Environment: Dead Cats, Toxins and Typhoid

For twelve years Biologist Phil Gruenberg has watched a foul parade float down the New River, a bile-green waterway that slices across the Mexico- California border. While scooping up water samples near the border town of Calexico, Calif., he has seen dead cats and chickens bob past, along with tires, slaughterhouse waste, laundry suds and human feces, and once, a dead man's body. The unseen horrors are, if anything, even more disturbing: the New is saturated with toxic chemicals and teems with disease-causing viruses and bacteria. Warns Imperial County Health Department Officer Dr. Lee Cottrell: "It's an environmental disaster waiting to...