Emelle, Alabama Toxic Waste Cadillac

By Booth Gunter and Mike Williams

Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 1-7

Down in the Heart of Dixie, in the gently rolling hills of the Black Belt, lie gigantic pits–twice as wide as football fields are long–filled to the brim with an alphabet soup mix of dangerous chemicals.

Silver and maroon tanker trucks wind down a narrow blacktop, bringing the deadly leftovers from a chemical industry reluctant to change its wasteful ways. Against a white, moonlike landscape hailed as the Selma Chalk, the workers perform their duty. Into the 150-foot-deep pits go thousands of drums per day of foul-smelling chemical wastes. The trucks come and go. Workers stationed in the burial pits use tractors to make mud pies out of liquid chemicals and cement dust–because federal regulations require chemical wastes to be “solidified” before burial.

This is Emelle, Alabama, located three miles from the

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Mississippi border. This is home to what many call the largest hazardous waste dump in the United States, some say the world. In 1983, the dump accepted about 288,000 tons of hazardous wastes. It is the permanent residence for hundreds of thousands–perhaps millions–of gallons of toxic chemicals brought from around the country since the landfill opened in 1977.

This is Sumter County, a sparsely populated area, speckled with cattle ranches, farm ponds, ramshackle houses. About seventy percent of the seventeen thousand people living in the county are black. Almost all of the white children go to private schools; all black children go to the public schools, which are consistently ranked among the state’s worst. Unemployment for blacks is a way of life. Per capita income was $6,362 in 1982, about $2,300 below the state average.

Owners of the dump, Chemical Waste Management Inc.–the largest handler of hazardous wastes in the country–claim the “secure landfill” is the safest anywhere, that five hundred to seven-hundred feet of the highly impermeable Selma Chalk would prevent any leakage of poisonous chemicals for at least ten thousand years. Underneath the dump, some seven hundred feet down, lies the Eutaw Aquifer, a major source of drinking water for people of west and central Alabama.

Country neighbors of the dump–farmers, ranchers and poor blacks–have noticed the foul stench emanating from the dump for several years. But only recently have citizens across Alabama encountered the questionable origins and politics that accompanied the landfill’s evolution. And only recently have Alabamians discovered the lackadaisical manner in which state and federal regulators have monitored the dump for safety.

For years, operators of the dump maintained a close arrangement with state officials. That arrangement included a country barbeque thrown by the company for regulators. The state Health Department officer who signed the dump’s permit even bought stock in the company that owns the dump, and sold it after a three-for-one stock split.

It appears, though, that the close relationship has come to a grinding halt–after a barrage of newspaper stories, fervent action by environmental groups and interference by an Environmental Protection Agency whistleblower.

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The origins of the dump are cloudy–state incorporation records do not accurately reflect the original owners. In 1977, a group of men from a Tennessee engineering firm enlisted the help of James Parsons, who happened to be the son-in-law of Alabama Governor George C. Wallace, then serving his third term in office. With little public participation, the state Health Department, which had jurisdiction over hazardous waste disposal at the time, granted a permit to the group, called Resource Industries of Alabama. Shortly after the permit was issued, the company–which had retained a prominent local attorney, who was also a key Wallace campaign supporter–sold the then-340 acre landfill to Chemical Waste Management, a subsidiary of the billion-dollar, multi-national disposal giant, Waste Management, Inc.

The attorney, Drayton Pruitt, helped the company acquire about two thousand more acres, giving the landfill an anticipated lifespan of one-hundred years. Pruitt had been a local kingpin for years in Livingston, the Sumter County seat. He was mayor for twelve years. He was county attorney until recently when blacks finally won control of county government. His father had been a state legislator for about thirty years and a staunch Wallace supporter. Wendell Paris, chairman of the Minority Peoples Council in the county, describes the socio-economic setting in Sumter as little more than a modern feudal system, with Pruitt as the liege lord.

“The white people in Sumter County are as afraid of Dray on Pruitt as I am of a rattlesnake,” Paris says. “He’s a kingpin in several groups, where nothing comes in unless he says so.”

In 1982, Pruitt bought 229 acres from a state legislator who sponsored a law that gave Chemical Waste Management a monopoly on commercial hazardous waste disposal in Alabama. The law–called the Minus Act, after former Representative Preston “Mann” Minus–said the legislature had to approve of any new hazardous waste landfills in the

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state. After adverse press reports, Minus insisted that the Alabama Ethics Commission investigate his land deal with Pruitt. He was cleared by the subsequent investigation.

Since Chemical Waste Management took over operation of the site, the landfill has grown into a waste importer, drawing toxic shipments from forty-five states, Puerto Rico and Canada. The site accepts pesticides, industrial solvents, lubricants, industrial sludges, and highly toxic, suspected carcinogens such as DDT and PCBs.

But the company claims the 2,400-acre facility is the “Cadillac” of hazardous waste landfills. The Selma Chalk, company spokesmen say, is perhaps the most secure geological setting in the country for landfill disposal of toxic waste, because the impermeable character of the formation slows the movement of liquids to a snail’s pace. Scientists such as Dr. Kirk Brown of Texas A M University, however, point out that more studies are needed on the reaction of toxic wastes with materials typically used to line hazardous waste disposal trenches. Tests on materials other than the Selma Chalk have shown rates of movement up to one-hundred times greater than initial estimates when toxic substances are put into contact with liner materials. A University of Alabama engineering professor is currently conducting more research in the area, and plans to test the Selma Chalk.

The chalk is also marked by geologic faults, which can act as a conduit to the flow of liquids into subsurface layers. A consulting firm hired by Chemical Waste Management claims the faults at Emelle have “healed,” or closed themselves to the flow of liquids. The US Geological Survey, however, has proposed more research on the faults, but as yet has not obtained funding to carry out the work.

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Alabamians have only recently awakened to the fact that perhaps the largest hazardous waste landfill in the nation is busily burying what may be a time bomb in the rolling Sumter County countryside.

Linda Munoz, a quiet-spoken, part-time nurse who lives about twenty miles from the landfill in the town of Cuba, says most Sumter County residents never knew what went on at the Emelle site until years after the facility opened.

“Until I left some information at her house, one woman thought the place was a fertilizer factory,” she laughed. “It’s not that people here are ignorant, it’s just that there has been so little about it in the local papers.”

Ms. Munoz and a band of half a dozen others have been busy since this spring organizing a homegrown environmental group, which they call ACE, for Alabamians for a Clean Environment. They say their eventual goal is to close down the Emelle site, although at this early stage, they admit the struggle is an uphill battle.

“People are very fond of the money that comes from the landfill, so they won’t speak out,” said Ms. Munoz, referring to the high-paying jobs at the landfill and the $1.4 million in fees paid by the company to the county last year. The money is divided among county agencies, and helps fund everything from highway maintenance to the-historic preservation society.

“But the money is nothing compared to the risks,” says Ms. Munoz. “Groundwater is one of Alabama’s most important resources, and we’re appalled at how we’ve jeopardized our groundwater by allowing the landfill.”

The fact of the matter is that few of Sumter County’s citizens had any say at all in “allowing” the landfill to locate at Emelle–except, of course, for a handful of powerful white men like Drayton Pruitt. For years, Pruitt has run the county like an empire, and with the appearance of Chemical Waste Management, has simply taken his backwoods power-brokering several notches up the scale of intensity and profitability.

But Pruitt’s story is a familiar one, and, because of the Selma Chalk, it may be more familiar to those who live in the 250-mile long swatch of the Black Belt, where the formation located is located, than to people in any other part of the country.

Ted Lingham, mayor of the tiny Lowndes County village of Lowndesboro for “the past eight or ten years–I really can’t remember exactly how long”–was out in his pasture one day checking his cattle when he saw a drilling crew hard at work in a neighboring pasture.

“I asked them what they were doing and they wouldn’t answer for awhile, and then they told me they were drilling for oil,” said Lingham, who lives about fifteen miles southwest of Montgomery.

“Now I know you don’t drill for oil with a little bitty old gasoline-powered rig,” he said.

Lingham soon learned that the crew was drilling core samples for the nation’s second-largest hazardous waste disposal firm, Browning-Ferris Industries, Inc., which later purchased an option to buy two-thousand acres of land for a hazardous waste landfill not two miles from Lingham’s ranch. The option was sold by Lowndes County Probate Judge Harrell Hammonds, who, since the sale, “hasn’t been the most popular man in the county,” as one observer puts it.

When Lingham learned of the plan, he quickly mobilized his neighbors and headed a crowd of five hundred citizens who attended a meeting with company representatives.

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“We raised such a stink the company has slacked off its plans,” said Lingham.

Browning-Ferris was also shut out of Lowndes County by the Minus Act, but not before enlisting the aid of state Rep. Nelson Starkey of Florence, who tried unsuccessfully to convince lawmakers to repeal the act.

