Original subtitles

NARRATOR: They're watching you.

More than 5,000 satellites circle the Earth.

Every day, they uncover new

mysterious phenomena that defy explanation.

Revealed from the skies,

Hitler's secret horror lab.

RICHIE: Oh my God, look at this place.

What on Earth is this?

NARRATOR: The weird new plot to bring down America.

We're actually funding the terrorists to target us.

NARRATOR: And the mystery temple on Orgy Island.

We've only scratched the surface of

the horrors that may have gone on here.

NARRATOR: Baffling phenomena. Mysteries from space.

What on Earth are they?

**

**

**

Historian Alex Richie is traveling across the freezing

waters of the Baltic Sea,

heading for the Polish coast.

She's been drawn here by a weird

structure revealed from space on October 19th, 2019.

RICHIE: This structure is strange.

It's just like

large cubes of concrete that have been put into the ocean.

Just doesn't seem to have any purpose.

MUNOZ: It looks almost like an oil rig,

but the problem is you don't see offshore oil rigs

this close to shore.

HYMEL: It definitely looks foreboding and unwelcoming,

and it's been abandoned for a while.

NARRATOR: Richie's journey takes her to the Gulf of Gdansk.

It's only when the historian approaches

the structure that its true scale becomes apparent.

RICHIE: Oh, my God. Look at this place.

This is amazing.

NARRATOR: The massive ruins rise some 80 feet out of

the sea and appear on the brink of collapse.

RICHIE: This is just incredible.

It could be a Cold War structure,

but the thing about it is that it's so badly decayed.

NARRATOR: Richie thinks that the building's size

and composition point to another dark period in history.

If you look at the rebar construction,

it it's quite clear that this was most probably

a Nazi structure.

Now, this makes sense in many ways,

because this was an area that Hitler very,

very much wanted to control.

NARRATOR: The Gulf of Gdansk played a pivotal role

in World War II.

It was this stretch of water that

witnessed the very first shots of the conflict...

[cannons blasting]

...during the Battle of Westerplatte

on September 1st, 1939.

RICHIE: There are no signs of gun emplacements,

so it doesn't really make any sense as a defensive structure

at all.

So this implies that it is some sort of

testing facility of some kind.

Now, because it's on the water,

what does one test on the water?

The biggest clue of all

lies in these two

carefully calibrated

chutes right here,

which are directly under the tower.

They look to me

as if they might be torpedo bays.

NARRATOR: Wartime records confirm that Hitler

orders the construction of this massive torpedo

testing facility in 1940.

He hopes it will solve one of the greatest

technological problems faced

by Nazi Germany during the opening years of the conflict.

Torpedoes are a disaster early in the war.

They either miss their mark completely,

they blow up too soon, or in some cases, they circle

back and hit the submarine that fired them,

sinking that submarine.

[cheering]

NARRATOR: To secure an early victory in the conflict,

Hitler desperately needs his U-boat wolfpacks

to destroy the American convoys heading to Britain,

[boat horn blows]

strangling supplies to the beleaguered nation.

But a quarter of all his torpedoes failed,

allowing vital supplies to get through.

The torpedo not working, like anything else,

is going to infuriate Adolf Hitler.

He wants efficiency.

He wants mission accomplishment.

[shouting indistinctly]

NARRATOR: Hitler makes torpedo production

his number one priority,

inspired by the way Japanese planes

devastate the American fleet at Pearl Harbor.

[explosion blasts]

The fuhrer focuses the German war machines'

might on designing a revolutionary new

aerial torpedo.

Perhaps the greatest fear any Allied sailor would have

had during World War II was an aerial drop torpedo.

So what you're seeing here was an absolutely

central mission in their eyes for defeating Allies.

NARRATOR: These new torpedoes are one of several Wunderwaffe,

or Miracle Weapons,

Hitler develops an increasingly

desperate attempts to turn the tide of war.

Others include a mortar that fired shells the size of

a rhinoceros and the world's first rocket-powered

fighter plane.

Meanwhile, the Allies, in the neverending game of cat

and mouse, are making their own strange weapons,

including the bouncing bomb.

[crashing noises]

But the Nazi engineers working at

the structure in the image faced a monumental task.

The only aerial torpedo they have to work on is of an old

Italian design,

which has a failure rate of over 50%.

The Italian torpedo not only fails half the time, they also

are designed to be dropped from a low altitude,

a steady, slow path to your target, exposing the pilot to

all kinds of fire from the ship.

