A RETURN TO THE SUN

By Sun & REP

Vol. 1, No. 6, 1979, pp. 4, 12

Five thousand years ago men worshipped the sun. After a 50 century hiatus, man is turning his attention and hope – toward that same sun. Today, we are caught in the middle of the most sophisticated technological web ever spun on this earth. The spider is energy – fossil fuels like coal, oil and natural gas, and nuclear power. There is one possible avenue of escape – the sun, and its energy in the form of wind power, water power, biomass, geothermal energy and others.

The energy dialogue poses three critical questions about our resources: (1) Are they limitless? (2) Are they safe? and (3) Who controls them? With regard to the first question, there is no infinite amount of any extractable natural resource: none are renewable. There is only so much oil, for example, and even though new reserves are periodically discovered, the cost of bringing oil to the surface is substantial and increasing daily. Also, the demand for energy is likewise increasing at an alarming rate.

The second point, safety, produces damning evidence against all fuels, especially nuclear power. Burning fossil fuels produces a staggering amount of air and water pollution; and nuclear fuels are hazardous to extract, transport, use, store and dispose of. Finally, because the raw material of fossil fuels is site specific, requiring elaborate extraction, transport, refining and distribution equipment and systems, no individual acting alone or collectively has the ability to control the fuel he uses for heat and cooling. The capital investment needed in bringing such fuels to homes, businesses and industries has been great, encouraging large and powerful corporations to dominate and control our energy.

Solar energy and its offspring, on the other hand, are limitless, ubiquitous and can be captured by anyone at a fraction of the cost of conventional energy. We simply must learn how to do it.

The price of coal and oil has been kept at artificially low levels for many years, encouraging over-dependence on energy resources which are environmentally hazardous and in some instances, dangerously depleted. Experts, however, now believe the sun can power 32 percent of America by the year 2000, if the government and private sector will direct their considerable expertise to the research and development of solar energy.

There is some basis for hope. From a budget of $1 million in 1970, Washington’s current solar technologies budget for fiscal year 1979 has exceeded $500 million, and along with hundreds of small manufacturers, the giants of American industry General Motors, RCA, General Electric, Grumman, to name a few are beginning to invest seriously in solar development.

Perhaps because of the energy crisis, a new philosophy has emerged about man’s relationship to technology and his environment. Recent events have shown that despite our presumed mastery of technology, technology is actually controlling us. We are learning that we cannot create our own environment and mutilate the one which nature has created and shaped over millions of years. We have learned that in an attempt to control and simplify our lives, we have instead complicated them and placed them in the hands of powerful and centralized interests far removed from the expression of public needs and desires. The movement for appropriate or small-scale technology is designed to enable all human beings to regain control over their lives. It is a recognition that we must understand. We must accept our limitations, as well as respect the world in which live.

Appropriate technology (AT) includes the various solar technologies, holistic and preventive health measures, solid waste recycling, acupuncture, natural foods production, organic gardening and cooperative arrangements of all types. In other words, AT encourages people to control the tools they need to enable them to live in harmony with their environment. AT recognizes that ecological balance must be maintained if disasters, crises, shortages, suffering and poverty are to be minimized; that greed must yield to need in maintaining the progress that we have attained in many fields.

Adopting the concept of AT might lead to some of the following: a group of Alabama tenant farmers receiving technical and volunteer assistance to grow and eat their own fish and use the inedible portions for fertilizing crops in an alternating cycle; a rural community in South Carolina building and heating their passive solar-heated homes for practically nothing, after a modest initial investment; a Nashville resource recovery waste system where thousands of tons of glass, paper and metals are collected, separated, sold and recycled, with proceeds to participating communities in a system where people can learn management skills.

Or it might lead to community gardens in Charlotte, North Carolina operated and maintained by groups of residents who supply, plant, harvest and eat organically grown vegetables at a fraction of their retail cost; Southern Georgia rural communities powered by wood-burning stoves, supplied with forest wastes for heating, cooking and washing; a community health clinic in Jackson, Mississippi, where doctors and trained volunteers teach and practice preventive medicine to residents

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and are supported by the Jackson community; farmers in the citrus belt of Florida taking their products by truck to St. Augustine, setting up market stalls and selling directly to consumers, eliminating middlemen and 66 cents on the dollar they lose when processors, transporters, packagers and retailers take their cuts.

These are some of the ways AT can – and is already beginning to operate in the Southeast United States. The potential is here. The Southeast receives more sunlight than most sections of the U.S.; there are few organized co-ops, many isolated farmers and rural communities. The Southeast is politically, economically and socially poor, but more and more voices are being heard; complaining, questioning and demanding action. People want power to control their own lives and their environment. They want to return, not to a harder, poorer life, but to one that is safe, healthy and satisfying. People want to see, feel, hear and smell nature, not destroy it. They want a community which reflects and blends with nature, not one that overpowers it.

AT can help lead us to that time and place, but it cannot happen without changes in many of our assumptions and values. And AT has something for everyone – the rich, the poor, the powerful, the needy, White, Black, urban dweller, rural farmer, businessman, tradesman – all of us. It is the belief that each of us is a human being with the right and power to control the basic needs of our own lives, free from outside manipulation, and with the dignity that only comes with economic well-being and the pride of self-sufficiency.

SUN/REP is a new, non-profit, public interest organization committed to the advocacy and commercialization of appropriate technology in the Southeast United States. Direct your inquiries to: SUN/REP, Suite 412, 3110 Maple Dr., Atlanta, Georgia 30305. Phone: (404) 261-1764.

Triana Fish Story

By Thomas Noland

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 14-15

Shortly after noon, trucks pulling two fishing boats with 55-horsepower inboard engines turn into the driveway at Triana Fire Station Number 1. Four Black men climb out, carrying buckets of fresh carp, catfish and buffalo fish caught that morning in the nearby Tennessee River. Several more men walk over from city hall. Everyone gravitates to the two stone tables under a shady tree, and the men from city hail begin slowly, methodically cleaning the fish, slicing wet and tender meat from bones and wrapping the patties in paper. By 4:00 p.m., the women of the village pull up in their cars, pass by the fishing boats that say “Town of Triana”, and collect some fish to bring home to supper.

Nobody rings up a cash register, or signs a receipt. For the 1,000 residents of this Black, lowincome community just south of Huntsville, the fish is free.

It’s been that way for the past six weeks, ever since the U.S. Center for Disease Control (CDC) in Atlanta announced the results of tests of DDT taken in February of 12 Triana residents. To everyone’s dismay, the tests showed levels of the banned pesticide and its related compounds to be from five to 250 times the national average in these residents. With additional testing expected to start soon, the angry, confused and frightened residents of an obscure town in North Alabama will make medical history by providing the first massive data on the effects of longterm exposure to DDT in human beings.

As the CDC prepares to set up its testing clinic, Triana residents who supplemented their meager incomes on fish pulled from Indian Creek, a Tennessee River tributary, depend now on the daily fishing expeditions by city employees in the two “Town of Triana” boats. Those boatsand a cache of fishing gear-were donated by the Tennessee Valley Authority. Each day they are taken to a portion of the river that the authority has shown not to contain DDT-contaminated fish, and they bring back a haul that is safe to eat.

Why the Indian Creek fish are not safe to eat goes hack to 1947, when a company called Calabama Corporation set up a DDT manufacturing plant on the U.S. Army’s Redstone Arsenal in Huntsville. No one suspected the enironmental dangers of DDT at the time. First sold commercially in 1946, it was hailed as a “wonder-killer” that, among other things, wiped out an epidemic of typhus-carrying lice among American servicemen in Naples in 1943. Calabama sold to Olin Chemical in 1954 and that plant continued to churn out the powdery white pesticide.

All of that changed in 1962. Arthur Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring” outlined an environmental disaster that had already begun to occur because of the unrestricted use of DDT. Perhaps her strongest and best-documented evidence had to do with the chemical’s tendency to soften the eggshells of contaminated female birds. In 1970, under threat of an environmental lawsuit, the Olin plant shut down, and shortly thereafter DDT was taken off the market.

But in the meantime, the Olin plant had deposited an estimated 4,050 tons of DDT sediment along a two-mile stretch of the Huntsville Spring Branch, which feeds Indian Creek. The sediment seeped into the water and collected in the fatty tissues of the fish Triana residents were eating.

In December of last year, TVA announced the results of a survey of fish taken all along the Tennessee. Bass at Triana showed DDT levels as high as 260 parts per million; catfish exhibited 411 parts per million. When those figures are set against the U.S. Food and Drug Administration standard of 5 parts per million as the maximum for safe human consumption, it’s no wonder Triana citizens were outraged.