Chemical Waste Management has also attempted to expand its exploitation of the Selma Chalk by purchasing an option to buy 564 acres of land in the rural east Mississippi County of Noxubee–a site not twenty-five miles from Emelle, as the crow flies. The company moved into the area with little fanfare, and proceeded to locate a local powerbroker of sorts, purchasing an option from A.T. Evans, a member of the Board of Aldermen in the tiny town of Shuqualak, located about two miles from the proposed dump site. The Board of Aldermen in 1983 unanimously passed a resolution supporting the location of the landfill in the largely black county.

But other residents didn’t give Chemical Waste Management the chance to sneak into Noxubee County un-announced. Bill Thomas, a local lumber company executive, organized a drive that netted 3,500 signatures on a petition opposing the landfill–in a county with a total population that Thomas estimates at between eight thousand and ten-thousand.

“Every landfill eventually leaks,” Thomas says. “We’re sitting right on top of the water we drink, and if we pollute that, then all of us are going to have to leave–even Chemical Waste Management.”

Thomas doesn’t trust the company, either, citing a list of problems encountered at Chemical Waste Management sites in Colorado, Kansas, Illinois and Ohio.

“The past performance of the company has been terrible,” he said. “They have flagrantly violated EPA rules on PCB storage at Emelle. We don’t have confidence in them to operate a toxic waste site.”

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Thomas’ reference to PCBs at Emelle strikes at the heart of what has become a roiling controversy in Alabama in the past six months, a controversy that stretches from Waste Management headquarters in Oak Brook, Illinois, to the halls of EPA in Washington, to the offices of state legislators and regulators in Montgomery and finally to the homes of concerned residents in Sumter County and in Chickasaw, a small industrial port city near Mobile. The story of Chemical Waste Management and its “problem” with PCBs stored a Emelle has attracted nation-wide attention.

PCBs, an oil-based substance used to insulate electrical equipment such as transformers, were banned by EPA in 1977 after studies indicated they might cause cancer. So persistent are the constituent elements of the substance that federal laws prohibit the landfill disposal of PCBs in concentrations greater than five hundred parts per million. Such waste must be incinerated, and on land, incinerators must have expensive scrubbers to trap residues that might otherwise go up the incinerator’s stack and contaminate the air.

In the early 1970’s, several European companies pioneered the technology of adapting hazardous waste incinerators to ocean-going ships. The ships provided a clear advantage over land-based incinerators for two reasons: far out at sea, the fumes and unburned particles coming up the incinerator stack are deposited miles from populated areas. Also, depending on the regulations in force, incineration ships are not necessarily required to install scrubbers, which provides a competitive edge over land-based incineration.

Although several incineration ships operated out of European and Asian ports throughout the 1970’s, in the United States, EPA failed to write rules for regulating ocean. incineration, despite the urging of several congressional committees. Sailing in an unregulatd sea, Chemical Waste Management in 1980 bought a Dutch incineration vessel and in 1983 commissioned construction of a second toxic-waste burning ship. The vessels were christened the Vulcanus I and II.

EPA officials encouraged the company’s plans by granting

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two research permits that allowed the company to burn several hundred thousand gallons of PCBs and other waste in a specially-designated burn site located 190 miles off the coast of Brownsville, Texas. To load the ships, the company leased a docking slip in Chickasaw, Alabama.

Even though federal ocean incineration regulations still had not been adopted, EPA in 1983 appeared well on its way to issuing a permit that would have allowed the company to burn almost eighty million gallons of PCBs and other chlorinated wastes off Brownsville. Anticipating a prompt receipt of the permits, the company had been stockpiling PCBs from across the country at Emelle, which is located just 150 miles north of Chickasaw.

The company’s plans, however–and EPA’s cooperation–ran into a storm of protest in late 1983 when thousands showed up at public hearings in Brownsville and Mobile to protest the burns, as well as EPA’s handling of the permit.

Collette King, a thirty-six-year-old homemaker and mother of three, galvanized citizens in Chickasaw to oppose the company’s plans. They first drew battle with the company in March 1983 over its plans to build two large hazardous-waste storage tanks at the port facility to hold the waste until it could be loaded onto the ships. At that time, the only public hearings on ocean incineration had been held in Brownsville.

“We had to organize a letter-writing campaign,” says Ms. King. “EPA was going to make a decision for Alabama based on public hearings in Texas. And the loading facility for the thing is here in Chickasaw.”

Stung by the public outcry, EPA scheduled a public hearing in Mobile for November, 1983. Gulf Coast residents and environmentalists turned out en masse to express their anger and opposition at the company’s plans.

In February 1984, Ms. King’s group convinced the Chickasaw City Council to pass a tough ordinance restricting the hauling of hazardous waste through the town. The ordinance said such trucks traveling to the port could take only one route through town, a route which passed over a narrow, winding railroad viaduct bridge with a weight limit of fifteen tons. Company spokesmen said the waste trucks weighed nearly that much empty, and the company in April went to court to fight the ordinance. The case is still pending, but events in the meantime may make the suit unnecessary.

One significant event came in February when EPA whistleblower Hugh Kaufman–whose revelations about inside dealings at Reagan’s EPA led to the scandal that rocked the agency last year and culminated in the resignation of administrator Anne Burford–claimed in an interagency memorandum that Chemical Waste Management was trying to “blackmail” EPA into granting the Vulcanus permits by storing PCBs at Emelle longer than federal rules allow. The rules call for the incineration of high-concentration PCBs within one year of the date they are accepted at disposal facilities.

Kaufman’s allegations were prompted by a proposed consent agreement between EPA and Chemical Waste Management, which called for the company to dispose of the PCBs at Emelle upon receipt of a permit to operate the Vulcanus ships. The agreement set a $100,000 fine for the storage upon the company’s compliance. If the company did not receive the ocean incineration permits within one year of the date of the agreement, it would have to submit a schedule for disposal of the PCBs–which would have to be burned at one of only three land-based PCB incinerators licensed by EPA, all operated by Chemical Waste Management competitors. So confident had the company been of EPA’s commitment to ocean incineration that it had put all its eggs in the Vulcanus basket–and did not apply for permits to build its own land-based incinerator.

Chemical Waste Management’s fortunes in Alabama took a turn for the worse in March, when Montgomery County District Attorney Jimmy Evans announced he would soon begin an investigation into waste-handling practices at Emelle. Evans lacked direct jurisdiction over the Emelle facility, but said he would examine reports the company was required to file with state officials headquartered in Montgomery. In June, Evans convened a grand jury, saying the panel might meet for months in its effort to uncover the entire story at the landfill–a facility that Evans claimed was turning Alabama into “the toilet bowl of the nation.” Evans has said the grand jury is investigating allegations that Chemical Waste Management improperly accepted such deadly wastes as dioxin at Emelle–without informing the state.

During a five-month period beginning in March, when almost daily press reports in the Mobile, Birmingham and Montgomery newspapers chronicled the fastest chapters in the Vulcanus/Emelle saga, state politicians began to take notice. Alabama’s attorney general filed a motion with EPA officials to intervene in the consent agreement between EPA and the company, saying he would not rest until fines were levied for the PCB violations at Emelle. Other politicians hopped on what some were calling the hazardous waste bandwagon, and a spate of bills dealing with financial

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disclosure by owners of hazardous waste disposal firms and other issues was introduced. By the time the session ended in May, the Legislature had passed one bill calling for a permanent three-person technical monitoring team stationed at Emelle, and had created a joint interim committee to investigate the hazardous waste industry in Alabama.

Meanwhile, on the national scene, in April EPA hearing officer Steven Schatzow, who conducted the public hearings at Mobile and Brownsville on the proposed Vulcanus permits, recommended to EPA assistant administrator for water Jack Ravan that Chemical Waste Management be allowed to conduct “test” burns to destroy 3.3 millions gallons of PCBs aboard the ships. The company had publicly estimated the total amount of high concentration PCBs at Emelle at 2.8 million gallons, and critics immediately cried foul over the close coincidence of Schatzow’s recommendation and the company’s pressing needs. They also noted that the company had applied only for the eighty million gallon operating permit–and not for the test burn permits Schatzow was recommending. Shortly after announcing his recommendations, Schatzow was transferred to the office of pesticides as part of what EPA Administrator William Ruckelshaus said was an innovative agency-wide program designed to infuse new blood at EPA’s top levels by giving career executives the chance to face new challenges by moving to new areas of the agency. No other transfers have since been announced under the program.

In May, however, Ravan assuaged critics and environmentalists by denying Chemical Waste Management any permits–research or operating–for the ships. Ravan said the EPA must first adopt ocean-incineration regulations before issuing more permits, and he called for additional scientific studies by the agency on the need for and efficiency of the technology. He did not, however, close the door on future permits.