WALTERS: Now, you've got to imagine what it must be like

flying an airplane really quite low

towards a ship, which is firing at you.

That's just, you know, suicide.

NARRATOR: Scientists at the facility test

a series of devastating new torpedoes...

[whooshing noise]

[crashing noise]

...launching them from the structure or dropping them

from planes flying over the Gulf of Gdansk.

Looking at the satellite image,

I can see there are two towers far off across the bay.

And these would have had a net put between them so

that the torpedoes would have been caught

when they hit the net.

NARRATOR: But by the time

the experimental Nazi torpedoes are ready for action,

[gunfire blasting]

the Allies have all but destroyed the German air force,

rendering them obsolete.

WALTERS: If you don't have aerial superiority,

it doesn't matter whether this torpedo works.

So therefore, these torpedoes end up

becoming kind of a white elephant.

NARRATOR: In 1945, as the Red Army sweeps through Poland,

the Nazi scientists abandon the secret facility seen

from space,

and it crumbles to ruin.

RICHIE: It's an amazing structure,

and in many ways is a testament to

the folly and the horror of -- of World War II.

**

NARRATOR: Coming up,

Afghan drug lords versus America.

In the end, terrorist groups will be the winners.

NARRATOR: And a buried mystery on Treasure Island.

Straightaway, I'm thinking,

is this some kind of pirate base?

NARRATOR: September 10th, 2019.

High above western Afghanistan,

a satellite scans Farah province,

searching for new threats to America and its allies.

This area of Afghanistan is continuously being monitored.

Because it's so remote,

and because of the lack of governance,

it's a place where terrorists and other criminal activity

take place.

NARRATOR: A new structure in

the hostile Bakwa district catches analysts' attention.

This is strange.

There is a small compound, and near

this building, we have this dark spot.

SZULGIT: It's some kind of liquid pool.

Whatever it is, it appears to be leaking out of the building.

NARRATOR: Maxar's SecureWatch technology reveals dozens

of other weird pools

have recently sprung up across the district.

The signatures that we're seeing in these

satellite images are part of a disturbing trend.

The formation of these pools is something

that has exploded in this part of Afghanistan.

NARRATOR: For some reason,

the mystery compounds are attracting

the might of the U.S. military,

which has launched over 60 airstrikes against them

in recent months.

The U.S. military doesn't just

bomb some place for no reason whatsoever.

Whatever these black pools are,

it's some serious stuff.

What's so dangerous about these that

they warrant such a strong military response?

NARRATOR: Intelligence reports indicate there are

as many as 20 terrorist cells operating in these arid lands.

CARTER: We know that Al Qaeda had a lab that

actually attempted to make chlorine and mustard gas

in Afghanistan.

All you really need is a small lab hidden away

from the rest of the world to make this stuff.

So perhaps they're using these compounds to build

our manufacturers some type of chemical or biological weapons.

NARRATOR: But the military's response

to the compounds doesn't support

the idea that they are terrorist factories making

deadly chemical agents.

If this was a chemical weapons site,

the military probably would have done more than just

attacking it from the air.

[explosion blasts]

NARRATOR: The number of targeted compounds suggests this

is a different large-scale criminal enterprise.

One thing Afghanistan is known for is heroin,

so maybe this is a different kind of lab making heroin out

of opium, and this pool is wastewater

from that process.

NARRATOR: Afghanistan produces 90% of the world's

opium and 85% of all heroin,

generating $6.6 billion in revenue a year.

Afghanistan has a near global monopoly on heroin.

The Taliban controls much of the drug trade in Afghanistan,

and they utilize that activity to basically raise money for

their operations.

NARRATOR: In February 2020,

intelligence operatives conduct a mission

off the coast of Sri Lanka

that sheds new light on what's happening inside

the mystery compounds.

The Sri Lankan government actually raided a ship

they believed was carrying just Afghan heroin

and found a huge quantity of a different type of

illegal drug, and that's methamphetamine.

It turns out that crystal meth production is a huge problem in

rural Afghanistan,

and labs are sprouting up in an otherwise empty dessert.

NARRATOR: Crystal meth is a highly addictive

stimulant that affects the central nervous system.

The recent surge of production in Afghanistan has

seen a 600% increase in seizures of the drug.

The boom is the result of a huge natural advantage

the Afghans have over criminals trying to produce

the drug in the West.

