Thousands of tests and field and laboratory have resulted in the development of major weed killers.

The action is physiological, appearing to upset the plant's growth processes and causing gradual but certain death.

Proved an action against hundreds of weeds and a wide variety of crops.

The Defense Department secretly launched a widespread aerial spraying program in Vietnam so that the enemy would be more visible.

Some American veterans are now claiming the health problems they have toda are connected to their exposure a decade earlier to agent Orange.

Agricultural chemists set ou to demonstrate the effectiveness of chemical killers on a nation wide scale.

At least 7 million pounds of those herbicides were sprayed on range and pasture land.

Crops.

Rights of way in forests.

After new fir trees are planted, competing growth is considered a problem.

We now manage the forests, cutting and replanting on a recurring cycle to produce timber as a crop.

We've been able to use herbicide very successfully.

Lots of young seedlings on their way to become.

Another commercial forest, free to grow.

And that is because of the use of herbicide.

I moved here because I wanted a quality kind of existence for myself and my children.

So that they would have good air to breathe and that they would have good water to drink.

Let's go.

Come on.

You and I just being able to be outdoors a lot of the tim and be able to forage and grow, garden.

When you're here, you just feel like you can breathe.

You live.

We get our drinking water from two streams that originate up above us on the hillside.

Then there's water systems that catch it.

It's gravity fed, so there's no no electricity needed.

And one of them feeds our garden and the other one feeds our house, filtering down over rock and through all the root systems and all the trees.

And it's just it's jus pristine, perfect clean water.

We still have filtration and everything, but the earth does all that filtration for us.

Is all completely forested.

It just looks so much bigger too, because that all is full of trees up on the hillside.

And this was much shadier than it is now.

We got the notice on July 20th that they would be spraying.

The reason for this, they had to kill off all the undergrowth so that the trees could grow freely and without being affected by all the thing that naturally grow in a forest.

I mean, it is a monoculture crop.

It's kind of being treated the same way that you would see any food crop being treated, trying to kill off the weeds around it so that they don't impede the growth of the crop.

They're trying to grow.

The window start day was July 22nd.

It goes till October 19th.

So anywhere in there spray activity may happen.

So then we started doing the research on what it was that they were actually going to spray.

It thinking that that was going to go into our water system, how are we going to water our garden, and how are we going to water the animals?

And how am I going to giv my kids a bath with that water?

Any time it rains that water is going to run down, go into our cistern and then I'm going to fill the tub so my kids take a bath in it.

We had a couple correspondences with them, but we had met with the representative of the company up on the hill, actually sitting overlooking our property.

This guy, he has children too, and so it felt like there might be a way to reason with him.

Why can't we go up there?

You know, and just, like, cut back some of the undergrowth why does it have to be sprayed?

And it became apparent pretty quickly that he was there just to appease us and to listen, but not absorb the things we were saying?

I guess I was trying to appeal to his humanity or something, and I was like, well, would you stand under a helicopter?

I mean, that's what you'r asking us to do as a family is.

And he's like, oh, I have I do that.

The bottom line is he' got to do what he's got to do.

And people have been doing it for a long time.

There's no support out there for people in the situation.

Today we're discussing rules for helicopter pesticide spray applications.

These are typically done in recently harvested areas with newly planted trees.

The Oregon Department of Agriculture works with the Oregon Department of Forestr to regulate this pesticide use and to protect our natural resources.

The poisons again grew to a national controversy in 1978, because rural northwest residents complained about their use on forests.

And we've always wanted to have a small farm raise some animals.

We raised goats and chickens and have pets.

In the mornings I walk outside and say, kids, and they all go, wow!

Yell at me back.

My name is Aaron King.

I lives near Triangle Lake with my family.

We have had this place since 2007.

In the spring 2008 is when we found ou about the helicopter spraying.

So when we first moved out here, I did absolutely know all about the logging.

What I did not realize happened was the aerial spraying that was a complete surprise getting that information.