Chemical Waste Management, though, was stuck without an incinerator for disposal of the Emelle PCBs. The EPA seemed content to allow the company to continue holding the waste in Alabama under the terms of the consent agreement, but, strangely, the agreement had never been formally adopted–perhaps because the agency was waiting for the Vulcanus permit decision. The lack of final approval left the door cracked for Alabama authorities, and in May an EPA administrative law judge ruled that the Alabama attorney general be made a party to the agreement. Graddick repeated his vows to push for heavy fines and rapid disposal of the PCBs.

In the meantime, though, the Alabama Department of Environmental Management entered the fray by issuing an April 16 directive ordering the company to stop taking PCBs at Emelle until the illegally-stored waste was removed from the site. ADEM gave the company a month to submit a disposal plan, but the company retaliated by filing suit in federal district court in Birmingham, claiming the state had no authority to issue the order because federal PCB laws preempted such an order.

U.S. District Judge J. Foy Guin granted the company a preliminary injunction on May 24, and issued a blistering opinion that scored state officials for impeding “the national goal of safe, uniform and effective PCB storage and disposal.”

Relieved but perhaps sated on PCBs, the company ceased accepting all but the low-concentration PCBs, which regulations allow it to bury at Emelle. ADEM, however, went back to its legal drawing board and on July 22 returned with a, new, proposed order that would impose a strict disposal schedule on the company, backed by a fine that would total $6.9 million if the company missed a series of deadlines called for in the order. Responding to the company’s claim that the April 16 order deprived it of due process, ADEM said the order would become final only after a July 24 meeting with the company to discuss the proposed schedule and fine.

The company claimed the order conflicted with Guin’s May ruling, but otherwise made no initial response. Observers expected the company to file suit again in federal court.

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Although no one has said that the Emelle landfill leaks toxic chemicals, the attention focused on the dump in recent months has caused state officials to scrutinize the operation as never before. In July, ADEM officials announced they had determined that the groundwater monitoring system used since 1981 at the landfill was inadequate for several reasons, even though it complies with federal regulations.

“In that site, and in these formations, the idea of using a deep-aquifer monitoring well is not a prudent thing to do,” said Buddy Cox, chief of ADEM’s hazardous waste section. “By the time the material traversed that distance, if it were to happen, you would have a significant problem on your hands–so significant that it would be difficult, it not impossible to correct.”

Monitoring wells drilled at the site reach all the way into the Eutaw aquifer. The well will not detect leaks from the landfill’s disposal trenches until too late, Cox says–only

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after the aquifer has been contaminated.

Cox stated publicly in July that he would soon require the company to drill shallow wells around each disposal trench on the site, wells that would angle under the trenches and detect leaks before pollutants reach the aquifer.

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Presently, state and federal laws provide that materials contained in hazardous waste landfills become the property of the state following what is known as a “post-closure period”–usually a period of 30 years. Having learned that when companies like Chemical Waste Management finish their years of making profits from a site like Emelle, they can eventually wipe their hands and walk away clean from any liability for future problems, Alabamians are becoming more aware, and more outspoken, on the potential time bomb that may be ticking away in the Sumter County hills.

The feelings of many are summed up by Collette King, who says she has become active fighting the company for four very specific reasons: “my three children and this community.”

“They haven’t got enough money in the Superfund to buy this house,” she says.

Booth Gunter and Mike Williams are staff writers for the Montgomery Advertiser. Gunter worked as a political and general assignments reporter for the daily Huntsville (Texas) Item until 1983, writing, among other issues, about the Texas prison system and capital punishment. Williams, a native of Tuscaloosa, has written about the history of industrial workers in Birmingham as part of a project supported by a National Endowment for the Humanities Youth grant.

Environmental policy in the Reagan Administration has encouraged industrial producers of hazardous waste to resume, or continue, long-practiced, devil-may-care ways. Anxious to dispose of toxic waste as cheaply as possible, many commercial waste companies have headed South. These companies say they have c~ me to take advantage of the region’s geology and to handle Southern-generated waste. They rarely mention that other attractions include the low level of environmental awareness among many Southerners, the laxity of state environmental laws, inadequate funding for regulatory agencies in most Southern states, and the willingness of many state and local politicians to assist the companies in their efforts to purchase land discreetly and to speedily obtain the necessary permits.

Ecological awareness among Southerners has grown in recent years as local groups have sprung up in opposition to particular sites and as reports of leaky landfills and questionable disposal practices have spilled into the press. Among the community activists stirs a growing conviction that toxic waste dumping in the South must be stopped before it becomes another chapter in an old story–the story of outsiders, aided by the greed and dishonesty of some of the region’s own politicians, taking advantage of the South’s resources for profit.

Hazardous Waste in Georgia

By Vicki Breman

Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 7-12

If you are poor, black and live in the South, you are much more likely to live near a hazardous waste landfill than if you are white and middle class. How much more likely? Well, it seems that no one knows for sure and until recently, no one has tried very hard to find out.

If you drive out Georgia Highway 49, near Powersville, you will find the now-closed Peach County Sanitary Landfill. Rural Peach County lies near the center of the state. It has a black population of fifty-one percent. Over twenty-percent of the families in the county have incomes below the 1980 poverty level.

Only thirty feet from the Peach County Landfill stands the Lizzie Chapel Baptist Church, founded in the 1880s by black tenant farmers. Because it was contaminated with pesticide residue, the well which once furnished water for Lizzie Chapel was closed by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) in June of 1983. Today the twenty-five members of the Lizzie Chapel congregation carry their own water to choir practice. Contamination of the wells of the five families who live just down the hill from the chapel seems inevitable as more of the toxic residue, the leachate, moves into the water supply.

Both the Georgia EPD (which manages the state’s hazardous waste program), and the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA–which administers the federal Superfund program for clean-up of abandoned toxic dumps) have put the Peach County Landfill on the current list to be considered for clean-up using Superfund money. The Peach County officials who ran the landfill until it was closed in 1978 are not particularly concerned. Tom Franklin, the county administrator, said he “didn’t even know the church was up there ’til I saw their new sign.”

The dumping of “empty” pesticide bags and floor sweepings from the Woolfolk Chemical Works (of Fort Valley, Georgia) contaminated the Peach County Landfill. Begun in 1925 by a local family, Woolfolk currently employs 125 people and is one of the biggest chemical manufacturers in the state. Peach County officials allowed Woolfolk to use the landfill from the early 1960s until its closing. Woolfolk dumped such known carcinogens as lindane, dieldrin, benzene hexachloride and several others listed on EPA’s Toxic Substances Control Inventory. Supposedly, Woolfolk’s dumping was restricted to a special section of the landfill, but monitoring by Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division indicates that dumping actually occurred over the entire site.

The Powersville landfill is only one of over 525 sites in Georgia on a current Environmental Protection Agency inventory list. The EPA inventory gives the names of all sites for which the state of Georgia either knows that hazardous wastes are being currently generated, treated or disposed of (supposedly lawfully and carefully)–or where there exists the possibility of some contamination on sites used years ago and now closed or abandoned.

A 1981 study Hazardous Waste Generation in Georgia, by Dr. James E. Kundell and S. Wesley Woolf at the University of Georgia Institute of Government, estimated that industries in seventy-two counties of Georgia produce over 3.5 million tons of hazardous waste annually. This amount has surely risen in Georgia since 1981. It may even have been an underestimate at the time–if viewed in light of recently released EPA estimates on hazardous waste generation nationwide. The Wall Street Journal has reported that the EPA has revised its latest estimate of waste subject to federal regulation upwards by seventy-six percent to 264 million metric tons. This is four times EPA’s own preliminary 1982 estimates.

This latest survey found that only about four percent of the total identified waste was handled by commercial disposal companies, but that they receive waste from about eighty-four percent of all hazardous waste sources nationwide. This means that most of the hazardous waste generated in this country is treated, stored or disposed of on-site or on adjoining property that the company has purchased. These industrial sites are often in or near urban centers and adjacent to low-income residential areas.

Although the surface area of a landfill site can look harmless enough, there may be chemicals buried–either covered-over through passage of time, or on purpose–that are slowly leaking into the earth and passing into the groundwater system. It may take years to discover the damage.

Much of the waste labelled “hazardous” is composed of chemicals which are either suspected or known to cause. cancer. While exposure to some hazardous waste materials causes immediate symptoms of “poisoning” such as nausea, headaches, or nervous system disorders, exposure to others produces no visible symptoms. Cancer may develop long

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after exposure. And, because of the contamination of drinking water, or of soil, or of the air where people live and work, individuals often may be unaware that they have even been exposed to hazardous wastes.

The placing of hazardous waste disposal facilities in low-income, minority communities follows the logic of an “economic reality” that argues that it is cheaper and easier to put hazardous waste sites in sparsely populated areas where land costs are low and residents have little political power.