And when the results of CDC’s February blood test survey were announced in March-showing that all 12

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Triana residents tested had DDT and DDE (the chemical built into the highest level of the body after eating DDTcontaminated food) levels significantly above the national average-the outrage became a concerted call for action.

The day the results were announced, Triana Mayor Clyde Foster charged state and federal agencies of having been aware of the excessive DDT levels in Triana fish for years, but of refusing to release the information in an effort to use his constituents as “guinea pigs” to test the pesticide’s effects on people. He was especially outraged to learn that the average DDE level among 12 tested447 parts per billion-was in the same range as that found in workers who spent their careers in DDT plants.

“Somebody is going to have to be responsible,” Foster was quoted as saying, “even if it means having to go to President garter himself.”

The agency least willing to take responsibility-at least at the outlet-was the Army. Shortly after the TVA fish study war announced in December, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered the Army to come up with a plan to clean up the sediment along Huntsville Spring Branch. But Army officials argued that since the sediment lies just outside Redstone, in the Wheeler Wildlife Refuge, it is not responsible for it-even though the sediment was created by a firm (Olin) which had a lease arrangement with the Army Corps of Engineers to operate the DDT plant. Now, in concert with the EPA and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Army has agreed to go ahead with a study to find “a permanent solution” to the problem, although not to determine legal responsibility for it. That study is expected to take several months.

In the meantime, Triana residents are not the only ones to suffer fallout from the controversy. A number of commercial fishermen in the Triana area-mostly Whitepractically have been wiped out by retailers’ fear of buying fish caught anywhere near Triana.

Bobby James, president of the Whitesburg Commercial Fishing Association, had to throw away more than 12,000 pounds of fish, worth $9,000, in March. His group is upset because TVA provided Triana with fishing boats, and the Army donated an old building to set up a fish market in the village, but the commercial fishermen got nothing.

James hints they may sue the Army or both. “A lot of people are thinking we want a pension or some kind of handout,” he told The Huntsville Times. “We don’t want a handout. We don’t need to learn how to fish. We have more fish than we can sell. We want to be reimbursed.”

Although commercial fishing is virtually at a standstill, the Alabama Department of Public Health still permits it on Indian Creek and the Huntsville Spring Branch. There has been no ban, according to the department’s Dr. Thomas J. Chester, because “A warning would be sufficient. Closing the stream only gives you enforcement problems.”

That warning, and all of its attendant publicity, has made life a little slower in Triana. Police Chief Joe Fletcher says no one comes to the banks of Indian Creek anymore unless he lives in Triana or has come to write about its troubles. Residents are apprehensive about the upcoming CDC tests which researchers hope will show, among other things, whether the human body continues to build up deposits of the non-biodegradable pesticide, or whether it begins secreting DDT after the substance reaches a critical level.

Like Foster, Fletcher believes the Army knew of the problem about the time “Silent Spring” came out.”They knew it was there,” he says, staring at the CDC’s report to him of his own DDT levels. “They should have come down and told us about it in 1964, when we were incorporated. They didn’t say anything then and we didn’t get the word until another source (TVA) told us.”

As for what further tests will show, Fletcher’s comments are ominous. “We don’t even know how you act when you got it,” he says, “but if it’s in you, it must be affecting you some kind of way.”

Thomas Noland is a staff writer for the Anniston Star.

Poor People vs. Alabama Power Company

By Wayne Greenhaw

Vol. 1, No. 8, 1979, pp. 16-19

He knew it would be an uphill climb from the beginning. Back in the winter of 1978, Robert John Varley, anewattorney whohad joined the federally-funded Legal Services Corporation of Alabama (LSCA), was glad to have the clout ofGov. George C. Wallace and Atty. Gen. Bill Baxley on his side. It had surprised Varley and Ohio native Stanley Weissman, also with LSCA, that Wallace was actually fighting a monopolistic utility like the Alabama Power Company. “All of my friends back home didn’t believe me when I first told them,” remarked Weissman later.

But Wallace and Baxley were seriously fighting side-byside with the legal services attorneys. They were fighting the little man’s fight; they spoke out for the middle-class consumer, the old person on a fixed income and the sidewalk businessman. They didn’t want to see Alabama Power Company receive the largest rate increase in the state’s history.

The request for the large rate increase came at the tail end of a eight-month battle in which Wallace was trying to show the Alabama Public Service Commission, the state’s utility regulatory body, that the company needed to lower the consumer’s electricity bills. Neither the governor nor his lawyer ever entertained the notion that the power company would use his forum to ask for an increase; but both knew the company could ask at any time. The request came like an afterthought during a late November session.

Immediately, Baxley jumped into the arena in support of Wallace. “The company is trying to get the raise before Wallace goes out of office so it can be put on his shoulders rather than the new man,” Baxley commented in private.

The LSCA, a non-profit organization organized after the Legal Services Corporation Act was passed by Congress in 1974, entered the picture on behalf of the poor people of the state. With six regional offices in Montgomery, Muscle Shoals, Gadsden, Dothan, Mobile and Selma, the LSCA had been fighting the legal war for the poor for nearly two years. With a goal to provide the poor at least minimum access to legal services, LSCA Executive Director Marvin Campbell pushed his staff to battle for better housing, consumer protection, prisoners rights, health care, equal education and other areas in which the poor have been mistreated.

With the power company asking for its gigantic increase only at the end of the year and in the dying days of an old administration, the public service commission did not act.

Later, during a public hearing, Alabama Power Company President Joseph M. Farley testified that Baxley’s earlier prediction had been right. He said his company did not ask for the increase when it first needed it-in mid-l978—-for political reasons. He said the power company did not wish to interject another issue into the statewide political campaign for governor. He knew that Baxley, who ran second to businessman candidate Fob James, would have used the increase request to his benefit since several members of the Alabama Power Company’s Board of Directors made large contributions to James’ campaign fund.

Two new commissioners, James E. “Jim” Folsom Jr., the charismatic young son of “Kissin’ Jim” Folsom, a former two-time governor of the state, and Pete Matthews, a veteran state legislator, joined incumbent commission president Juanita McDaniels in January of 1979. Immediately, Alabama Power Company again asked for a more-than-33 percent permanent increase in rates. The company also asked for the same increase on an emergency basis-meaning it would go into effect immediately.

However, the two new commissioners told the media they wanted to wait. They said they did not know enough about the case. They wanted to hear both sides to the argument.

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Then the new governor, Fob James, a former AllAmerican football player from Auburn University who had promised “a new beginning” after 16 years under George Wallace, met with his buddies on the power company board. Without telling the LSCA attorneys, James, a selfmade multimillionaire with a sporting goods manufacturing company in Opelika, summonsed all three commissioners and the new attorney general, Charles Graddick, to his office. For more than an hour they met in secret behind closed doors. At the end of the meeting, a spokesman said the group had discussed the need for an emergency rate increase for the power company. And a day later the PSC unanimously agreed to hear the request.

Bob Varley was up early that morning. From his rural home in Autauga County, he drove into Montgomery as the sun was coming up over the Alabama River. At LSCA offices in Montgomery’s downtown Bell Building, Varley, who some two months earlier had agreed to take the case because “I was ready to do anything in the courtroom,” started his first major legal battle.

The young man who had grown up in southwest Florida, attended Auburn University on a Navy ROTC scholarship, served for four years in the Marine Corps, finished the University of Alabama Law School in 1977 and clerked for U.S. District Judge Sam C. Pointer, Jr., was eager to dive into the legal world. What he lacked in experience, he made up in work and intelligence.

At Varley’s side was Stan Weissman, who had been hired out of Ohio as LSCA’s utility specialist. Although he was a member of the Ohio Bar, he was not allowed to practice in Alabama until he passed the local examinations. While he worked on the utilities case, he also studied for the Bar and took the battery of tests.

The heaping workload and pressure of test-taking, however, was nothing new to Weissman. The 48-year-old former chairman of the Ohio Environmental Board of Review was also a holder of a Ph.D. from Illinois Institute of Technology with a major in chemistry. After earning a law degree from Capitol University in Columbus, Ohio, he passed his Bar exam there before moving south.

APC President Joe Farley was the first to take the stand on behalf of his company. He spent two days answering questions by his attorneys explaining in detail why the Alabama Power Company needed some $290 million a year more than they were presently being paid by Alabama consumers. With deadpan emotion, he told-using charts with graphs and columns of statistics-how the power company would be broke within several years if it did not receive the largest increase ever asked.

By the end of the second day, when an assistant attorney general was finally allowed to question Farley, he was asked why APC’s parent company, The Southern Company, continued to pay highnearly ten percentdividends, if it was actually going broke.

Farley leaned forward, loosened his shoulders beneath his dark pinstriped suit in a characteristic gesture, and stated at long length that one could not equate Alabama

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Power Company with The Southern Company. He said that APC had its own problems, while The Southern Company was making progress in other states.