It was just shocking.

I mean, I spent hours sitting there at that window, just like they're going to spray right there.

I'm going to be able to watch it.

Because, I mean that just brought our attention to that one.

And that's when I found out, oh my God, they're spraying everywhere.

We are headed up.

One of the main arteries toward the top of Triangle Lake is what I call it.

So this is a clear cut that has been replanted.

And in the Forest Practices Act, they have a rule that states that their seedlings must be free to grow within a certain amount of time, to be a certain height.

And so they aerial spray.

So that all this other stuff will die off and their seedlings can get taller.

You can see that clear cut right over there.

They'll eventually spray that.

Everything goes down into Triangle Lake.

They haven't tested that lake since the 70s.

I just thought I'd throw that out there.

Our sun started getting really sick.

Rowan would just have bloody noses out of nowhere.

We'll come to find out later on.

That's actually a symptom of exposures to pesticides.

I started getting these weird cysts in different places.

It's exactly a week after I filmed this spray.

And that's wh we started making a stink about.

We need to get our urine tested right?

Testing for pesticides in urine is hugely expensive.

Doing any kind of testing is expensive.

We got roughly 21 people and everyone tested positive.

Everyone.

My name is Daryl Ivey, and, well, I'm a helicopter mechanic.

We ran out of money, so I took a job, driving a truck off of an ad out of, Craigslist.

And they had helicopters involved, so I figured I'm knowledgeable in helicopters, so I'd be a shoo in the first day I showed up on the job.

I'm in a giant 5000 gallon tanker truck full of atrazine and 214 year brushfire.

Okay, three other chemicals.

I noticed them, locking gates behind us, which was to me.

Why are we locking the gates behind us?

We needed water for the chemical truck.

And so we pulled u to a gorgeous, pristine creek, and you can see the little.

The baby salmon's in it.

See, here we are again, coming out of a creek over there is barrels and barrels of concentrate.

Here's our best truck with, worn out seals on the lids.

And so I started just filming.

I have had no training whatsoever about these chemicals.

I really don't know what can go where.

I just have common sense.

As a federal mechanic, I still haven't got a straight answer from anyone on why we tear all the labels off of everything, but there was a lot of little things here that just didn't make sense because the label sai keep away from fish, anything, drinking water, it doesn't matter.

Keep it away from the creeks.

And yet here we were, actually right there with the truck putting contaminated things in it.

I didn't know what to make, you know, a lot of thoughts went through my head.

Maybe I'm being overcautious.

Maybe I'm the weirdo because there's a forestry representative, that's been doing this for umpteen years, and he's not upset.

My pilot's been doing it 20 years.

This other truck driver doing it.

No one seems to think this is an issue.

So maybe I'll just continue doing my job.

We were told to get in the vehicles, and, I realize that he was going to spray us.

Well, where's the deer at?

Down to the right by the timber.

I take it they run off when the helicopter comes flying, sprays them?

Yeah, they they run off.

They they don't get sprayed.

There's about a 12 mile an hour wind blowing it right at me.

Look at the drift on this right here.

Holy moly.

It's drifting hardcore.

We drove the vehicles down to the creeks again to refill because we needed more water and all the chemicals from th helicopter spraying the trucks.

We're getting rained on, putting contaminated things in it.

California has become the first state to require popular weedkiller roundup to come, with a label warnin that it's known to cause cancer.

Numerous jurisdictions have banned or restricted the use of glaze fate.

These include the Netherlands, Germany, France, Portugal, El Salvador, Argentina and Denmark, which are contributing to the severity of wildfires, harming wildlife and watching the chemical wor its way through our food supply.

As Rachel Carson once wrote, the right to make a dollar at whatever cost is seldom challenged.

It is the public that is being asked to assume the risks.

We talked about glyphosate and the chemicals they're using, and he replied, it looks like he found some scientists to back up that glyphosate is not killing people.

And to a list includes frying food is to a nightshift work to a very hot beverages, to a red meat to a glyphosate, to a what's to.