A 1967 engineering study which led to the site selection for the non-hazardous Seminole Road Landfill in Georgia’s DeKalb County illustrates that public officials do consider the likely response and the clout of area residents in choosing among alternative sites. Al Smith, a resident and participant in the DeKalb County controversy, points out that ninety-eight percent of the residences surrounding the chosen area were either black-owned or black-occupied. “Minorities and low-income folks,” says Smith, “are seen as less likely to raise a fuss and mount an organized opposition.”

Organized community opposition can be powerful and effective. In late 1977, Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division issued a permit for what was its first and so far, only, commercial hazardous waste landfill, Gordon Services Company. According to Eugene Zwenig, technical advisor to Residents Against a Polluted Environment (RAPE), which successfully closed that landfill, Wilkinson County officials testified at a federal court hearing in August of 1978 that they had licensed only a waste oil refinery, a re-cycling industry. The site was being used to dispose of a variety of hazardous materials from as far away as Kansas.

Investigation by Mr. Zwenig’s group revealed that the Georgia EPD had allowed dumping to take place for at least a month before it had issued a permit and that protection and testing at the disposal site were inadequate. The state had issued this permit in disregard of existing federal guidelines under the 1976 Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) and the 1977 EPA Guidelines for State Officials.

Under public pressure from residents of the town of Gordon, who maintained an observation post at the entrance to the site around the clock for two months, the Director of Georgia’s EPD, Leonard Ledbetter, commissioned a- task force of five members, (three from his own staff, one from the EPA and one from the US Geological Survey), to conduct an “independent technical evaluation” of the site. The task force recommended suspension of disposal at the site. The task force recommended suspension of disposal at the site pending further study and until the operator submitted for approval the procedures to be used to insure safe operation of the site, information which should have been considered before issuing a permit.

The Wilkinson County site has never re-opened. Eugene Zwenig warns that “it is now a Superfund site of the future.” Monitoring wells at the site are being sampled every six months according to John Taylor, chief of the Georgia EPD Industrial and Hazardous Waste Management Program. This recent change from quarterly monitoring is of questionable wisdom since contamination is more likely to appear with each passing month that the waste stays in the ground.

Donny Weaver lives next to the site. He has his own well checked by the Georgia EPD each time it checks the Wilkinson County site. And, although the EPD has promised to send him copies of its monitoring results, he has yet to receive any.

Lack of a commercial hazardous waste landfill distresses those state officials and businessmen who believe that Georgia needs one to entice migrating industry. Some in the state are willing to sit down at the welcome table with the gleam of the New South in one eye and the sting of hazardous waste in the other. “Georgia could make up to twenty-five to thirty-five million dollars a year on hazardous waste sites,” says former Governor George Busbee. Nor does current Governor Joe Frank Harris disavow this position.

Not to be deterred, in 1980 state of Georgia officials again tried to permit a commercial hazardous landfill waste facility–this time in sparsely populated (7,000) Heard County. The 1979 Georgia Hazardous Waste Act, passed in response to the Wilkinson County situation and also in an effort to prevent federal regulation of hazardous waste in Georgia under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, had stripped local governments of any control over solid hazardous waste disposal. No one told Heard County officials that Earth Management, Incorporated (EMI), a branch of IU Conversion Systems of Pennsylvania, had an option to buy

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276 acres of land in the county and had begun preliminary investigations at the site.

Word got out about Earth Management’s plans in Heard County. When the public hearing was held by the Georgia EPD on the permit application in October of 1980, community opposition was galvanized. A group known as Georgia 2000 filed lawsuits to stop the landfill. The efforts of the Heard County citizens were aided by Eugene Zwenig and his friends in Wilkinson County. Zwenig, who holds degrees in civil engineering from Auburn University and the University of Florida, is a retired researcher from the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Once again, the state of Georgia’s ability to safely manage a hazardous waste program was challenged. A study from the Center for Environmental Safety at Georgia Tech found that Earth Management’s proposed facility provided inadequate staff and laboratory ability to analyze the wastes it intended to dump and, “based on prior landfill experience, surface and ground water will be contaminated and uncontrolled reactions between incompatible waste will occur with the resultant possibility of toxic fumes, fires and explosion.”

Earth Management withdrew its permit application in the hope that public reaction would subside. It never did. On June 14, 1984, an unusual agreement was signed between Heard County and IU Conversions Systems. The county paid the company $350,000 and in return received ownership of the 276 acres where the dump was to have been placed, plus a guarantee that the company would never try to put another dump in Heard County nor within two miles of its borders.

Given the state of Georgia’s poor record at managing hazardous waste disposal, how have they continued to act so autonomously?

It was not until 1970 that the US Congress finally recognized that hazardous waste storage and disposal was “a problem of grave national concern. ” Having acknowledged the problem, it took six more years for Congress to enact the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA), designed to regulate hazardous waste from “cradle-to-grave.” Presently, the Reagan Administration’s hostility toward protection of the environment obstructs RCRA’s implementation.

The RCRA defines hazardous waste as “solid waste, or a combination of solid wastes, which because of its quantity, concentration, or physical, chemical, or infectious characteristics may–cause, or significantly contribute to an increase in mortality of an increase in serious irreversible, or incapacitating reversible, illness; or pose a substantial present or potential hazard to human health or the environment when improperly treated, stored, transported, or disposed of, or otherwise managed.” This law deals only with waste, not non-waste activities in which toxic materials are used–such as leaking tanks, spills in loading areas, leaking underground pipes, or leaking manufacturing equipment.

The Resource Conservation and Recovery Act required hazardous waste facility owners to obtain a permit. Because a number of facilities were already operating when the RCRA became law, a mechanism was included in the law to allow facilities in operation on November 19, 1980 to continue under “interim status” until a final hazardous waste permit was issued. All that was required to continue business as usual was for a facility to report to the EPA that: 1) the facility handles hazardous waste and, 2) the name, location and identification of what hazardous materials were to be handled and in what manner.

If the Peach County Landfill near Powersville had still been operating in November, 1980, it could have received “interim status” and operated until its monitoring well showed contamination–which occurred last spring. The EPA was to have developed permit and management regulations within eighteen months of the passage of RCRA. Instead of meeting that deadline, it issued “minimum standards” for management of facilities under interim status.

Although final regulations have been in effect since January 1983, they will need to be strengthened for years to come. The current regulations have no meaningful applicability since so few final permits have been issued (only thirty-five in EPA’s Region IV–Alabama, Florida, Georgia, Kentucky, Mississippi, North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee–as of the summer of 1984). Any new facilities are subject to the final regulations. The EPA estimates that it will be 1989 or 1990 before all facilities either have been issued final permits or have been closed by denial of a final permit.

Georgia manages its own program, as do most states (state implementation is encouraged by EPA), and claims to be moving quickly to issue final permits. Up until the end of this April, according to EPA records, Georgia had issued the fewest final permits of any state in Region IV. Abruptly,

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in May, the situation changed. Since May of 1984, the Industrial and Hazardous Waste Management Program of the Georgia EPD has been considering final permits at the rate of approximately one a week. It has not however, publicized the fact that it is moving so quickly to grant permits to these sites nor has the EPD encouraged citizens to participate in the permitting process.

The present method of advising the public is to print a public notice in the legal section of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution and in the local paper of the county in which the hazardous waste operation is taking or will take place. This notice gives the name and address of the company, the activities to be permitted and the locations where the draft permits can be inspected for comments. The notice also provides that persons may request a public hearing to comment on the permit application and ask questions about the proposed activities.

The Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation (LEAF, the South’s only regional, public interest environmental law firm, see Southern Changes March/April, 1984) is currently seeking financial support for a Southern regional monitoring project to review these draft permits, make comments, and to notify and educate citizens near the proposed sites to enable them to participate in these decisions that bear upon their lives.

Although it sounds technical, such review is not difficult for citizens. There are four main areas of concern: does the permit meet the requirements of the federal regulation in 40 Code of Federal Regulations Section 264 for groundwater monitoring? Are the closure and post-closure plans adequate? Are container requirements sufficiently protective? Are the provisions for financial responsibility stringent enough so that if the facility has a contamination problem in the future, the state and its taxpayers are not left responsible after the company has left with its profits?

Georgia could have established more stringent rules and regulations than the bare minimum required to obtain EPA approval for its program. Although some states in the US have strengthened their own rules, Georgia and most other Southern states have not. Instead, the state has simply incorporated as its own the federal RCRA regulations–with their many weaknesses and dangers: inadequate groundwater protection standards, no requirements for closing facilities until leaks are found and corrected, and no financial assurance for corrective action on leaking sites.

Worst of all, the federal law which Georgia adopted exempts those who produce one ton or less of hazardous waste a month. “This small generator exemption is very scary,” says Georgia Representative Denny Dobbs, formerly with the Emergency Response Branch of EPA in Region IV. Dobbs favors closing this loophole which has been estimated as allowing up to twelve-million metric tons of hazardous waste nationwide to be sent to ordinary municipal landfills such as the Peach County site. There are fifty municipal landfills on the Superfund inventory for Georgia, the majority of which may well require a clean-up in the future.