When asked why consumers in Georgia, Mississippi, Florida and Tennessee paid less than the average homeowner or apartment dweller in Alabama, Farley again went into a complex answer which skirted the question.

After Farley’s third day on the stand, an opposition lawyer said, “There is no way you can get a straight answer from the man. He has more corporate tricks up his sleeve than all the Rockefellers and Fords combined.”

During his testimony, Farley pointed out that all construction would stop on the Joseph M. Fancy Nuclear Reactor Plant near Dothan if the increase was not awarded.

Shortly after he stepped down from the stand, thousands of construction workers were laid off at the plant. Work at other facilities was also slowed.

It was a dramatic demonstration of raw power-not necessarily kilowatts.

The LSCA put on several witnesses. Each told how his or her family operated on very little money. A woman described her home in the western section of Montgomery where indoor plumbing was installed within the past five years. “But the wood is so poor in my house that at one place you can sit on the toilet and look down and see the ground,” she said. She said that she and her husband had been trying to save a little money from his pension, their only income, to close such holes, insulate the house, and keep heat from escaping. But she said they were able to save very little with their electricity bill rising every month.

Another witness said his light bill was twice the rent on his five-room house and “if it goes any higher we’re going to have to do without groceries.”

In Selma, an out-of-work truck driver expressed appreciation for LSCA’s intervention in the suit. Back in 1978, when the APC first asked for the increase, they charged some customers the high rate and collected nearly $300,000, which the company was forced by the courts to pay back. The driver was charged the accelerated rate. The electricity bill for his four-room house with an unpainted outdoor lean-to toilet totalled about $22 in October. His bill jumped to $29 in November. “I didn’t have no idea they were going to raise me like that. Here we were with Christmas coming on and no money for anything. That $7 raise might not mean much to somebody making $100,000, but it meant toys for my children and some extra oranges and apples in their stockings,” he added. He had received his $7 refund after LSCA fought for it in court.

During this same period of time, according to its own annual report, APC President Fancy was making $148,049.98 for 1978 . He had received a $12,500 raise from the year before when he made $135,555.48. In 1977, the power company’s two executive vice presidents were paid a total of more than $160,000. A third executive vice president was added in 1978, and three were paid more than $250,000. The company’s 21 other vice presidents received well over $1,000,000 in salary payments for the year.

Legislator Alvin Holmes of Montgomery called for the company to “fire the vice presidents who don’t do anything but sit behind desks and let that be their increase.”

After all sides were heard in the PSC chambers, it was a general concensus among observers that the threemember panel would vote for the increase.

Little more than a week later, an order on the emergency increase came down signed only by Folsom and Matthews. McDaniel abstained from voting.

When it was announced that there would be an increase LSCA faces fell. Then it was explained that the increase would be less than one-third that asked by the power. company. The commissioners had decided on a plan introduced by Folsom giving the power company a 9.5 percent or about $82 million increase. “I did not vote for it because I do not think it is enough to provide the state with adequate electrical power in the future,” said McDaniel.

Within days, LSCA attorney Bob Varley was back in the courtroom asking that the order be set aside because the PSC did not have the authority to grant an increase or even listen to the emergency hearings. LSCA maintained the PSC had broken Alabama’s sunshine law by meeting in secret with Gov. James, Atty. Gen. Graddick and officials of the power company. “Because of those meetings-three that we know of (including a meeting with the governor’s executive assistant and the PSC behind closed doors)-the Public Service Commission heard the case and ruled,” Varley stated.

However, Varley was quick to say that LSCA was not opposed to the lowering of the increase from 34 to 9.5 percent, adding, “They simply didn’t have the authority to make any decision.”

LSCA Executive Director Marvin Campbell looked at the entire on-going fight. “If in fact there is a need for a substantial increase, as the power company contends, the interplay of facts exists: the lack of planning by the PSC in the past with the failure on its part to anticipate future

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costs and the impact of construction of new generating capacity on the residential consumerthese factors created problems.

“The Alabama Power Company’s rate schedule puts the responsibility on the residential consumer when it is the industrial consumer that receives the benefits of expanded capacity.

“Now the PSC needs to take swift action to protect the residential consumer-particularly people with low and fixed incomes-when the impact hits the hardest,” Campbell continued.

“Last year, the power company went before the PSC for a certificate of convenience and necessity and presented a very low cost for the Farley Nuclear Plant. The company estimated the cost at about $300 million and as of now it has already cost about $800 million. That was very poor planning,” Campbell said.

Shortly before presenting its case to the PSC for a permanent increase, the power com pany bought 30 minutes of prime time television for about $10,000. Vice President Samuel Booker outlined current necessities. He said the company’s coal supplies were at an all-time low. He said that, because of low rates, new customers would be delayed in having their facilities connected. And he said customers should make plans to conserve energy during summer months.

LSCA’s Weissman said the APC spokesman had presented “a one-sided account” which did not “take into consideration the Fuel Adjustment Clause” (given to APC by the PSC four years ago) to allow the company the capability to buy coal immediately and pass the cost on to the consumer.

Weissman said LSCA, however, did agree that everybody should conserve energy and that the power company should rewrite its rate schedule in order to provide incentives for residential consumers to conserve electricity.

The Times, a Black Montgomery newspaper, quoted a local man, “I have four children. It was about the coldest day of the year when they (power company workmen) came out and cut off my electricity.

“I had not received a light bill. I went down to the office and wanted to pay half of my bill, and they refused me.

“I told them that I had not received my bill, and they said it was my mistake-not theirs.

“I didn’t have anywhere to take my family that night, and one of my daughters caught the flu. She almost died,” he said.

After that night, he said, his family began using kerosene lamps for light.

It will probably be another three to four months before a decision is finally made on a permanent increase. In the meantime, Robert John Varley still wakes up before dawn and drives across the Alabama River to work where he and Weissman are still climbing the hillside, fighting tremendous odds.

Wayne Greenhaw, a free-lance writer, has had four books published, including WATCH OUT FOR GEORGE WALLACE. He also handles media contacts for Legal Services Corporation of Alabama.

Ensley, Alabama: 1932

By John Beecher

Vol. 4, No. 3, 1982, p. 17

The mills are down.
The hundred stacks
are shorn of their drifting fume.
The idle tracks
rust . . .
Smeared red with the dust
of millions of tons of smelted ore
the furnaces loom–
towering, desolate tubes–
smokeless and stark in the sun . . .
Powerhouse cubes
turbines hummed in,
platesteel mains the airblast thrummed in
are quiet, and the sudden roar
of blown-off steam . . .
At night
the needle gleam
where the ladle poured at the pig machine,
the deep smoulder of an iron run
and the spreading light
of molten slag over the sleeping town
are seen
no more
now mills and men are down.

From Collected Poems, 1924-1974 by John Beecher, New York: MacMillan, 1974.

Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation. By Harvey Wasserman and Norman Solomon with Robert Alverez and Eleanor Walters, New York: Dell Publishing Co., 1982, $12.95.

By John Northrop

Vol. 4, No. 6, 1982, pp. 19-20

Hiroshima proved that the atomic bomb could wipe out cities, but it was years later before many people began paying much attention to the possible side effects of radiation. Big mistake.

Evidently, Americans have paid an extraordinary price for nuclear technology from almost the very beginning. Immediately after the war, American G.I.’s were assigned to help sweep up the rubble in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. A few years later the veterans were dying from cancer in unusual numbers. Soldiers who had served as observer/guinea pigs near subsequent bomb tests also fell victim to cancer at an unusually high rate. Adding insult to injury, the Veterans Administration has denied most claims, refusing to acknowledge the apparent connection between radiation and the atomic veterans’ diseases.

True enough, it’s nearly impossible to prove exactly what has caused any given individual’s cancer, but statistics and common sense should tell us something. When men are dropping dead of the disease at rates of up to ten times greater than the rest of us, and the obvious common denominator is uncommon radiation exposure, we at least should give them the benefit of the doubt.

But there, precisely, is the problem. From the beginning, the burden of proof has fallen on those who believe that atomic radiation is dangerous, not on those who would have us think it safe. As a watchdog, the federal government has shown a feeble bark and a more feeble bite, proving most attentive to safety claims by pro-nuclear radiation authorities. Official radiation standards have tightened only as embarassing evidence has mounted that no amount of radiation can be considered “safe.”

Killing Our Own surveys the damage. Chapters discuss a host of radiation issues, including the use and misuse of medical X-rays, the hazards of occupational radiation exposure, and the health threat of routine releases from nuclear power plants. One of the worrisome problems with even low-level radiation is its potential impact on later generations. Genetic damage to a few individuals now can show up as widespread birth defects a few decades down the road.