That's how they rated it.

He's basically saying glyphosate is as dangerous as drinking a very hot beverage.

That's where they classified it.

That's not like they're trying to prove points to us.

I just feel like he's not willing to have this conversation.

He's more trying to, like, prove to us that it's safe.

And it's just it's no brainer to us that it's not.

In the meantime, life is happening.

You know, it would almost be easy to say well, we'll just leave the day they spray and then we'll come back.

But it' unfortunately not that simple.

There's a lot that needs to be done.

If they spray, we're going to shut off our systems.

We don't want to collect any water while the spray is happening.

And so how much wate can we catch before they spray?

We put up a camera to capture them spraying so we can, you know, see if they're following the guidelines and just the process in general.

When we took water samples to test the chemicals that they're intending to use, when they spray, after they spray, we're going to be testing the water again to see if anything shows up.

So we spent a long time, lik trying to figure out how we were going to put a plastic cover over the entire garden.

We are going to lay plastic over the whole garden so that we could try to harvest what we have here and salvage and keep it as clean as possible.

Out here.

It's happening right at harvest time for us, which is hard.

There's a lo that comes out in the fall time.

We're still writing letters and emails and we haven't heard back.

We haven't heard back from pretty much everybody we have contacted on this situation.

So I'm trying to not sound hopeless and feel hopeless here.

They've got to start listening to some of the residents and our right.

By myself experienced a miscarriage, which I at first thought might be just, you know, in the normal course of affairs, but found out later that, various agencie had been spraying two, 4 or 5, in and around our immediate area here.

I thought at firs that that may be coincidental, until I discovere that there were many other women in the area who had miscarriages in the spring time, very closely following major herbicide application.

I mean, I have to move because of my knowing that I am exposed to this stuff and I have no choice in the matter.

My daughter has no choice of of whether or not she drinks these things.

Several times a week we talk about moving.

Even though this seems like just the perfect dream spot, you know?

You know how, helpless we are here.

You.

When you live in a rural part of Oregon, you live under the Oregon Right to Farm and Forest Act, which takes away rights immediately.

You live in timber land and that you abide by these separate rules.

The Oregon Department of Forestry gets kicked into action.

Right.

So they contacted the Oregon Health Authority, and they did this whole big thing and created this exposure investigation and tested the citizens an basically found the same thing, this, you know, report got sent off to all the agencies.

They had to sign off on, the timber industry.

So w we got different versions of it through our lawyer that shows you what they crossed out, what they said no to the investigation, basically held hands with the timber industry.

They didn't even use some of the data that was collected because they were kids.

Had they put the kept those children's results in there, we would have been in the 95th percentile and that would have triggered more testing and more investigation.

Yeah.

But as is, it got swept under the rug.

So we were doing a lot of recording video recording our operations.

We had recently got a CB so we could listen to them.

I was filming them doing their thing.

They started talking about us on the the CB.

So I got my camera started, pointed at the CD and just started, you know recording what they were saying.

Which.

They were to watch people all going, you talking about?

Yeah.

You want to know if they're going to kno what you're talking about?

Me.

And then one guy pipes up and says, oh, that's great.

Met that with my neighbor again.

He just had sniper gun literally threatening our lives.

I've loaded the helicopter 11 times today and I've been directly spraye today, but just being around it, my my throat is burning.

As you can tell, my eyes are all puffy.

There's spra coming off the top of the truck where the chemical are leaking out the top patches because we just topped it off down at the river there.

You, don't fly right over top of those houses down there and spook the neighbors.

Hey, just.

You just said wonder why the hell.

There's so many things wrong with this scene that I don't even know where to begin.

And this is calle their reforestation department.

By the way, the forestry.

I just got sprayed.

If you didn't notice it.

I honestly don't know where to begin.

Breathing these chemicals all day long.

And 17 days later, I was in the emergency room.

I'm in the hospital right now.