The state of Florida has moved to close this “small generator loophole” by recently amending its Hazardous Waste Management Program to apply to all waste generators in excess of one-hundred pounds per month. Florida has also instituted a program to enable small businesses, households and other small generators of hazardous wastes (used electric batteries, containers for business machine chemicals, paint cans, household poison containers) to safely dispose of them during “amnesty days” established by the legislature for several locations around the state.

The US Congress is considering measures to deal with the problem nationwide. Hazardous waste from small quantity generators is now covered by the Solid Waste Disposal Act and amendments to RCRA now pending before Congress would reduce the small generator exemption in that law to one-hundred pounds per month.

As currently written, the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act appears unlikely to prevent the sites it regulates from becoming major clean-up problems in the future. A staff memorandum from the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment points out that “no matter what may be done to limit land disposal in the future, the interim-status facilities have already received billions of tons of hazardous waste over several decades.”

Lastly, RCRA merely tracks hazardous wastes and assumes that they will be properly disposed of, but gives no incentive to industry to recycle or to select alternative methods of disposal. RCRA encourages landfilling as long as it is cheap. And landfilling is likely to remain cheap until more stringent and protective regulations are in place. As Eugene Zwenig notes, “The need exists to remove industry from the burial habit toward full conservation and recovery practices.” To do this, we must “attack the problem at its root.” Total cost should be borne by the generator of hazardous waste with rewards for successful reclaiming and recycling projects.

The magnitude of the abandoned hazardous waste site problem finally led Congress, in 1980, to enact the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, known popularly as Superfund. Through taxes on manufacturers, producers, exporters and importers of oil and forty-two chemical substances, a trust fund of $1.6 billion was created. This fund was combined with the National Contingency Plan established in 1968 to respond to emergency oil spills and releases of hazardous substances in navigable waters–funded through the Clean Water Act.

Superfund money, which is reimbursable to the govern-

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ment by the party responsible for the pollution, is available for three kinds of situations:

Immediate Removals–where prompt action is needed to protect public health or the environment. These include such things as protecting drinking water supply, averting fires or explosions and preventing exposure to highly toxic substances. These actions must be taken within six months and at a cost of less than one million dollars.

Planned Removals–for quick, but not emergency response actions. They are designed to minimize risks and are subject to the same time and cost restrictions as emergency removals.

Remedial Actions–long-term, more expensive actions directed to permanent clean-up. Only sites that go through a rigorous investigation and priority ranking process are eligible for remedial action, since money is limited and cleanup expensive.

Every attempt is made to find the parties responsible for the pollution and require that they pay at least part of the clean-up The Powersville site in Peach County is currently being considered for designation as a National Priority Site; a decision is expected in October. If Powersville is selected, a funding formula for clean-up will have to be devised.

Superfund operates on the premise that responsible parties are liable for the situations they have created. If they can be found and are not bankrupt, they will pay a large share of the cleanup costs. If no responsible party can be found, Superfund pays one-hundred percent for immediate or planned removals. For remedial actions, ninety percent of privately owned sites or fifty percent of municipally owned sites are paid for by federal money with the state left to pay the difference. That local governments have to bear such a. large amount of clean-up costs in their own jurisdictions tends to make them less than eager to discover hazardous sites.

At this point in the Peach County case, for example, Woolfolk Chemical Works denies any responsibility because they “didn’t break any laws” and such liability, Woolfolk claims, would force it out of business. Because the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act was not in force at the time, technically, Woolfolk did not break any laws. But, as Leonard Ledbetter, Director of Georgia’s Environmental Protection Division has stated, “In no way does Superfund legislation have any language that forgives the source for having created an environmental problem.” Even if Superfund money is available, Woolfolk should pay.

What will happen if Powersville is not selected for Superfund and/or Woolfolk is not found liable for the contamination at the site? Then, as much as the full cost of clean-up will fall to the municipality (as owners of the landfill) and to the state of Georgia. Georgia has its own Superfund statute as part of its Hazardous Waste Management Act, which created a Hazardous Waste Trust Fund. The Trust Fund’s only sources of money are bond forfeitures (of which there have been none), state assessed fees and surcharges, and civil penalties. The fund presently contains only $141,000 according to John Taylor of EDP’s Industrial and Hazardous Waste Management Program. That amount is meaningless given the costs involved. The Luminous Processes site, the only one in Georgia to be cleaned up under Superfund, cost $750,000 to remove 1,800 cubic feet of radiation-contaminated soil from a one-acre area and transport it to a secured disposal site.

The actions at Powersville would be different, and would be directed at protecting the water supply–possibly by curtaining-off the underlying groundwater from the contaminated site and assuring an alternative water supply for those with contaminated wells. It would be very expensive.

Georgia has over 525 sites on the Superfund inventory, yet only a total of five have been considered for Superfund. When asked why this was so, John Taylor responded, “Georgia is not a very industrialized state, especially compared with areas in the Midwest and Northeast, so it is unlikely that we have many hazardous waste sites that would be eligible for Superfund.” In all likelihood, Taylor’s assumption is erroneous. It is also dangerous. Even one Times Beach or Love Canal situation in Georgia would be catastrophic.

Because of lack of money, EPD only began to assess some of its potential Superfund sites in January 1984. This action was made possible by a federal grant which is limited to preliminary assessments and site inspections; it is neither sufficient, nor intended for cleanup.

Georgia needs a state superfund with adequate financing to both encourage the state to assess abandoned sites for possible clean-up and to have sufficient funds to do a thorough clean-up if needed. The Conference on Alternative State and Local Policies in its publication The Toxics Crisis: What the States Should Do, recommends the adoption of independent and stable funding mechanisms, based on fees levied both on the generation and disposal of hazardous waste. As the report emphasizes, this dual approach discourages on-site production of hazardous waste by the generator tax and prevents imported waste from escaping taxation.

The report also suggests that states designate some of their superfund money for litigation expenses to investigate and pursue illegal dumpers. Money recovered could then be returned to the superfund making it partially self-supporting.

Most of the Southern states do have their own superfunds (Alabama and Arkansas do not) but although some have better funding mechanisms than others, given their caps of three-million to six-million dollars and the costs of clean ups, only South Carolina is ever likely to have an adequate amount to clean up more than one or two sites.

The Georgia office of the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation (LEAF) is currently preparing a report on the current status of abandoned waste sites in Georgia, outlining the need for sufficient funds to take care of the problems that are sure to be found. This report will be distributed to Georgia legislators and will be available to the general public.

The other major problem the citizens of Georgia face is their government’s current insistence upon a hazardous waste landfill in the state. According to the EPA, ninety-percent of the hazardous waste generated today can be disposed of safely without landfilling. “Land burial and deep well injection are absolute last resorts,” says Denny Dobbs. His order of priority is waste reduction, recycling and waste exchange, treatment (biological and chemical) and incineration.

Among Southern states, Florida already has banned hazardous waste landfills and is beginning a program to promote resource recovery, recycling, re-use and treatment.

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In order to eliminate its landfills and encourage alternatives, Georgia needs to assess exactly what hazardous wastes are being generated, determine the state-of-the-art disposal method for each and decide the proper kind of disposal facility and state needs. Even the best alternative methods will need close monitoring.

Some alternatives to landfills are more expensive in the short term. But the costs of living with hazardous waste landfills–measured by the inevitable clean-up bill and the damage to human health for generations to come–is considerable and ultimately unacceptable.

Vicki Breman is an attorney with the Georgia office of the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation.

Blues for Mr. President

By Tom Rankin

Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 12-13

MR. PRESIDENT

Oh, went down to the employment office this morning
Lord, didn’t have a thing for poor me

Went down to the employment office this morning
Lord, didn’t have a thing for poor me

Went down to the welfare
Lord, the reply was the same

Mr. President
see the poor people out there in line

Mr. President
see the poor people out there in line

Lord, they trying to find a job
and a job so hard to find

Now Mr. President, DEAR Mr. President:

Whole fifty states writing you now
Trying to let you know their condition, people is suffering
People being put out of doors
People is sitting on the streets, losing their homes
Ain’t got money to pay off their mortgage
Banks going broke
Little businesses shut down
People suffering everywhere Mr. President
I know you say that things is progressing a little
But the poor man is suffering
You cut the poor a whole lot; the blind, the cripple, the lame
Come live with me a little while
Find out how the situation is here
Then you’ll reconsider a little bit
Go live with the blind man
Go live with the cripple man

Yours truly,
Whole fifty states

Mr. President
please give the people something to do

Mr. President, oh man
give these people something to do

People everywhere is singing
singing the no job blues

Please Mr. President

Words and Music Copyright 1983 by Richard Henry. All rights reserved.