Not that we’ll have to wait for other damage. In 1976, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commisssion admitted that the nation’s nuclear power program will cause 1,1001,300 cancer deaths and 2,100-2,400 genetic defects by the year 2000. This may seem a piddling sum compared with annual U.S. traffic deaths of up to fifty thousand each year. However, the NRC figures fall low in the range of atomic casualty estimates, and they don’t consider the consequences of an accident.

Like at Three Mile Island. In a chapter entitled “People Died at Three Mile Island”–an ironic reference to bumper stickers claiming otherwise–the authors point to official Pennsylvania state health statistics which show a sudden rise in neo-natal and infant deaths in the TMI area shortly after the 1979 power plant accident. The authors also show how Pennsylvania health officials have been playing games with the same statistics, trying to prove their own figures lie.

The authors don’t guess why, but one reason is plain enough. The state was a bit slow to order an evacuation of young chidren and pregnant women during the TMI crisis. If TMI radiation did kill those babies, who deserves at least some of the blame . . . ?

Which brings to mind a story from a quarter-century earlier than TMI. Atom bombs and reactors have much in common, as would any parent and child. Certainly their

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radioactive by-products are similar, as well as the health effects of these substances. For years, the bomb people freely polluted the atmosphere and wide areas of the American west with weapons test fallout. Until the 1960’s, the old Atomic Energy Commission, now broken up into the NRC and other agencies, steadfastly held that the fallout was almost harmless, despite a growing clamor by knowledgeable scientists that thousands of human beings would die from radiation effects.

In 1954, a Hollywood movie crew came to St. George, Utah, a bit downrange from the government’s Nevada bomb test site. The crew stayed three months filming The Conqueror, featuring John Wayne. By 1979, ninety-one of the crew’s 220 members had developed cancer, and half of those had died of the disease. Among the victims were the film’s stars–Susan Hayward, Agnes Moorehead, Dick Powell and Wayne himself.

When People magazine put it all together in 1980, the implications were embarassing. “Please, God,” a Pentagon official was quoted, “don’t let us have killed John Wayne.”

The Duke is dead, but nuclear energy lives on. Every section of the nation has its share of nuclear facilities. In the South, Mississippi was the site of two underground bomb tests in the mid-1960’s. Tennessee Valley Authority electricity has powered uranium enrichment facilities since the beginning of the A-bomb program. Even with recent cutbacks, TVA’s nuclear power plant program is one of the largest in the world: South Carolina hosts one of the nation’s two major high level waste dumps. There’s even uranium mining in Florida.

As the nation’s poor (and everyone else) struggle through our new era of limitations, at least one industry maintains its favored status at the government trough. Big federal bucks still go to nuclear research and development despite ham-fisted cutbacks in alternative energy programs. Indirect nuclear subsidies also continue, like the legal monstrosity known as the Price-Anderson Act. Price-Anderson limits government and industry liability to a mere fraction of the multibillion dollar costs possible in an all-out nuclear power plant disaster. This means that if your neighborhood nuke goes haywire and your property is rendered uninhabitable for centuries, you’ll have to swallow most of those losses.

One suspects there won’t be much change soon in federal performance where radiation and health are concerned. Over the years, federal officials have ignored and even suppressed evidence that radiation is far more dangerous than atomic promoters would like.

Much of this is not particularly new. Killing Our Own consolidates a wealth of information from Peter Metzger’s The Atomic Establishment and other sources, all carefully noted. Indeed, this is one of the book’s strong points; it is an efficient overview of radiation information from a perspective not backed by industry money or government promotion.

The book’s other strong point is people. The authors have incorporated the personal stories of a good many radiation victims. Confronted by their anguish, the reader sees beyond the statistics and finds human faces. Individual agony speaks more directly to our sympathies and reinforces the impression that government and industry have behaved with insensitivity, even criminality.

Critics already have accused Killing Our Own of trafficking in hearsay. That’s a bit much, although it’s fair to concede that some of the evidence against the radiation establishment seems circumstantial. No matter. Convictions are won–and conviction shaped when circumstantial evidence is cogent. Killing Our Own probably won’t be the last word on its subject, but it will help shift the burden of proof in the court of public opinion. As the public grows more aware of the real and potential threats of atomic radiation, the nuclear establishment–including cooperative federal and state “regulatory” agencies–will be forced to admit the danger of its wares.

At last we’ll get to the real issue: Is nuclear energy really worth its high human costs?

John Northrop is a member of the Conservation Committee of the Birmingham Audubon Society.

Money on the Mainline

By Tim Johnson

Vol. 5, No. 2, 1983, pp. 1-6

Bob Scherer, Chief Executive Officer and Chairman of the Board of the Georgia Power Company, believes that electric rates should not be regulated. “Regulation isn’t working,” he explained recently to a reporter from Industry Week magazine.

“If we were deregulated tomorrow,” he continued, “and we could charge whatever we wanted, there would not be, in my opinion, a disproportionate amount of socking it to the customer.”

Although Scherer did not explain what a “proportionate” amount of socking it to the customer would be, his company has engaged in a long-range strategy of persuading the Georgia General Assembly, one step at a time, to remove authority from the state Public Service Commission, steadily increasing rates and profits. After all, as Scherer declares, “We found out that our fundamental purpose was to raise a reasonable return for our investors.”

In 1980, an election year (Georgia legislators serve two-year terms), Georgia Power pushed legislation that would have drastically restricted the PSC: the cost of plant construction work in progress would be placed into the rate base so that the Company would be allowed to earn profits on plants that were not yet in operation: consumers would be prohibited from intervening in rate cases; when the Company earned state income tax credits, the PSC would pretend that the taxes had been paid and charge consumers accordingly; rates would be based on Company estimates for future costs. Several other provisions would have also proven costly to the ratepayer. Dozens of citizens, most of them turned out by Georgians Against Nuclear Energy, lobbied furiously against the bill, and although versions of it squeaked through both houses of the legislature, it failed to pass both house and

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senate in identical form before time ran out.

The Company vowed to return the next session. In the meantime, the sponsor of the bill–Representative Bob Sise, a natural gas company executive–was defeated at the polls. The only issue his opponent discussed was “the Georgia Power Boondoggle,” as the bill was called.

The next year, the Company was back. This time, it asked for much less–legislation that would require that electric rates be based on future costs and that state tax credits and deferrals be ignored in rate cases (federal law already requires this for federal taxes). With strong behind the-scenes support from Lieutenant Governor Zell Miller (who had opposed the Company’s legislation the previous year, when he was running for U.S. Senate), the bill breezed through both houses and was signed by the Governor almost before citizens could react.

The sponsor of the bill, Senator Tom Allgood, was elected senate majority leader in only his second term in the senate. Bob Scherer sent out a fundraising letter to local business leaders for Miller’s reelection campaign.

“Clearly, the Company is working toward deregulation of its rates,” comments Neill Herring, an Atlanta activist. “Their construction program is so out of hand that they have a choice between admitting they were wrong and cancelling some of their plants, or intimidating the state legislature into giving them more of the ratepayers’ money. And they won’t admit they made a mistake.” Herring is in a position to know: since 1971, he has been involved with various groups in opposing electric rate increases.

In January of this year, Herring and forty-five other citizens attended an “Energy Strategy Conference” at a Future Farmers of America Camp near Covington, Georgia, (a campground given to FFA by Georgia Power.) The conference was organized by the Southern Regional Council, the Environmental Action Foundation of Washington, and Georgians Against Nuclear Energy (GANE). Concerned about the same issues for varying reasons, these groups hoped to bring together a diverse coalition of citizens to discuss Georgia’s energy future.

“Everybody’s affected by higher power bills,” points out Sid Moore, an attorney who has intervened in utility rate cases on behalf of poor people (for Georgia Legal Services), all residential and small business consumers (as the state-hired consumers utility counsel) and retail businesses (on behalf of the Georgia Retail Association).

Rising utility rates hit the poor hardest, but the middle class, small businesses, industry and government also suffer when power bills increase. And because utility rates are set by state agencies, organizers have a forum for opposing unjustified increases.

A recent ally of those concerned about rising electric bills is the environmentalist movement. In the past, many environmentalists supported electric rate hikes because higher rates encouraged conservation and conversion to renewable energy resources. However, because the major cause of rate hikes is the construction of new power plants, especially nuclear power plants, environmentalists have increasingly joined forces with those concerned about the economic impact of electric rate increases.

“If we’re going to stop Plant Vogtle (a two-unit nuclear plant under construction by Georgia Power), we’re going to have to cut off the money,” explains Pam Beardsley of GANE.

The January Energy Strategy Conference drew representatives of business, government and citizens groups for a weekend of workshops and strategy sessions in six areas of concern: the economics of power plant construction; alternatives to construction; organizing within cooperatively-owned and city-owned power companies; intervening in rate cases; the politics of electric utilities in Georgia, and organizing around utility issues in the black community.

