The Daily Press in Newport News has been busy doing what newspapers should do - investigating wrongdoing and alerting the public to it.

In this case, the Army’s wrongdoing has potentially deadly consequences.

The newspaper reported earlier this year that the Army secretly dumped some 64 million pounds of chemical weapons in the Atlantic Ocean off at least 11 states from 1945 to 1970.

Their initial stories prompted a Florida man to come forward and reveal that the Army also dumped radioactive waste off the Virginia coast in 1960.

Ellis R. Cole said he helped winch hundreds of 55-gallon barrels into the ocean. They were labeled “radioactive,” and Cole said he had to shower eight to 10 times each time he left the ship’s hold to get the Geiger counter to stop detecting dangerous levels of radiation on his body.

Cole, now 64, is surely not the only man who remembers these clandestine dumping excursions. Others need to come forward to help locate these caches of lethal weapons, which include 400,000 chemical-filled bombs, rockets and land mines.

There is no question that this dumping will come back to haunt the United States. Three artillery shells filled with mustard gas were dredged up by clammers off the New Jersey coast last summer. Three Air Force bomb-disposal technicians were burned when dismantling one of the shells, the Daily Press reported.

Now that this dirty secret has been exposed, the Army needs to take responsibility for its actions. The sites must be located and monitored to determine whether they can be safely left in their watery grave with ongoing monitoring, or whether they should be hauled out of the ocean for proper disposal.

While a cleanup would be expensive, it would be a fraction of what the Defense Department spends on a daily basis to make such messes in the first place. Future generations should not be strapped with the cleanup, or worse yet, be deprived of the knowledge that the chemical weapons are there.

The public would still be in the dark without the newspaper investigation, and undoubtedly, the Army would have preferred to keep it that way.

Army representatives assured U.S. Senator John Warner, R-Va., chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, that they are now working on the problem. Monitors have been installed off New Jersey and a search of all surviving Army records on ocean dumping has been ordered.

If the public is to feel that a thorough investigation is under way, however, a non-military agency must be involved in the process, and it must be open to public scrutiny.

The bigger point to this story is that the cavalier treatment of our water, land and air has got to come to an end. The world is a finite place and dumping waste anywhere has long-term consequences.

It would be the height of irony, for example, if offshore oil exploration released deadly chemical and radioactive weapons. Perhaps Congress should rethink its rush to search for oil and natural gas until it has a clue where all those weapons are buried.

It might also be a good idea to make illegal dumping illegal. Wonder what kind of fine the Army is going to have to pay?