Born in Beaufort on the coast of North Carolina in 1921, Richard “Big Boy” Henry grew up working odd jobs in town and on the farm, trying to supplement his parents’ income. When he wasn’t delivering groceries or helping his mother wash clothes for white townspeople, Big Boy would listen to the intinerant bluesmen on the streets of Beaufort and New Bern. In 1933, he met Fred Miller, a guitar player from Sumter, South Carolina who was traveling the eastern seaboard. “I would sing for him and he would play,” he remembers. “At that time I was just trying to learn how to play. Of course, around the age of fourteen I started to play, but before then I’d do all his singing for him. And we’d go around on the streets and the corners and different houses, and we’d pick up, maybe, twenty-five, thirty, fifty cents here and twenty-five, thirty, fifty cents there.” As Fred Miller and Big Boy played music as a team, Big Boy learned new songs from the more experienced bluesmen, but also began to improvise and compose his own lyrics.

By the mid-forties Big Boy Henry was providing for his wife and children partly through his music. When he wasn’t off the coast of Mississippi or Texas pulling nets on menhaden boats, he was playing music at a neighborhood house party or cafe. Often, he would return from a fishing

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trip on Thursday or Friday and catch a bus to New York City where he would spend the weekend playing the blues’ “Long about the middle of the forties, early fifties Fred and I would catch a weekend bus to New York. We’d play on the streets, in the beer joints, went up on Thompson Street in Brooklyn. We could make more money up there than we could down here.” Often he would return with eighty or ninety dollars. In the mid-fifties, however, Big Boy exchanged his blues guitar for the pulpit and began preaching in a church in New Bern, North Carolina. At one time he pastored two churches, although he never used preaching as his main source of income: “Religion is a thing no man should just sit down and live off.” He continued to work as a commerical fisherman on the menhaden boats while also fishing his own nets in the Neuse River. For nearly thirty years he continued preaching and fishing, playing no blues until 1980 when he once again picked up his guitar and began singing and composing songs.

A gentle and articulate man, Big Boy Henry now composes regularly, borrowing lines and chords from traditional blues repertoires as he comments on the world around him. One August night in Durham while opening for a John Lee Hooker concert, Big Boy began to improvise on a talking blues. “That was August 22 of 1982 and suddenly I thought about a whole lot of things,” he explains. “Mostly when I’m singing in places like that, everything I sing’s new. So I thought about “Mr. President” and it went over big there.”

The song he calls “Mr. President” tells of hard times brought on by Reagan Administration policy. “What made me think of it, I was talking a little bit, joking about how hard things is, so it come to me and I said I believe I’ll sing some of it. Wherever I would go, wherever I would sing, people I would entertain, and then on the news, people be sitting outdoors losing their homes, have no rent to pay. I think not only Reagan, I think the whole country should have more compassion than that.”

Unlike many of the songs he sings which speak more subtly of social problems, “Mr. President” addresses politics candidly. The song, he feels, reflects the opinion of many blacks and whites who have suffered from the economic and social policies brought on by Reagan and his team. “I think that he don’t have the feeling towards us like he should,” Big Boy says of Reagan’s lack of concern for blacks. “I don’t think it’s through hate or anything, but I reckon he “rowed up that way.”

Today Richard “Big Boy” Henry lives in a two-story farm house in Beaufort with his wife, Ann, and seven children. He performs in Beaufort and Greenville often, and occasionally travels to Durham and Winston-Salem to appear at festivals. “Mr. President” his first record, was recorded on the label and is available from Audio Arts Recording Company, Route 1, Box 59, in Greenville, North Carolina 27834, (919) 758-2240.

Tom Rankin is a folklorist and photographer now living in Jackson, Mississippi. An exhibit of his photographs opens Oct. 12 at Vanderbilt University.

Southern Electric Cooperatives Still Segregated

By David Pace

Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 15-16

Only two percent of the board members of rural electric cooperatives in twelve Southern states are black, even though the population of the areas served by those cooperatives is about twenty-four percent black.

That’s one of the findings of a two-year study of Southern electric cooperatives by the Southern Regional Council.

“Electric cooperatives were born from the magnificent notion that they would be grassroots democratic organizations that serve all their members,” said Steve Suitts, executive director of the Council. “But over time in the South, they have grown to be the very opposite of the concept that gave them birth.”

Suitts said the Council’s Co-op Democracy and Development Project, which is at least six months away from publishing its findings and recommendations, found under-representation of blacks on the boards of electric cooperatives throughout the South.

Relying on documents the electric cooperatives filed with the federal government between 1981 and 1983, Suitts said the project found that out of a total of 3,035 board members in twelve Southern states, only sixty-one were black.

In Mississippi, for example, cooperatives provide electricity to areas where the population is thirty-seven percent black. But Suitts said no black ever has served on a co-op board in Mississippi.

The Southern state with the best representation of blacks on co-op boards, according to the SRC’s findings, was South Carolina, where five percent of the 221 board members were black.

Suitts said board members of Southern electric cooperatives have been able to perpetuate themselves in office by turning their annual meetings–those required by law for the election of board members–into more of an entertainment event or picnic for the community than a democratic election.

In addition, he said Council researchers have turned up evidence that board members use a variety of other tactics to keep themselves in office, including:

–Using co-op employees to solicit proxy votes for incumbent board members when they are reading meters or collecting bills, while at the same time denying potential challengers to board members access to lists of the cooperative’s customer-members.

–Scheduling annual meetings at times when most members cannot attend, and abruptly adjourning such meetings when it appears incumbent board members might lose their reelection bids.

Mattie Olson, a spokeswoman for the National Rural Electric Cooperative Association in Washington, said her organization would have no comment on the SRC’s study until it is published and the association has time to analyze its findings.

Electric Cooperatives in the South were set up in the 1930s and 1940s under a New Deal program designed to turn on the lights in rural America. They were created by local citizens using model legislation enacted by the various Southern legislatures.

Because that model legislation provided that cooperatives would be democratically controlled by their customers, only two Southern states–Arkansas and Virginia–have given their public service commissions the authority to regulate the rates charged by electric cooperatives.

Racial makeup of Southern rural electric cooperatives

state	Black Population in Areas Served by Co-op	Total Number Co-op Board Members	Number Black Co-op Board Members
Alabama	21%	192	4
Arkansas	17%	178	3
Florida	10%	158	2
Georgia	26%	399	11
Kentucky	14%	186	1
Louisiana	28%	197	1
Mississippi	37%	201	0
North Carolina	22%	304	13
South Carolina	24%	221	11
Tennessee	14%	205	2
Texas	16%	645	8
Virginia	26%	149	6

Source: Southern Regional Council

Based on documents co-ops filed with the federal government between 1981-1983.

In one state where co-op electric rates are not regulated

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–Mississippi–Suitts said a study by a legislative committee found that cooperatives had the lowest operating costs of any provider of electricity in the state, but they also had the highest rates.

“If they were entirely government institutions, there would be much more strict scrutiny of their conduct, and there would be much easier ways to get at their nonresponsiveness to customers.

“As it is, they sit right between government and the private sector and get the benefit of the worst abuses of both,” he said.

David Pace writes for the Associated Press.

The Electric Valley

Reviewed by David E. Whisnant

Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 18-22

The Electric Valley. Directed and produced by Ross Spears, music by Kenton Coe, narration by Wilma Dykeman, research and writing by Richard Couto, cinematography by Anthony Forma. Funding provided by the National Endowment for the Arts, the National Endowment for the Humanities and the American Film Institute. Knoxville: James Agee Film Product, 1983. 90 mins., 16mm color, videotape available.

TVA was “part of my life,” Nashville Tennessean publisher John Siegenthaler says as The Electric Valley opens; it was like “oatmeal in the mornings . . . and it was good.” What the film presents, however, is not so much TVA’s goodness, but its conflicted history. When he returns to the camera at the end of the film, Siegenthaler admits that confidence in TVA has been “badly shaken” during its first fifty years. But there is hope, he insists: “institutions can be renewed.” Some valley citizens are not so sure. “It was kind of like waitin’ to die,” says one whose land was taken and whose home was bulldozed for the controversial Tellico project; “I learned how temporary we are here on this earth,” says another.

The story of TVA is not just about dams and phosphate fertilizer and cheap electric power, but about some of the fundamental tensions in our national life: private property vs. the common good; private preference vs. public policy; centralized planning vs. organic drift; individuals vs. institutions; tangible goods vs. intangible values; tradition vs. change and “progress”; family and community vs. the state. Few other institutions in our national life have so consistently focused arguments on both sides of these questions. Partly because it articulates and dramatizes these oppositions, The Electric Valley is by far the best film ever made about TVA–and there have been a God’s plenty of them.