“Everyone agreed that the major problem facing electricity consumers in Georgia is Georgia Power’s construction program,” according to Debby Shepherd, the main coordinator of the conference.

In the late 1960’s and early 1970’s, Georgia Power–like other utilities in the South–undertook massive construction programs predicated on growth rates projected at ten percent or more per year. Electricity consumption had grown at this rate through the sixties, and, using a straight-line projection, utilities assumed that this rate would continue.

There were several fallacies in this assumption. As Sid Moore points out, the utilities drew the straight line without looking at the reasons behind the growth in the sixties.

“Residences and offices installed air conditioning in the fifties and sixties, causing the tremendous jump in summer demand,” says Moore. “But the market was saturated. To assume continued growth at these levels would mean that poor people would be putting in air conditioning, since they were the only ones without it.”

Electricity prices had actually declined in the sixties, further encouraging consumption. The huge construction

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programs of the seventies, coupled with fuel price increases in the seventies, further dampening demand growth.

Contributing particularly to higher prices for electricity was the construction of nuclear power plants. Once glowingly touted as offering the potential for electricity “too cheap to meter,” nuclear power turned out to be extraordinarily unreliable and expensive. By the end of the 1970’s, electricity produced by new nuclear power plants exceeded the cost of electricity produced at oil-burning facilities.

“At this rate, it will soon be cheaper to burn money to produce electricity than to use nuclear power,” commented Danny Feig of Atlanta, an antinuclear organizer.

Another reason for the slackening demand for electricity was the increasing share of the market taken by alternative energy sources. “People are utilizing conservation techniques, wood, passive solar water and space heating, low-head hydro, and cogeneration (producing industrial process heat and electricity with the same steam),” according to Jeff Tiller, an engineer who participated in the conference.

In those states where power companies failed to adjust their construction program to the reality of growth in consumption, the consequences have been severe. Consumers have usually been required to pay for new plants whether the plants were needed or not, sharply increasing rates and further dampening consumption. Georgia Power has tried to solve this problem not by reducing construction, but by selling plants to out-of-state utilities. However, these utilities themselves are usually overbuilt, so only small percentages of Georgia Power’s “overcapacity” has been sold to out-of-state utilities.

The overcapacity problem in Georgia is particularly severe: a 1978 report by the U.S. House Committee on Government Operations states, “Georgia Power Company rated first (in annual cost to consumers of excess generating capacity) with overcharges of $39 million.” The problem in Georgia has become much worse since that time, as several more plants have come on line and growth has further declined.

Yet, the construction program of Georgia Power continues.

In West Georgia, on the Chattahoochee River, two hydroelectric projects are under way at Goat Rock and two more at Bartletts Ferry (Georgia Power already operates several facilites at those sites).

In northwest Georgia, near Rome, the Company is building three pumped-storage hydroelectric projects on Rocky Mountain. A pumped-storage facility involves two dams, one at a lower elevation where water is stored after it flows from the higher, electricity producing dam during peak hours. During off-peak times, base-load electricity is used to pump water back up to the higher dam for use during the peak hours.

In Monroe County, near Macon, Georgia Power angered residents when it condemned twelve thousand acres of land for construction of a four-unit coal facility, the Robert Scherer Plant. Utility officials once bragged that this would be the largest coal-fired facility in the world, but became quieter when residents expressed concern rather than gratitude.

The state of Georgia is allowing Plant Scherer to be built without air-cleaning scrubbers, saying that land clearing at the site constituted the beginning of construction, making the facility exempt from federal requirements under a grandfathering provision. The result, according to Georgia Power’s own environmental assessment, will be the following emissions: 37,200 pounds of sulphur dioxide per hour, 3,100 pounds of I articulates per hour, and 21,700 pounds of nitrogen dioxide per hour. Such emissions have been associated with various health problems (including lung cancer) and environmental problems (including acid rain and crop damage). Plant Scherer is a base-load plant (designed to operate around the clock) as opposed to a peaking plant (used only when demand is at its highest), meaning that the plant is scheduled to operate twenty-four hours a day, seven days a week, year round.

Georgia Power’s repeated efforts to sell Plant Scherer to utilities in other states has fueled the bitterness of Georgia natives. One partial buyer is the Gulf Power Company, which, like Georgia Power, is a subsidiary of The Southern Company. Gulf Power cancelled a coal-fired plant it was building on the Crystal River in Florida to buy into Plant Scherer. The reason? The State of Florida required Gulf to put scrubbers on its plants, and the cost difference between the Florida plants with scrubbers and Plant Scherer without scrubbers made the cancellation economically attractive. Billy Lovett, a member of Georgia’s Public Service Commission who attended the Energy Strategy Conference, expresses the sentiment of many Georgians when he refers to the deal as “filtering Florida’s air with Georgia’s lungs.”

Molly Martin, and Zeke Williams of Macon were among those gathered in January at the Energy Strategy Conference. They expressed concern about the air pollution from the plant–one unit of which is complete–as their primary reason for attending the conference. Also present were homeowners whose land had been

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condemned for high-voltage power lines from Plant Scherer.

“I bought a home in a rural area to get away from environmental threats to my family,” says Rabun Tingle, a small business operator and the father of six. “I’m not about to roll over and play dead when they try to condemn my land for dangerous power lines from a plant they don’t even need.”

Tingle pointed out that during condemnation proceedings for Plant Scherer, Henry Strozier, Assistant Vice-President and Manager of System Planning for Georgia Power, swore that the plant would not be sold to out-of-state utilities: “We only build for Georgia,” he said under oath.

In the same 1974 proceeding, Strozier downplayed the significance of energy conservation, saying, “The energy conservation kick has little effect on demand.”

The overconstruction problems at all these sites are dwarfed when compared with just one construction project: the Alvin W. Vogtle Nuclear Plant, named after the current president of The Southern Company. (Jeanne Shor house, a Southern Company stockholder who opposes Plant Vogtle, once proposed at an annual meeting of the Company that a currently operating plant be renamed after Alvin Vogtle “so his ego won’t be so tied up in this worthless nuclear plant.”)

Located across the river from the Savannah River Plant (where plutonium and tritium are produced for the nation’s nuclear weapons), Plant Vogtle is the most expensive construction project ever undertaken in Georgia. The Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG), a partner in the project, estimated in May of 1982 that its 17.7% share of the plant would cost $1.8607 billion, for total plant cost of more than $10.5 billion (assuming that Georgia Power could obtain capital as cheap as MEAG’s tax-free municipal bonds, which it cannot). This cost estimate includes only construction and interest costs before the plant comes on line.

In comparison, the Kings Bay Naval Submarine Station now under construction at Kings Bay on the Georgia coast–the most expensive peacetime construction project the Navy has ever undertaken–is projected to cost $1.7 billion, less than one-sixth the currently projected cost of Vogtle. The Atlanta airport, one of the largest and busiest in the world, cost less than $500 million–one twentieth the cost of Vogtle.

At the end of 1981, the net value of all of Georgia Power’s operating equipment totaled $3.7 billion. Plant

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Vogtle would therefore cost, at current estimates, nearly three times as much as all plants, lines, poles, meters and other capital equipment in operation a year ago combined.

In 1972, Georgia Power told Moody’s investment service that the two units at Plant Vogtle would cost a total of $731 million and both would be in operation by 1980. In 1983, the Company estimates that the plants will be on line in 1988, and admits even this projection is “optimistic.” And MEAG projects that they will cost more than fourteen times the 1972 projection.

Environmentalists have long been concerned about nuclear power problems such as plant safety, waste disposal and decommissioning. Peace activists have traditionally opposed nuclear power development because it provides a means for producing materials for nuclear weapons. It is now clear that, at least in the case of Plant Vogtle, continued construction is a major economic issue.

“Plant Vogtle is an albatross,” says Al Burrell, a founder of GANE and editor of its newsletter, The Gainsayer.

Burrell and the other citizens at the January Energy Strategy Conference agreed that Plant Vogtle would be a major target of their efforts.

“We agreed that focusing on the economic aspects of Plant Vogtle holds the most promise for stopping the plant,” said Debby Shepherd.

If Plant Vogtle is completed and placed into the rate base it will have a devastating impact on electricity consumers in Georgia. Sid Moore calculates that electricity produced at Plant Vogtle will cost more than twenty cents per kilowatt hour to produce (not including distribution or administrative costs), compared with about three cents per kilowatt hour for electricity produced in Georgia today.

The cost of Vogtle electricity will be borne by virtually all electricity consumers in Georgia, since cooperatives and city-owned utilities own shares in the project.