Meth is made using a chemical precursor called ephedrine,

and this is normally extracted from cold and flu tablets.

Afghan meth cookers have figured out that

they can produce their own precursor chemical.

They can make ephedrine from a plant.

SZULGIT: Ephedra grows wild in the deserts of Afghanistan,

so there's this endless,

cheap, and easy-to-get supply for anyone living in the area.

NARRATOR: The Afghan species of the ephedra plant

contains particularly high concentrations of ephedrine.

They grind it down, right, dry it out, soak it in water,

hence your wastewater and these runoff pools,

and then filter it.

Boom, you got your precursor chemical.

The signatures that we see, the slit trench,

the pool of liquid,

are telltale signs of a methamphetamine lab.

NARRATOR: In just this one district,

300 meth labs have recently sprung up.

In a single day in May of 2019,

U.S. forces destroy 68 of them.

But analysis suggests the surviving labs can produce

around 70 tons of the drug each month.

It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that

the meth being produced in Afghanistan could be moved

towards the U.S.

NARRATOR: Almost a million Americans now use crystal meth,

spending almost $50 billion a year on the drug.

And the explosion in production in Afghanistan

could soon see yet more

drug money being funneled into terrorists' pockets.

Think about the ability that gives them, right, to create

more havoc and murder and mayhem

out in the world is they push their terrorist agenda.

[bomb whooshes]

NARRATOR: The war on terror is estimated

to have cost around $6.4 trillion...

...over $19,000 per U.S. citizen.

The satellite images from Afghanistan reveal

the true cost could soon be much higher.

So here's the trick, right?

We take the product, we are the addicts,

and we're actually funding terrorists to target us.

NARRATOR: Coming up,

death in paradise.

He was literally hacked to death with machetes.

And secrets and lies on the island of sin.

This is actually an island owned

by none other than Jeffrey Epstein.

NARRATOR: May 2019.

Archaeologists take to the skies above

an archipelago 600 miles west of Ecuador.

This is the Galapagos Islands, uh, considered to

be among the most pristine environments on the planet.

HORTON: The Galapagos are famous because it was where

Charles Darwin made all

the amazing discoveries, where the theory of evolution

was evolved.

NARRATOR: Evolution was a deeply controversial idea

in Darwin's day.

But because of his landmark work here,

the islands are preserved as an unspoiled virgin wilderness.

However, as the team scans a forested region

on San Cristobal Island,

they capture a lidar image of something unexpected.

HORTON: Well, this is really intriguing.

It shows structures, which hidden below

the dense vegetation.

CADDICK-ADAMS: There are all these rectangles and squares,

which is really odd,

because those shapes shouldn't be there.

NARRATOR: Archaeologists wonder if the hidden structures

are the legacy of people who may have

visited these shores long before the arrival of

Charles Darwin.

HORTON: One possibility is the Incas.

In the 1950s, people went to the Galapagos and found

about 2,000 shards of pottery,

including one they interesting piece of an Inca flute.

[flute playing]

BELLINGER: It suggests Inca activity in this area,

but not enough to prove that this was an Inca settlement.

NARRATOR: After the Conquistadors

annihilate the Inca,

they plunder their empire for gold,

and the Galapagos become a stop-off

for Spanish ships laden with treasure.

Where there are Spanish treasure galleons,

there are pirates.

NARRATOR: Bloodthirsty pirates found these islands

to be perfect hunting grounds.

[indistinct shouting]

Most famous among them is Englishman Sir Francis Drake,

who operates with the permission of the Queen.

She wants him to drain

the resources of the Spanish Empire,

and he's only too happy to help, adopting tactics

so brutal they earn him the nickname El Draque,

the Dragon.

The Galapagos offer a pirate a gift.

No one is ever going to find you.

So straightaway, I'm thinking,

is this some kind of pirate base?

NARRATOR: When archaeologists study the site

in the image, they discover

the structures are a legacy of a different chapter

in these islands' twisting history.

HUNT: Recent investigations shows

that here we have all the traces

of industrialization, the remnants of

a transformation of this tropical paradise

100-plus years ago.

NARRATOR: Theo excavations reveal the site in the image

is the relic of an extraordinary

economic phenomenon --

the sugar boom of the 1800s.

HUNT: Sugar was possibly the most lucrative crop

of the 19th century,

and the term for sugar becomes synonymous with white gold.

NARRATOR: Between the 17th and 19th centuries,

fueled by plantations in the Americas, annual sugar

consumption skyrockets.