The doctor didn't know what to do with me.

They didn't even have protocol with how to deal with me.

They still don't.

That's what I told them, that I had been, exposed to chemicals.

And they said, what kind?

And I pulled all the labels out.

And this one right here.

They seem to be very concerned about this.

Atrazine.

And they had me go outside the hospital, stand out there for 30 minutes while they readie their decontamination chamber.

They put my clothes into a sealed container.

And then I decontaminated it.

And then I went int a special room in the hospital.

That's for, contagious people.

You're isolated from the rest of the emergency room wing, and they called the CDC.

They called the poison control.

They called the Department of Forestry.

They called OSHA, an they called everybody in there.

Brothers.

Uncle.

Well, I just came out of the decontamination unit here at the hospital.

All my clothes are in biohazard bag.

They didn't even give me a, an IV bag to hydrate me to start flushing because i just it wasn't in the protocol.

They didn't know what to do.

If my child drank a bottle of roundup and ingested it, we could go get a test for him like that.

If you get sprayed early, they don't want you to get a test.

They put it in a cup and it sa in the hospital for three days.

I was basically asking, why is my pee still here?

Why was I lied to?

Told me that they needed a doctor's orders.

And so I grabbed the medical records that I just go three minutes prior downstairs.

Acute chemical exposure, poisoning.

And I was like, well, there's an emergency room doctor saying that I had poisoning.

And the doctor works at your hospital, so, okay, let's send it out.

And so I was escorted out of the hospital by risk management with security and told to take my clothes with me, which, by the way, nobody wanted to take chain of custody on those either.

And this is my bucke that they put all my clothes in.

Obviously, they think that, this is definitely dangerous and a contamination.

The fact of the matter is that with a very sophisticated medical establishment, with a rather large government apparatus, a large corporate apparatus, none of these entities ever discover police work.

Is this government.

In fact, I suggest that the sophisticated apparatus is there to disguise.

And to obfuscate and to conceal.

When we are meeting with people about the sprays, public meetings, you know, they they think we're trying to take their jobs away.

And we keep telling them it's it's if you were to stop using one man spray helicopter, you drive a helicopter you would create a lot of jobs.

If they can go on that mountain and plant trees, they can go and remove the weeds, which is a thin that we reiterated all the time, all the way up the mountain.

They do that by hand, but they say they can't do that when they are spraying.

And that just is mind blowing because that would create a lot more jobs.

After negotiating with them on backpack spraying versus helicopter spraying, they agreed to backpack spray and it was rather fast.

We got home, we could smell it.

I was like, man, that's a familiar smell.

What is that?

And to me, it smelled like the stuff you put on your dog's like between their shoulders for their fleas.

We got the water test back from the lab for the second testing after they sprayed, and it came back with three of the chemicals that they had used, all detected in our water and our drinking water.

According to the report.

We worry all the time because we're, you know we're living off of this water.

Now, we won't know long term effect until things start popping up.

That's what we've been trying to avoid.

But it's always in the back of our minds.

It's just going to come back and get us later.

It's a worry.

I feel like, my country is a traitor to the cause that put us here.

For 21 years, I taught kids tha this was the land of the free.

The.

That there was no country like America, and that you didn't have to watch your neighbors to be sure that he didn't kill you.

It's hard to believe.

Since 2008, when I started this whole journey of trying to end the aerial spraying, I do feel like I have made some headway, at least out here, because people now say, oh, I don't ever hear the helicopters, and because they don't do the helicopters out here anymore, they just backpack spray out here.

Because they don't want the PR nightmare.

I was giving them a PR nightmare.

Like, literally.

I don't even have log trucks driving down this road.

They go about the back wa so they don't disturb my peace because I will disturb their peace is what happened.

So.

Yeah.

There are other ways of logging that don't use the spray and have other economic implications.

The alternative to herbicide is manual intensive labor, but it would keep the money in the pockets of the local people instead of shipping it off somewhere.

You know.

And.