To estimate the direct impact on Georgia Power’s retail residential consumers, a relatively simple calculation produces frightening projections. Placing Georgia Power’s share of the facility into the rate base–$5.5 billion–and paying the Company a 12.5% return on rate base (less than they now are allowed), then doubling this for the tax effect (any rate increase must be doubled for the effect of state and federal income taxes; although Georgia Power does not pay this amount, state and federal-laws require the PSC to pretend that no tax credits or deductions were taken) indicates a $1.375 billion rate hike. This does not include labor, operating costs, distribution costs or other related costs. The residential consumers’ share of this would be about $460 million, divided among Georgia Power’s 1.1 million residential consumers. Thus, the average residential consumer would pay more than four hundred dollars a year in higher power bills due merely to adding Plant Vogtle to the rate base.

Effects on other consumers–stores, industry, schools and others–will be similarly startling. What will happen to marginal businesses? Will industry locate in other states? Money put into paying school systems’ power bills cannot be spent increasing teachers’ salaries.

“Plant Vogtle is an economic quagmire,” says Carol Stangler, former coordinator of GANE. “It’s time to pull out.”

Especially in view of Georgia’s glut of electricity generating capacity (more than forty percent above peak demand with twelve more plants under construction), it is in the best interest of the state’s economy to stop construction of the Vogtle plant. Experience in other states similarly indicates that cancellation of Plant Vogtle would be a wise action.

It is also in the best interest of the Georgia Power Company to stop construction of Plant Vogtle.

As eletricity rates rise, consumers shift to alternative sources of energy, including conservation. Many industrial consumers now use their process heat (heat produced in the manufacturing process by burning coal, oil, gas, wood or another fuel) to boil water, producing steam which turns turbines, thereby producing their own electricity. Industrial motors produced today are twice as efficient as those produced just a few years ago. Residential consumers insulate their homes and, as they replace appliances, purchase more efficient ones (household appliance efficiency has quadrupled in the past ten years). Passive solar energy for space and water heating is already considerably cheaper than electricity. While few people have the capital needed at the front-end for these alternatives, lending institutions are proving more receptive.

As Georgia Power’s electricity becomes more expensive, it will make even more economic sense to switch to alternative energy sources. Within a few years–before Plant Vogtle is scheduled to come on line–electricity produced from solar cells is expected to be cheaper (including battery storage) than the electricity produced at Plant Vogtle. As consumers conserve and switch to other sources, Georgia Power will either have to lower prices in order to be more competitive with the alternatives (in which case, unless they cancel some of their construction, they will lose money) or to raise prices to its remaining customers to pay for idle power plants–an option likely to drive away even more customers.

“Georgia Power apparently doesn’t plan to stop Plant Vogtle anytime soon,” says Pam Beardsley. “Not if they can get the money the plant requires.” But Beardsley believes that, by drawing attention to the detrimental effects on the state’s economy of high utilty rates and

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overconstruction of power plants, new allies will be drawn into the battle.

Within the last few weeks, a remarkable coalition has emerged to challenge the Power Company’s latest legislative maneuverings–attempts to allow rate hikes to go into effect before full PSC proceedings are completed. Such legislation would provide Georgia Power with an extra hundred million dollars or more during each rate case.

The organized elderly have voiced their opposition through the Georgia chapters of the American Association of Retired Persons, the National Retired Teachers Association and the Council on Aging. Organized labor is represented by the Communication Workers of America, the United Auto Workers and the Machinists. Residential consumer advocates are working through Ratewatch, Georgia Action/ACORN and others. The attorney who represents major commerical consumers on rate design issues has lobbied extensively, as has John Lewis, former SNCC organizer, long-time civil rights activist and member of Atlanta’s City Council. All five Public Service Commissioners oppose such legislation as do the current and two former Consumers’ Utility Counsels (a state office established to represent consumers). The two Atlanta newspapers, usually advocates for Georgia Power, have, of late, taken the consumers’ side as have several other newspapers around the state. Two chemical companies have joined the coalition. And citizens from all over Georgia have phoned and written legislators to express their opposition.

The coalition has named itself the Campaign for a Prosperous Georgia; “It has a Republican ring to it,” explains organizer Doug Teper in explaining the attempt to show that fighting utility rate hikes is not a subversive activity. A full-time coordinator has been hired, a small grant has been obtained from the Janet Lowe Memorial Fund, and more fundraising efforts are under way.

“The fight is between truth and money,” says Rabun Tingle. “We’ll see who wins.”

The Co-Owners Of Plant Vogtle

Currently, Plant Vogtle is jointly owned by:

Georgia Power 50.1%
Oglethorpe Power Corporation 30.0%
Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia (MEAG) 17.7%
City of Dalton 2.2%

Georgia Power is an investor-owned utility serving the majority of Georgia’s electric consumers. It is wholly owned by The Southern Company, which also owns Alabama Power, Gulf Power (in Florida), and Mississippi Power.

Oglethorpe Power Corporation consists of rural electric cooperatives which serve a majority of the land area (though a minority of the population) of Georgia. It was established in the 1970s to buy into Georgia Power’s construction projects and has been able to obtain extremely cheap money from the federal Rural Electrification Administration (meaning that taxpayers are subsidizing the construction with their tax money as well as their electric rates).

MEAG was created by the State of Georgia and consists of 46 city-owned electric systems and one county-owned system representing about 8. 6% of the state’s population. It was created in the 1970s exclusively for the purpose of buying into Georgia Power’s construction projects, thereby providing lower cost capital for the construction. This is due to the tax-free nature of bonds it issues (another taxpayer subsidy).

The City of Dalton opted to stay out of MEAG but bought into Plant Vogtle on its own.

Tim Johnson, who has worked for the Georgia Public Service Commission and the Consumers’ Utility Counsel of Georgia, its an Atlanta writer and organizer.

Blockading the Bomb Plant

By Sue Bowman

Vol. 5, No. 6, 1983 pp. 5-7

Demonstrations against the deployment of US Cruise and Pershing missiles have been mounted all over Europe this fall. In West Germany the campaign is called “Hot Autumn.” Included in the protests are civilly disobedient blockades of the American bases, scheduled as the deployment sites for the first-strike missiles.

In the early morning hours of October 24, the Natural Guard blockaded the “Bomb Plant” in South Carolina, the birthplace of every one of the United States’ nuclear weapons.

The pre-dawn light revealed about one-hundred people filing down the shoulder of Highway 125 toward the Jackson gate of the Savannah River Plant. Cars zipped by, their headlights glancing off the signs and banners that the protesters carried. The drivers looked straight ahead and kept moving–it was seven a.m., shift change, and they were among sixteen hundred workers entering this gate to be at work by 7:45 at SRP, the nation’s current producer of bomb-grade plutonium and tritium.

At the precise moment it was light enough to distinguish human forms from shadows, two cars travelling abreast on the highway slowed and stopped, halting the entire flow of traffic. Occupants of the car, members of a Natural Guard “affinity group” from Charleston, jumped out and positioned themselves and their banners in the road. The two cars pulled away, leaving the determined human roadblock.

Police, who had expected the protest but were unsure of the form it would take, immediately moved to arrest the blockaders, but as those people were dragged away, another group thirty yards back stepped into the road. This was repeated by three more groups.

Forty-five minutes later the traffic was still blocked. At one point the stoppage stretched back to Augusta, Georgia, twelve miles from the gate. Fifty-four people were arrested at the Jackson gate, as supporters cheered from the sidelines and chanted, “No Pershing, no Cruise, either way we all lose!” and “The people united will never be defeated!”

At the New Ellenton gate of the three hundred and twelve square mile facility a group of approximately sixty women who had participated in a peace camp sponsored by the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF) converged on a busy intersection at a red light. Twenty-five women blocked that entrance for fifteen minutes.

Seventy-nine blockaders were charged with refusing to obey police officers’ orders to leave the highway. Bond was set at $110.25. Some refused to give their names and were denied bond, some chose to stay in rather than pay bond for financial or moral reasons, and others bonded out the same day. Trial was initially set for November 8, but requests for jury trial have pushed the date to January 9.

The blockade capped a weekend of anti-nuclear actions that began with a Saturday rally at a site approved by SRP officials. Speakers at the rally included Anthony Guarisco of the National Association of Atomic Veterans, who spent sixty-seven days at ground zero in the Bikini Islands; Rebecca Johnson, a participant in the two-year-old peace encampment at Greenham Commons, a US base in England and one of the first deployment sites for the cruise missiles; Kay Camp, former member of President Carter’s Nuclear Disarmament Committee just returned from meetings with European peace activists; and many others.

The events were sponsored by the Natural Guard, a coalition of peace, environmental and human rights groups. The platform for the actions called for a halt to the global testing, production and deployment of all nuclear weapons, the funding of human needs over the military, and an independent study of the health and economic impacts of nuclear weapons production at SRP.