In Britain alone, it jumps from

the weight of 4 pounds per person to almost 100 pounds,

a 22-fold increase.

Whether it's for candy or just as a food additive,

sugar becomes ubiquitous in the diet.

NARRATOR: During the second half of the 19th century,

world coffee production also triples -- in 1875,

the vast riches generated by these

two cash crops lead entrepreneur Manuel J. Cobos

to construct the structures in the image.

It's the ultimate get rich quick scheme.

In just a few years, San Cristobal

goes from a pristine wilderness

to an industrial powerhouse.

NARRATOR: Cobos transforms what today looks like

an unspoiled paradise

into 3,000 acres of coffee and sugar cane fields,

growing rich on the 500 tons of sugar it produces each year.

HORTON: He called this establishment

the Hacienda del Progreso.

The, as it were, the Progress Farm, which was kind of ironic

given the conditions in which people were working.

NARRATOR: Just like the plantations in the Caribbean

that inspired El Progreso.

Cobos's wealth is built on a foundation of human suffering.

Cobos managed to secure a great number of prisoners

from Ecuador, who completed

their sentence, in service in his factories.

He treated them very,

very poorly and often meted out punishment personally.

NARRATOR: Cobos's tyranny and brutality turned

Darwin's paradise into a festering hellhole.

Floggings and imprisonment for minor offenses are commonplace.

Disease and death are rife.

BELLINGER: This enormous factory complex has been

described as a concentration camp like place.

HUNT: The work conditions were so desperate

that his own workers rose up against him

and struck him down.

BELLINGER: Karma did its thing.

They shot him three times with his own gun.

[gunshots blasting]

They threw him out of the window,

but he survived the fall and crawled into a nearby ditch.

But the workers then discovered him,

and he was literally hacked to death with machetes.

NARRATOR: Without the tyrant holding it together,

El Progreso falls into ruin

and is slowly reclaimed by the jungle.

The only clue to its industrial past

swallowed by history until revealed once more

from the skies.

It's amazing to think that at some point, this place was

a thriving sugar and coffee producing machine,

and now it's back to being wilderness.

NARRATOR: Coming up, the power of 10,000 suns.

This is full-on James Bond villain level technology.

It's a proper Death Ray.

NARRATOR: And a stinking river of death.

This place has been nicknamed the Slow-Motion Chernobyl.

NARRATOR: March 1st, 2017,

420 miles above southwest France.

The GeoEye-1 satellite

captures this image.

LINSELL: It looks like a giant row of open laptops.

It's really weird.

SZULGIT: When you look at it closely,

you can see it's clearly a structure

that spans a huge space.

The cars are tiny in comparison.

NARRATOR: Closer analysis suggests the laptop-like

features are lines of giant mirrors.

You can see that when the sun hits these white squares,

they're highly reflective.

Studying the image, Greg Szulgit

thinks he recognizes the mirrors'

distinctive arrangement.

What we're actually

looking at are heliostats,

squares of thousands of mirrors that are all angled

so the energy gets focused into one tiny surface.

NARRATOR: The mirrors combine to concentrate huge amounts of

sunlight into a highly focused beam

just 31 inches in diameter.

You're taking all of the sunlight energy,

and you're focusing it on a single spot so that

it gets up to 6,000 degrees Fahrenheit,

which is hot enough to melt most metals.

NARRATOR: The destructive power of this beam raises fears that

the image is evidence of some kind of solar weapon.

If you were to stand there, you would be incinerated.

It's not an exaggeration to say that this

is full-on James Bond villain level technology.

It's a proper Death Ray.

NARRATOR: A solar-powered Death Ray sounds like

pure science fiction,

but there is historical evidence to suggest it might be

a very real possibility.

According to a second century historian,

in 212 B.C., the inventor Archimedes used

an arrangement of mirrors to repel an invading Roman fleet,

and both the Vikings and Egyptians are known

to have harnessed the destructive power of the sun.

Even the Nazis are rumored to have thought about focusing

huge amounts of sun

into a giant beam that could just vaporize

whole sections of a city.

The Nazi super weapon is called the Sonnengewehr,

a huge, reflective metallic dish

attached to an orbiting space station.

Building it was beyond the limits of

wartime technology,

but Wernher von Braun, the father of rocketry,

took it so seriously that he continued to lobby the U.S. to

build a similar device right up to the 1960s.

It's a bit like a giant version of a kid

taking a magnifying glass and killing ants on the ground.