The film follows TVA’s history in a simple chronological sequence of well-marked segments: the birth of the idea through the christening of the first dam (Norris) on the

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Clinch River; the early valley electrification program; initial opposition from private power companies; the conflict between directors David Lilienthal and Arthur E. Morgan, and Morgan’s departure in 1938; the World War II period during which TVA supplied power for the Manhattan Project at Oak Ridge (“We thank God that it has come to us, rather than to our enemies,” President Truman says of the bomb); the shift to coal-fired steam power during and after the war; opposition to TVA by political conservatives during the 1950s, and the Dixon-Yates scandal; the economic and environmental impact of TVA’s stripmined coal purchases, especially in connection with its steam plant at Paradise (“Mr. Peabody’s coal train has done hauled it away”), Kentucky; the agency’s subsequent commitment to nuclear power, and the near disaster at Brown’s Ferry; the Tellico/snail darter controversy; and the recent cancellation of TVA’s partially completed Hartsville nuclear installation.

The Electric Valley gets much of its force through the skillful use of archival film footage, interviews with early TVA officials and partisans, and interviews with ordinary citizens who have felt the negative effects of some TVA programs. Each has been used before in TVA films, but they have never been blended so effectively.

Some of the early dam-construction and rural electrification footage is almost too familiar from TVA’s own public relations films, but other segments are fresh and unfamiliar enough to fan the coals of the old idealism (and the old controversies) briefly into flame again: Norris Village residents working in shop and cannery; FDR opening the gates of Norris Dam; director Lilienthal presenting a $44 million private power company buyout check to Commonwealth and Southern president Wendell Willkie (“Good luck, Dave,” says Willkie); opponents Lilienthal and Morgan before Congressional committees; an under-the-big-top TVA promotion of electrical appliances, with a robotized refrigerator that hypes itself to the assembled crowd, and a voice-of-God narrator who promises “a way of life that is physically gratifying and spiritually uplifting”; Eisenhower at a press conference, linking TVA to “creeping socialism”; Walter Cronkite on the CBS Evening News, announcing TVA’s victory over the Cherokees and the snail darter at Tellico.

A number of important early TVA officials are interviewed in the film: Lilienthal, engineer Harry Wiersma, chief engineer George Palo (who praises GE’s “turnkey” nuclear plants), Eisenhower-appointed director General Herbert Vogel (“TVA meant nothing to me, really”); director Aubrey Wagner, who presided over TVA’s entry into what he calls “the new world of the atomic age,” and who blandly assures us that the Brown’s Ferry incident was “not serious”; recent director David Freeman struggling with a forty-year legacy of policy contradictions. Taken together, these cameo appearances telegraph TVA’s history: early idealism and achievement, persistent liberal hopes and conservative opposition, hydro-coal-nuclear technological drift, corporate co-optation, perennial struggles with high social costs.

Some of TVA’s contradictions emerge most forcefully in interviews with lower-level TVA employees, and with local citizens who felt the agency’s impact most keenly. Since part of TVA’s early employment policy was to hire locally, the two groups overlap substantially. Norris Dam worker Curt Stiner talks of “a whole passer” of Clinch River Stiners

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who worked on TVA’s first dam; Henry Clark, the featured test-demonstration farmer in TVA’s early 1940s film The Valley of the Tennessee, tells of his experiences with the agriculture program. Clark and Stiner are older now, but look prosperous and peaceful, having benefitted (we seem urged to conclude) from the TVA experiment.

But others have not. In one of the more moving sequences, a man who was forcibly relocated from the Norris area tells of having bought forty acres of ancestral land from his father, logging his own timber, and building “a good barn, a good crib, and a good smokehouse.” “I dug me a good well and ever-thing,” he says, but he got to live on the place only a year before TVA bought him out and moved him off. A similar sequence introduces a black Fortana worker who recalls that racism in the area was so intense that black workers had to be guarded at night (Lilienthal’s “seamless web” still had a ravelling seam or two), and that TVA, needing the black workers (white workers “couldn’t get no [concrete] buckets down there and back”), acquiesced to the extent of building a Jim Crow wing on the mess hall.

Decade after decade, such costs and contradictions accumulate. Coal-fired steam power brings acid-laden fly ash that filters into the clothing and beds and takes the paint off the automobile of the Smith family who live near the Paradise steam plant (“Pardon Our Progress,” says a billboard on the fence). Before finally forcing them to leave, TVA offers free car washes. Similarly at Tellico: the Ritchie family loses their 119 acre farm because TVA wants three acres of it.

One thing films can offer better than any other medium is efficient and powerfully compressed narration. Thus one can learn more TVA history from watching The Electric Valley than could be learned in any other way in a comparable amount of time. Some excellent research, writing, shooting, and editing have given us images that linger, words that echo, issues that won’t go away.

And yet efficiency and compression come at a price. That price can be raised by poor research and editing–as it too frequently is in documentaries–or lowered by insight and skill, as here. But the price is there in The Electric Valley, nevertheless, and one has to assess it. Consider two brief examples.

One searches TVA’s own documentary films in vain for Arthur E. Morgan. He has been banished, non-personed, by the TVA commissars; it is as if he never was. But he is present in The Electric Valley; the temperamental and ideological differences between him and Lilienthal are at least sketched, and we are asked to consider the cost of his firing by President Roosevelt in 1938. Morgan emerges as a humane and creative public servant sacrificed to TVA expediency. That much is to the film’s credit. And yet the available books, articles, and congressional hearings tell a more complicated story than that: Morgan was also naive in some ways, an impractical dreamer in others, a cultural elitist in still others. And at last his own worst enemy. So the dialectic is too stark in the film; it lacks subtlety, and to the extent that it does, it misleads.

My second example is less familiar than Morgan. Test-demonstration farmer Henry Clark appears here for perhaps a minute or two, and sounds not very much different from the younger Henry Clark of The Valley of the Tennessee: TVA worked for him; he signed on the dotted line, deferred his gratifications, bought the phosphate, contoured his fields, raised the best crop of tobacco ever seen in the county, and tooled smilingly by his dumbstruck neighbors on his new tractor.

And yet when I located and spent several days with Henry Clark in 1980, preparing to write an article on the earlier film, I found him a complex and surprisingly conservative man who (like General Vogel) never really had much use for TVA. Through five or six hours of taped interviews (some of it done while we watched The Valley of the Tennessee together at a local high school) I heard him (echoing Wendell Willkie) express grave doubts about TVA-style “socialism.” He told me he had made a lot of money in Knoxville real estate, and I came away feeling that he had “played” TVA in the same way he played the real estate market. Ronald Reagan, he told me, was his candidate. Did

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Clark not say those things to Ross Spears’ interviewers? Did they not talk to him long enough to ask? I don’t know. But in any case, The Electric Valley does not in this instance carry us far beyond The Valley of the Tennessee–with its dumb hillbilly caricatures staring in grateful awe at the dam builders, like some primitive cargo cult–as it might, within the limits of compression and efficiency.

In a sense, this is the larger problem with the film: for all its excellence (which is substantial) it does not carry us as far as it needs to toward new formulations of the issues. It is still–in this darkening Reagan Age–Morgan vs. Lilienthal; hydro vs. coal vs. nuclear; fat nuclear construction workers’ paychecks vs. massive cost-overruns, rising electric bills, and falling demand curves. If Lilienthal and Morgan were idealistically trying to sell a seamless web, Reagan is shamelessly hawking a shoddy fabric of the rankest political, cultural, historical heresy. He and his minions are seducing the public into believing that “guvmunt” (the media mocked Wallace’s and Faubus’s speech in order to question their ethics and analytical powers, why don’t they mock his?) is not us but “them,” that unregulated private greed is the shortest route to public good, that public endeavors are by nature doomed to failure, that the most radically atomized social order is the healthiest.

It would have been unwise for Spears to conceive of this film as an anti Reagan tract; God willing, TVA will still be there after Reagan is gone. And yet the agency’s history might, it seems to me, have been better used–at least in the case of Morgan and Clark, and perhaps in others–to raise public dialogue to a new level. Here and there we catch a glimpse of the possibilities: Decatur, Alabama newspaperman Barret Shelton, who appeared in the earlier TVA public-relations film TVA Town, insists that “the federal government belongs to us,” that it is “our federal government and our people,” but the defense rests there; narrator Dykeman tells us that plan is a “four-letter word” in the Valley (as indeed it mostly is), but the Henry Clark contradictions are passed too lightly over, and some of those TVA victims for whom plan is a four-letter word are then presented as simple martyrs to simple TVA greed and bungling, and exponents of unconditioned (Reagan-like) private ownership.

If my own study of TVA has taught me anything, it is that the historical problems of TVA flow both from the context of political and economic power within which it operates, and from the conceptual limits of the public dialogue surrounding the agency. By themselves, films can’t do much about structures of power except to reveal and dramatize them. This film does that very well indeed: To my knowledge it is the first film on TVA even to attempt to do so in a serious way. Had it followed its own logic a bit further, however, it might have made an even more substantial contribution to sharpening the terms in which future public dialogue is to be carried on concerning one of our greatest–if nevertheless deeply flawed–efforts to address the question of the common good directly and courageously.