The Savannah River Plant was constructed hastily in the early 1950s, part of the government’s anti-communist thrust and the global powers’ race to gain thermonuclear superiority. The federal Atomic Energy Commission swallowed 312 square miles–two towns, six thousand people and 6,100 graves–in a rural corner of South Carolina, taking chunks out of Barnwell, Aiken and Allendale counties. Displaced farmers couldn’t buy land for what the government paid them, and the economy quickly shifted from its agricultural base to a dependence on the Bomb Plant. Today nearly ten thousand people work there. It is difficult to find a person in the surrounding communities who has no personal or family connection with the plant.

SRP is owned by the Department of Energy, direct descendent of the AEC, and has been operated since the beginning by E.I. duPont de Nemours. DuPont has so downplayed its connection with the military that few know of its integral role in nuclear weapons. The company operates SRP on a cost-plus contract as its “patriotic duty,” according to a DuPont report entitled “Certain Information About the Savannah River Plant.”

The facilities include five reactors, three now churning out plutonium, one inactive, and the L Reactor, scheduled to restart this year. The L Reactor recently became the subject of a heated controversy when the state of South Carolina joined a suit by environmental groups to prevent the reactor from operating without an Environmental Impact Statement. The DOE reluctantly agreed under legal order to do an

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expedited EIS, but other questions remain unresolved and troublesome. The reactor will dump 176°F. water into Steel Creek because the reactors, unlike commercial plants, have no cooling towers; radiation releases are not controlled by containment structures: and the Tuscaloosa aquifer beneath SRP is threatened with eventual radioactive contamination (officials are now dealing with chemical contamination in the aquifer).

Meanwhile, production is being stepped up, with the possibility of a new reactor being sited at SRP, although there is increasing sentiment expressed by experts that the plutonium and tritium are not needed.

The Bomb Plant has operated for thirty years under the government’s cloak of mysticism–national security. Consequently, most of the reports on radioactive releases from the plant have been classified. Dr. Carl Johnson, former Director of Health for Jefferson County, Colorado, who has done extensive studies on health effects around the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility, examined declassified documents from SRP and found that routine and accidental releases of radiation have been several times that reported to the public. Although vital statistics indicate that rates of infant mortality, cancer and heart disease are higher study done surrounding counties, there has never been an independent study of the health effects caused by SRP’s operation.

An unpublished by DuPont has shown that “lung cancer and leukemia were significantly increased” among workers at the Savannah River Plant when compared with other DuPont workers and the general public, according to Bob Alvarez of the Washington based Environmental Policy Institute. Alvarez was asked to participate in a Center for Disease Control evaluation of the study.

Why did the Natural Guard take on the Bomb Plant with civil disobedience?

“Six years ago the Natural Guard took the point on opposition to nuclear waste and reprocessing with eight-hundred arrests in 1978 and 1979,” commented Natural Guard organizer Brett Bursey. “We were then viewed as the lunatic fringe. Now the governor and even Strom Thurmond have come around on that issue. Direct action is but one of the factors that change social and political realities–but I believe it is a dynamic catalyst that can light fire under an issue. The issue of nuclear disarmament will be resolved when the social and political costs outweigh the gains. We plan to be a significant cost they will have to consider.”

Jill Morris of Athens, Georgia, said she blockaded SRP “because the Bomb Plant is killing us–and if we don’t commit civil disobedience at the Bomb Plant we’re commit tiny ourselves to suicide.”

Local farmer Steve McMillan, who has long been a vocal opponent of SRP in every other forum available to him, said, “To tell you the truth, I’m putting my money where my mouth has been. I felt kind of lonesome out there–I knew I would probably get criticized by a lot of local people who would look down their nose at me and think I’m crazy, but it was time for me to take a stand for what I been saying.”

Randy Tatel commented, “When I decided that nuclear weapons were a political and humanistic insanity, I turned to find a legislator who represented me…and there were none. Consciously, it fell to my shoulders to be my own representative and take the military machine head-on. Civil disobedience then was a natural decision.”

Bursey notes that it is not a frivolous decision. “What we’re seeing now is that the government is ready and willing to crack down on civil liberties to stem mass protests like this.” He pointed to a legal maneuver by the federal government just before the blockade which would have drastically altered the character of the demonstration. “A federal judge virtually declared martial law in South Carolina.”

One week before the blockade, a US Attorney, prompted by the Department of Energy, asked federal judge Charles Simons for an injunction to prevent the Natural Guard from interfering with the operation of the Savannah River Plant. The injunction would have provided criminal contempt of court charges against anyone who trespassed or blocked access to the plant. Wording of the request went as far as to request that the injunction prevent anyone from aiding, abetting or assisting someone in trespassing or blocking access to SRP. It attempted to certify the Natural Guard as a class, subject to a class action suit, although it is not a membership organization but “an ad hoc coalition called together to host a specific event.”

U.S. Attorney Henry Dargan McMaster said the broad nature of the injunction meant protest organizers could be cited for contempt before the blockade and jailed without bond for six months and possibly longer. Bursey asked hypothetically, “Does that mean if a church takes up a collection to support the blockade, they could be held in contempt for aiding and abetting the blockaders?”

It was only the point of interfering with access that actually concerned the blockade plan. The Natural Guard’s stated objective was to block traffic on state property, never intending to trespass on federal land. The state misdemeanor carries a maximum penalty of thirty days and/or one hundred dollars, while trespass on SRP property would have brought a fine of one thousand dollars.

Federal officials, frustrated that they would have no jurisdiction and fearing that the state penalties would not discourage protesters, sought to extend federal authority onto state property. The idea was that with the injunction in place, the federal government would have the power to deal with anyone who even looked cross-wise at the Bomb-Plant if they could convince the court that such activity would irreparably threaten national security.

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Judge Charles Simons was glad to oblige the US Attorney’s request. Simons is used to power. As Strom Thurmond’s former law partner, maneuvered into judgeship by Thurmond under Nixon, he has long wielded a stern gavel in South Carolina. In numerous cases before him Simons has been openly hostile to anti-nuclear protesters. He said on the record that wherever Brett Bursey goes “violence is likely to follow”. He clearly expresses his view that the Natural Guard is more than a bunch of pesky demonstrators but a dangerous threat to national security.

During the three hour hearing, Simons told Natural Guard attorney Danny Sheehan, “We do things a little different in South Carolina,” and proceeded to talk at though he had already ruled even before he had heard the defense. When defense attorney Lewis Pitts protested, “We just feel the ballgame’s over,” the judge snapped, “I happen to be in the driver’s seat and we will move forward.”

“Regardless of the legal niceties I would be inclined to do whatever is necessary to protect the operation of the bomb plant,” Simons said.

The judge was riled by the suggestion that he may not have the authority to issue the injunction. “I don’t care if they (the protesters) are up in Columbia. I’d have not hesitancy about issuing an injunction if the operation of the SRP was in question.”

“If I don’t have the authority to enjoin, I’d be surprised,” he growled.

Natural Guard attorney’s argued that the injunction violated separation of powers because there were already penalties established by state and federal legislators for the violations protesters intended to commit. Sheehan noted “They are actually subordinating fundamental constitutional structures to get at these people.”

“Waving the red flag of national security is used frequently to blind the court,” Sheehan insisted.

Simons was not impressed and he slapped on the injunction with apparent relish. The ruling confused many people planning to attend the legal rally on Saturday, who believed Simons had made even that exercise illegal.

The Natural Guard made a mad dash for the Fourth Circuit of Appeals, racing to get a decision before the rally now only days away. On Friday night, an expedited hearing before one judge gained a suspension of Simons’ order pending a full hearing. Fourth Circuit judge Francis D. Murnaghas, Jr., ruled that the proposed actions would not be a grave threat to national security and that the First Amendment rights of the protectors would be impermissibly infringed upon by the injunction.

The constitutional nature of this case has prompted legal assistance from national and state organizations of the American Civil Liberties Union as well as several large firms specializing in constitutional law. The outcome will have implications for any group planning to demonstrate at federal facilities linked to national security.

The many-faceted international opposition to nuclear weapons, combined with a growing awareness of “the bomb in our backyard,” is tugging away SRP’s cloak of mysticism. The reality behind it is becoming more frightening. Antinuclear activists in the southeast will be increasingly called upon in the near future to “Blockade the Bomb Plant” not only with civil disobedience but with every means available to sane, intelligent and nonviolent people.

Sue Bowman lives in Columbia, South Carolina and writes regularly about Southern disarmament activities for several publications.