NARRATOR: The mirrors in the image appear to be stationary,

making them unsuitable for use as a weapon,

but the site could nonetheless serve a military purpose.

What we're seeing here is a sort of tree-like structure

with a concave building at the end,

and that makes me think this is a solar furnace.

NARRATOR: The location of the image

corresponds with a facility known as Odeillo,

the largest solar furnace in the world.

By bouncing sunlight off an eight-story concave

mirror and into a laboratory,

it creates a beam of 3,200 kilowatts...

...equivalent to the concentrated energy

of 10,000 suns.

What they're doing with this energy is they're using it

to create and test

some of the most high-tech materials on planet Earth,

and to just pummel it with intense amounts of energy.

NARRATOR: Exactly what happens here is secret,

but we do know that the solar furnace is critical

to the success of multibillion-dollar space

and military projects.

MOSHER: This facility is helping develop space-age materials

that can withstand the temperatures,

the punishing heat of atmospheric re-entry.

NARRATOR: When a rocket or missile reaches space,

temperatures around it drop to as low as

455 degrees below zero.

On re-entry, a nose cone can reach

12,000 degrees Fahrenheit,

2,000 degrees hotter than the surface of the sun.

If the hardware cannot handle this sudden temperature change,

it induces a potentially catastrophic phenomena

called thermal shock.

You have this blistering plasma ahead of you,

heating up the spacecraft,

and then you come into the cool atmosphere below it.

That can really shock that

material and cause it to buckle or break.

NARRATOR: To prevent disaster in the skies,

engineers at the solar furnace bombard the latest composites

with superheated beams,

testing them to destruction.

This is a highly efficient way of using sunlight to

bring them up to these temperatures

and see how they react.

NARRATOR: The destructive power of the facility

seen from space is also being used

to further mankind's understanding of the cosmos.

This facility could be leading us to the next phase of human

exploration of deep space by helping develop

materials that allow us to go into atmospheres like that of

Mars and survive to tell the tale.

NARRATOR: Coming up,

Jeffrey Epstein's mystery island lair.

What took place on that island has

remained secret for a very long time.

And attack of the killer foam.

Touching this foam can burn humans,

and it can strip the paint off of cars.

[satellite beeps]

NARRATOR: April 4th, 2017,

an Earth imaging satellite

scans a land mass in the U.S. Virgin Islands.

This is a beautiful island in

the Caribbean with beaches and blue waters.

There is one building on this island

that's a little strange, though.

WALTERS: It's got this gold-domed roof,

and then on the kind of ground in front of it

is kind of what looks like mosaics.

I mean, there's no other word for it.

It looks like a temple.

NARRATOR: The mosaics are in a distinct

and intriguing pattern,

and there appeared to be statues on the roof.

CARTER: They were purposefully done.

Whoever had this built intentionally

put those symbols on the building.

NARRATOR: The structure is strange enough,

but what's weirder is who built it.

This is actually an island owned

by none other than Jeffrey Epstein.

NARRATOR: Notorious financier and convicted sex offender

Jeffrey Epstein purchases

the 70-acre Little Saint James Island for $8 million in 1988.

He hires a staff of 70 and uses the lavish villa on

its northern tip to host a series of now notorious

private parties.

CARTER: Little Saint James has some pretty terrible nicknames.

Island of Sin, Orgy Island.

Given what we know about Jeffrey Epstein, you have to be

suspicious about this island, and in particular,

even more suspicious about this isolated building

on the island.

NARRATOR: In 2019, Epstein is arrested for

trafficking and sexual assault of minors.

He dies in prison awaiting trial.

Since then, the island has been

a no-go zone patrolled by armed guards.

The aerial images offer a rare insight into

the mind of one of the 21st century's most infamous people.

WALTERS: What took place on that island has

remained secret for a very long time.

This temple-like structure, it could

be at the heart of the whole Epstein mystery.

Historian Guy Walters recognizes some

features of the strange structure's design,

features which provides disturbing clues

to why Epstein built it.

We are looking here at something incredibly

similar to something from the Middle East.

It's a kind of cube,

it's a rigidly square rectangular structure.

It's got a curved dome.

This is really reminiscent of bathhouses

that were built by the Mamluks.

The Mamluks were a fearsome caste of

warriors who ruled Egypt and Syria for centuries.

Their name translates as slave soldiers.

