene Crane, a pastor from Taft who testified that his wife, a longtime Corpus resident, had been treated for cadmium poisoning.
Crane told a local reporter in 1995 that his wife had been an artist, and some doctors thought that red and yellow paint pigments that contained cadmium could have been the culprits. But Crane wanted to report it anyway, just to be sure.
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“I’m glad they’re going to have this meeting so we can report this,” Crane said. “The fact that we had chemical warfare testing on our own people is terrible.”
Health experts who looked at the Corpus Christi tests after the 1994 disclosures were split on the dangers and potential health effects. But they all agreed on one thing: there was no way to be sure. Charles Feigley, an environmental health sciences professor at the University of Southern California, summed it up thusly in 1995.
“If it was used right, it’s likely there wasn’t a harmful dose, especially in a one-time test like in Corpus Christi,” Feigley said. “But there is no real way to tell. Usually, you don’t experiment with humans.”
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