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The need is urgent as the chilly winds of Reaganisrn continue to corrupt the very terms of public discourse and–to borrow Siegenthaler’s metaphor–cool the oatmeal.

David E. Whisnant is professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County. He is the author of All That Is Native and Fine: The Politics of Culture in an American Region (University of North Carolina Press, 1983).

This Land, This South

Reviewed by Edward L. Ayers

Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 22-23

This Land, This South: An Environmental History by Albert E. Cowdrey. University of Kentucky Press, 1983. 236 pp. $23.00

The land has always set the stage. Our literature, history, memory, and experience have always been permeated by the delta, the mountains, the pinebarrens, the coast. Some students of the South, in fact, have seen the land and the weather as the basic facts of Southern history, the reason for slavery and for staple crops, Southern violence and Southern lassitude. What we’ve never really understood is that the land itself has a history. As Albert Cowdrey makes clear in his evocative, detailed, and impressively researched account, the Southern landscape has played more than a passive role in shaping Southern lives.

Cowdrey’s story immediately confronts us with surprises. The corn which fed so much of the native population of America before the Europeans and Africans arrived, for example, was the product of ingenious selective breeding; the plant cannot survive unless humans separate the kernels from the cob and plant them. “Indians,” too, probably created the South’s vast pine forests by burning off older forests. The apparently natural bounty whites found was not nearly as natural as they assumed, though the deaths of seventy percent of the natives who had contact with Europeans and European disease may have made the continent seem much more empty than it otherwise would.

Disease played havoc with the new arrivals as well, for the South has long proved a haven for microbes and insects. Whites and blacks infected one another with strange maladies, and decade after decade passed before mortality rates stabilized. But eventually they did, and the North American slave population–alone of all those in the New World–survived in numbers sufficient to replace themselves.

Once the slave population began to grow and cotton emerged as the foundation of the region’s economy a new era began, one in which the South’s resources came under new strains. The region’s soils, generally older and more fragile than those of the North and West, began to show signs of wearing out even before the slave regime ended. Yet it remained for the Gilded Age to damage the South the most brutally. As railroads penetrated the forests, lumber companies began to strip huge areas throughout the region, taking the best trees and leaving the worst to strangle the forest. Cowdrey describes the waste and rapacity with understated passion. The beginnings of conservation also appeared in the South during the Gilded Age, but not before much was ruined.

The history of the Southern environment in the early twentieth century repeated the same cycle, though those years did witness great strides against some of the persistent illnesses of the region, malaria in particular. It was not until the Depression and the New Deal that attempts to manage the South’s resources made much headway. The Mississippi River, which had long bedeviled planners, was at least partially tamed. The Tennessee River Valley became the focus of national attention and an admirable–though uncopied–model. The Civilian Conservation Corps began to repair some of the damage inflicted by greed in decades past. Yet even the New Deal had its costs: the Agricultural Adjustment Administration proved a boon to large planters and a curse to thousands of tenants, who were driven from the land and often from the South. The 1930s and the war years that followed, Cowdrey argues, were probably the most revolutionary years in the region’s environmental history.

The balanced account of the postwar years will surprise few who have lived in the South. All can see the effects, good and bad, of development, commercial reforestation, strip

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mining, oil fields, suburbanization, landscaping. But to those who read this fine book the South can never look quite the same again. The signs of centuries of struggle with and against the land will be easier to see and more understandable–if no less poignant and tragic.

Edward L. Ayers is associate professor of history at the University of Virginia. He is author of Vengeance and Justice: Crime and Punishment in the 19th-Century American South (Oxford University Press, 1984).

Southern Progressivism

Reviewed by John Egerton

Vol. 6, No. 4, 1984, pp. 23-24

Southern Progressivism: The Reconciliation of Progress and Tradition by Dewey W. Grantham. University of Tennessee Press, 1983. 502 pp.$34.95 cloth, $16.95 paper. paper.

The Progressive movement that spawned a succession of far-reaching social reforms in the first quarter of this century is most directly identified with two maverick northern Republicans–Theodore Roosevelt, who went to the White House from New York, and Robert M. La Follette, who went to the U.S. Senate from Wisconsin.

As the twentieth century began, corrupt political machines and rapacious corporate giants were stealing the nation blind. In reaction against those intolerable excesses, many of which were dramatically exposed by muckraking writers, local and state reform efforts sprang up and eventually became national in scope.

The catalog of improvements resulting from these efforts was and is impressive: regulations of railroads and other corporations, more equitable tax structures (including a federal income tax), correction of child labor abuses, health and welfare legislation, wage and hour laws, food and drug standards, conservation of natural resources, women’s suffrage, and a number of election reforms, to name a few.

We remember Teddy Roosevelt, the raging “Bull Moose,” and “Fighting Bob” La Follette, and perhaps because of them we think of Progressivism as a northern phenomenon. The West entered the picture too, and the Midwest, but somehow the South seemed distant and uninvolved, like a foreign colony–which in truth it was. The South in the first two decades of this century generally is pictured as an agricultural backwater infested with poverty, ignorance, racism, and despair; that Progressivism might have taken root and flourished there seems as improbable as azaleas blooming in Buffalo, or magnolias in Madison.

And yet, as Dewey Grantham shows us in this painstakingly thorough and comprehensive study, the winds of change that swept from the East Coast to the West also reached into the farthest corners of the South. Grantham’s masterful synthesis of a voluminous and diverse record results in a portrait of the South–and of Progressivism–that is surprising, provocative, complex, and original.

In the last half of the nineteenth century, the South tried just about everything–slavery, war, reconstruction, white supremacy, “New South” myths, “Old South” memories, economic depression, agrarian populism, urban development. Nothing worked very well. By 1900, still traumatized and preoccupied by the indefensible evils in its racial history, the region was struggling desperately to create yet another “final solution”: legalized segregation of blacks under the guise of “separate but equal” development.

In the interest of maintaining firm control over the black population, southern whites looked first to politics and applied a series of “social reforms” that included poll taxes, literacy tests, white primaries, and other measures aimed at disfranchisement of blacks. This, they reasoned, would reduce “irresponsible” behavior by the former slave class and bring stability, peace, and progress for both races. A similar argument was sometimes used in the field of education: reformers contended that schooling for the white masses would make them more tolerant of blacks.

Thus did the South belatedly enter an era of social charge that resembled what was happening elsewhere in the country. A strange assortment of conservative reformers and Progressive–demagogues, racists, religious fundamentalists, moralists, social-gospel Protestants, gentle visionaries, social scientists, club women, feminists–found a variety of ways in the first twenty years of the new century to change institutions, laws, practices, beliefs. Some of what they did only worsened the racial cancer that had afflicted the South from the beginning of its history, but other reforms inched the region toward genuine progress and improvement.

States–and in some cases local governments–entered into the regulation of railroads (all northern-owned), banks, and insurance companies; the licensing of lawyers, doctors, teachers, and other professionals; the reform of prisons; the prohibition of alcoholic beverages; the passage of child labor laws; establishment of juvenile courts and reformatories; the spread and improvement of public school systems; the creation of institutions for mentally and physically handicapped people; the enfranchisement of women; the modernization of municipal services and administration; improvements in public health, occupational conditions, and agriculture; and even some timid and halting steps toward improving race relations.

After an absence of fifty years, the South returned with Virginia-born Woodrow Wilson to an influential role in national politics. The Wilson years and the First World War stimulated Progressivism and national unity in the South,

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and the more optimistic of the region’s reformers predicted continued improvement.

But by 1920, the South was still mired in poverty, trailing ever farther behind the rest of the rebounding nation. A post-war rash of violence against blacks–an ominous portent of the bitter decades to come–overshadowed continued improvement in schools, highways, health, and economic opportunity. The Great Depression was yet to arrive, but the South was long since a depressed region, a threadbare stepchild too poor to maintain a single society of even minimum quality, yet insanely committed to the myth of separate but equal development for its two races. And through those crucial years, few leaders outside the South–including the reformist Progressives–seriously challenged the region to change its segregational ways. Instead, the nation as a whole tended to accommodate itself to the South’s racism–and to deny its own de factor afflictions.

This sprawling, complex story is unfolded with great skill by Dewey Grantham, who in his thirty year career at Vanderbilt University has earned a national reputation as an eminent historian of twentieth-century America, particularly of the South. It would be a rare scholar who could absorb and blend such a vast body of recorded material as this book required; it is even rarer when the resulting synthesis flows smoothly and clearly.

The southern Progressives, Grantham concludes, “were able to function both as agents of modernization and as guardians of southern tradition.” They wanted a new order, not to replace the old but to fit snugly and comfortably around it. It took them another half-century to learn that such a dream was not only wrong but impossible.

John Egerton’s most recent book is Generations: An American Family (University of Kentucky Press, 1983).