WALTERS: What's really chilling when you consider

this building in relation to the Mamluks

is the Mamluks also had some pretty unsavory

habits themselves.

I mean, they would kidnap young boys and force them to

become warriors, but they would also kidnap

young girls and force them into sexual slavery.

NARRATOR: Unlike the Mamluks, there is no evidence that

the structure in the image was used

as a kind of bathhouse.

But Walters has uncovered accounts that provide

other clues to what went on inside.

There's testimony about soundproofing,

so there's an explanation.

Could be it's a recording studio,

but I don't think Jeffrey Epstein has known

to be a musician.

NARRATOR: Walters's image analysis yields

more possible evidence.

You've also got this other really sinister feature of this

path that kind of emerges from the back of the hill.

Is it just a path to a store room,

or is there some sort of underground room where other

things can go on?

NARRATOR: The allegations of sexual abuse against Epstein

are now a matter of public record,

but none of his accusers have spoken about what may

or may not have happened inside his clifftop temple.

WALTERS: You don't wanna let your imagination get the better

of you, because otherwise

it's gonna take you to a very dark place indeed.

What we do know is that Epstein

certainly lived in those very dark places.

We've only scratched the surface of the type

of horrors that may have gone on here.

NARRATOR: Coming up,

white death.

SZULGIT: The river is thought to have caused

more than 600 fatalities over the last decade.

[satellite beeps]

NARRATOR: March 27th, 2020.

Orbiting the Earth at a speed of 16,800 miles per hour,

the WorldView-2 satellite scans

a riverside town in the central Mexican state of Jalisco.

KOUROUNIS: Looking a little closer,

there's definitely something not right about this river.

What's weird about it is that the river is white.

NARRATOR: White patches stretch along several miles

of the Rio Santiago.

KOUROUNIS: Normally, when you see white water,

you think rapids, but this is not a mountainous area.

There's no rapids here.

So for some reason, the water here is being discolored.

But why?

NARRATOR: Reports from those living near

the weird white river provide a disturbing clue.

They talk about massive fish die off,

with thousands of them just lying in the water.

And they say the stench at times is completely unbearable.

NARRATOR: The death and stench correspond to the appearance

of the white foamy substance visible from space.

Local news reports actually say that touching this foam

can burn humans,

and it can literally strip the paint off of cars.

NARRATOR: Dozens of rivers span the border

between Mexico and the United States.

One, the New River, has cost both

governments almost $100 million to clean up,

and still the pollution flows into America.

Samples here provide clues to what has turned this stretch

of the Rio Santiago into a foaming toxic river of death.

NUNO: There are more than 1,000 different chemicals

and heavy metals being dumped into this river every year.

It includes phosphorus, lead, to mercury and even cyanide.

NARRATOR: The effects of this horrifying cocktail of

chemicals stretch well beyond the Santiago's riverbanks.

SZULGIT: The river is thought to have caused

more than 600 fatalities over the last decade.

KOUROUNIS: The people living along the river are forced to

live with cancer rates that are nine times the Mexican average.

This place has been nicknamed the Slow-Motion Chernobyl.

NARRATOR: Just a generation ago,

the Rio Santiago was teeming with life,

a tourist hot spot known as the Mexican Niagara.

But it is now one of the world's most

polluted rivers.

This area has seen somewhat of an industrial boom,

and there are all kinds of multinational corporations that

have set up shop along the banks

of this river with their processing plants and factories.

NARRATOR: As the water moves downstream,

it flows past more than 300 large industries,

which have sprung up on

the river banks over the past five decades.

SZULGIT: Paper mills, pharmaceutical companies,

industries -- all of these can dump

ridiculous amounts of waste.

Where does it go? straight into the river.

SCHUTTLER: On the days when the foam really builds up

and starts to creep and grow out of the river,

parents actually keep their children locked up inside

the houses -- it's that dangerous.

NARRATOR: Lax official regulations mean there's

no limit to how many local industries can pump

waste into the Rio Santiago,

and the companies are not obliged

to allow inspectors into their facilities.

Authorities have ignored the pollution for years,

but now it's starting to catch up.

NARRATOR: Around 40% of local children regularly

suffer from respiratory illnesses or throat infections.

And the future for others living near

the Slow-Motion Chernobyl looks no less bleak.

SZULGIT: The mercury and the arsenic in this water

is polluting entire food chains,

and those effects will be for generations to come.

SCHUTTLER: It is shockingly sad

that you can see pollution from space.

This is something we should be ashamed of.