Quote:Imagine a place so saturated with toxic, cancer-causing chemicals that it's in the dirt people walk on, the air they breathe - even the blood that pumps through their veins.

The 24,000 people living in Anniston, Ala., don't have to imagine this. Many of them are living it. In fact, they have been living it for decades - they just didn't know it. The company responsible didn't tell them, and neither did the Environmental Protection Agency.

60 Minutes aired this story last November, and just last week there was a major development.

Monsanto and its corporate spin-off, called Solutia, agreed to pay $700 million in damages and clean-up costs to the community. Correspondent Steve Kroft reports. Today, parts of Anniston are so contaminated that residents have been told not to grow vegetables in the soil, kick up dirt, eat food, chew gum or smoke cigarettes while working in their yards.

Quote:"Our children have to play in the streets, on the sidewalks, because they can't play in the grass because it's contaminated," says resident David Baker.

"We have to wear masks if we cut our grass. Where else in the United States of America are people doing that?"

Quote:They were invented in Anniston in 1929 and manufactured here by Monsanto for almost 40 years - a source of wealth and jobs until the 1970s, when it became clear that PCBs were doing more harm to the environment than good for industry.

They were banned in 1979, but the people here are still living with the legacy.

"In my judgment, there's no question this is the most contaminated site in the U.S.," says Dr. David Carpenter, a professor of environmental health at the State University of New York in Albany.

Carpenter has testified against PCB-makers and says every national and international health agency in the world lists PCBs as a probable human carcinogen.

Quote:As a result, approximately 20,000 current and former residents of Anniston have joined five different lawsuits against Monsanto for polluting their community, threatening their health and destroying their property. Monsanto dumped tons of raw PCBs directly into Snow Creek which runs by the plant. Five thousand additional tons are buried in a hillside and Baker believes they're still giving off fumes.

"This is part of Snow Creek. Stink Creek. Smell Creek," says Baker. "Where is PCBs coming from if you stop making it in 1971? You stop making this stuff in 1971 and I'm still breathing it in 2002."

Quote:Stewart uncovered close to a million pages of company documents that show Monsanto knew PCBs were a problem as early as 1938 - when scientists hired by the compay reported that rats exposed to the chemicals delivered liver damage. By the 1950s, Monsanto was urging its own workers to wear "proper protective clothing" and "respiratory equipment" when handling PCBs. Many of the documents dealing with PCBs or other pollutants were marked "Confidential: Read and Destroy."

"They were warned by the people who did those tests that they should warn their neighbors because children and animals might be affected by what was being released from their plant," says Stewart.

In 1969, Monsanto created a high level PCB Committee, whose mission was to "protect the image of the corporation" and "permit continued sales and profits." Even they concluded that PCBs will someday become "a global environmental contaminant." But no one let the community know the extent of the problem and little was said about it in the press.

Quote:In fact, people in Anniston might never have known about the contamination if it weren't for a man with the Soil Conservation Service, who pulled a badly deformed largemouth bass out of Choccolocco Creek in 1993. Instead of throwing it back, he decided to send it off to an independent lab for analysis, and discovered that the fish was loaded with PCBs.

By that time, the contamination had spread 40 miles downstream. The State of Alabama put out warnings not to eat local fish. And about the same time, Monsanto began quietly buying property in West Anniston, bulldozing houses and fencing off the land. Parts of the neighborhood looked like a ghost town.

Quote:But the residents of Anniston are also angry with the EPA, which was aware of the contamination since the 1970s, but never warned the community.