The Bomb Plant on Trial

By Sue Bowman

Vol. 6, No. 1, 1984, pp. 10-12

Fifty demonstrators who blockaded entrances to the Savannah River Plant last fall were found guilty of a traffic violation January 11, but the nuclear weapons facility which produces the plutonium for US weapons, sustained a direct hit to its reputation.

The two-day trial of the protesters, before Aiken, South Carolina, Magistrate Court Judge Max A. Meek, resulted from a demonstration October 24 hosted by the Natural Guard, a coalition of peace and environmental groups (see Southern Changes, December 1983). The blockade coincided with international demonstrations against nuclear weapons.

A three-man, three-woman jury deliberated over an hour before returning a guilty verdict for “failure to obey a police officer.” The defendants were sentenced to one-hundred dollar fines or eleven days in jail.

During the trial, blockaders explained that to prevent a “greater harm,” they were compelled to disobey police orders to leave the road in front of the plant. The thread running through expert testimony suggested that they had every reason to be concerned. A former Department of Energy “company man” confirmed allegations that SRP has withheld reports of widespread radioactive contamination; an authority on the medical effects of radioactive contamination warned that the plant endangers the lives of people living around it; a retired Navy admiral and Pentagon nuclear weapons strategist testified that increased production and deployment of nuclear weapons has greatly increased the threat of nuclear war and that the Bomb Plant would be a first target.

DuPont, contracted by DOE to run the plant, is guilty of a pattern of negligence and has suppressed information about radioactive contamination, according to DOE’s former head of nuclear waste management at SRP. William Lawless, nuclear waste project engineer for six years, said a 1981 report which outlined his criticisms of the waste program was reclassified as a “draft” report. He said DuPont objected to the contents of the report and that because of the reclassification, the document could be withheld from the public, even if requested through the Freedom of Information Act.

Lawless gave many examples of contamination reports withheld from the public and numbers-juggling by the company to make releases appear harmless.

One report deliberately withheld was a 1977 internal document which listed forty “monitoring wells” on SRP property which had been contaminated with radioactive tritium. Some of the wells contained levels of radiation 200,000 times that allowed for drinking water. (Out of court, Lawless said this discovery caused him to quit drinking plant water.) According to Lawless, the contaminated water, as much as 400,000 gallons from one well, was pumped out of the wells onto the ground to conceal high levels of radiation. This would result in temporarily lowered readings of contamination in those wells.

No records on types of hazardous and radioactive waste were kept at the “burial ground” at the plant. For twenty years, pipes in which tritium was manufactured were buried “uncapped” at the plant, contaminating the water.

There was extensive corrosion in twenty-seven high level waste tanks, even before they were fully constructed, and Lawless testified that reports of these conditions were deliberately suppressed.

Numbers were juggled and regulations rewritten to make releases of radioactive gases appear less significant. “In the real world, the gas is still there,” he said.

Robert Alvarez, Director of the Nuclear Weapons and Power Project for the Washington-based Environmental

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Policy Institute called Lawless’ testimony “startling and highly significant …. This is the most significant finding about SRP that’s been made public in years.”

SRP officials accuse Lawless of misinterpreting facts, and said the reports were available to anyone who asked for them–but each report must be requested by name.

Lawless’ testimony about mishandling of waste at SRP, and discrepancies between public and internal reports, magnified the testimony by Dr. Carl Johnson, former Director of Public Health, Jefferson County, Colorado. Johnson told-the jury how the releases and discrepancies translated into dangers to health.

Johnson told the packed courtroom that declassified SRP internal documents from 1954-1975 showed radioactive releases were much larger than those reported to the public. On March 15, 1955, an accidental release of radiation resulted in radiation levels four hundred times background level. “In my opinion it should have resulted in evacuation of this area.”

Johnson said that it is hazardous to live in Aiken or the surrounding area, that residents lives are in danger “to a medical certainty.” Johnson based his predictions that the area would show high cancer rates on data from Hiroshima and Nagasaki and on his own extensive studies of health effects around the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons facility in Colorado. “There is no level of radiation without effect,” he said several times

Rear Admiral Gene LaRocque, retired after thirty-one years in the Navy, seven as Pentagon nuclear weapons strategist, brought the spectre of nuclear war into the courtroom. He spoke matter-of-factly about the vulnerability of facilities like SRP in a nuclear attack.

“Plutonium production facilities would be among the first targets,” he said. “If we hit a production facility (in the Soviet Union). . tit would spread radioactive material over a tremendous part of the country and be a devastating blow. . .It would be a natural first target. . .We would want to get their war-making capacity.”

“We need to assume that the whole Aiken area would be a prime target for a nuclear strike,” LaRocque said. If an attack hit right on the plant, due to wind shifts, “the radioactive materials would be impossible to control. . . We don’t have plans to deal with that sort of catastrophe.”

LaRocque said that with the offensive posture of US nuclear policy, we’ve actually decreased our national security. The military is geared to “fight to win. . we’re uncomfortable with deterrence.”

“We’re ready now in thirty minutes to destroy the Soviet Union. All the president has to do is say go.” he added.

LaRocque defended the blockaders’ tactic. “Civil disobedience is one of the many good ways to bring it to public attention. . .People should do something every day to prevent nuclear war.”

Framed in the context of expert testimony, defendants’ compelling reasons for blockading the road and being arrested made absolute sense. In the courtroom, a very diverse group of individuals told their stories.

Adele Kushner, a retired county employee and grandmother from Atlanta, said, “I have become concerned over what kind of world we are leaving for our grandchildren.” She said she had tried every other means to get her government’s attention before deciding to participate in the blockade.

Beth Ann Buitekant, a registered nurse from Atlanta, talked about the inadequacy of the health care system because of military expenditures. About weapons proliferation, she said, “I personally have no control over it, except to do exactly what I have been doing.”

Andy Summers, a Methodist minister and pastoral counselor from Savannah, downriver from the plant, said nuclear war would result in “destruction on such a massive basis that we hardly have the capability to think about it” and that this results in a “psychic numbing.” “We need to develop new, vivid symbols to come to grips with the worsening situation.”

Brett Bursey, program director of a social action organization in Columbia, South Carolina, noted, “Not only are they doing something against the wishes of the majority of the American people, but they’re lying about it.” He referred to Lou Harris polls indicating that three-fourths of the American people support a nuclear freeze.

Bursey expressed the importance of civil disobedience in American history, including the Boston Tea Party and civil rights movements. “There would not be black people on this jury if years ago black people didn’t refuse to go to the back of the bus,” he said, addressing the one black juror.

Ed Clark, 77, a church pianist from Greenville, said his participation in the blockade was “a way of bearing witness against the nuclear arms race. . .which could happen tomorrow. I felt it was an urgent matter–I had to take part.”

A former welder at SRP and other facilities, Butch Guisto, who grew up and still lives in Augusta, testified that his welds were never X-rayed, and that there was a “cavalier treatment about radioactive releases” at that plant. “I know for a fact that tritium releases occur,” relating that he had been present on several occasions. “I live in this area, and I’m just as responsible as anyone else,” he added.

Testimony in the trial deeply affected even the defendants, who are generally more educated about nuclear issues than the average citizen. Local farmer and blockader Steve McMillan had testified that he became concerned

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about the Bomb Plant over a period of time. “I began to suspect the people in our area weren’t getting the truth,” he told the jury. Walking out of the courtroom after the verdict, he slowly shook his white head–“It’s worse than we said it was.”

The jury chose to take the prosecutor’s way out and find the defendants guilty of the traffic violation. “They broke the law, plain and simple,” Assistant South Carolina Attorney General James Bogle told the jurors.’

Defendant Randy Tatel commented on the jury’s decision. “I empathized with the jurors in that they couldn’t have remained objective in reviewing the evidence. It would have meant overcoming the numbness, the years of acceptance of the Bomb Plant in their back yard–they were told pointblank that the plant was killing them and their children and contributing to the threat of nuclear holocaust.”

But the “convicts” were jubilant. Not one expressed more than a shrug of “well, it would have been nice to be acquitted,” instead, conversation went to the impact of the trial. As one defendant later expressed, “The more I think about it, the more I realize how big we won. We never really expected to be acquitted, but think of the local education that occurred! The policemen listening to Dr. Johnson, the judge, the jury, people who will talk to the jury about what they heard, the list goes on.”

He concluded, “Maybe next time we will be acquitted as well.”

Sue Bowman lives in Columbia, South Carolina and writes regularly about Southern disarmament activities.

LEAF

By Tim Johnson

Vol. 6, No. 2, 1984, pp. 5-9

Atlanta environmentalist Deborah Sheppard was organizing a state conference for a coalition of environmental groups in 1982. Among the offers of volunteer help she received, one stands out.

“This woman called. She was a mother of two, a former nurse with the World Health Organization and a law student at the University of Georgia. She was a ball of fire–talking about all the things she and her partner were doing. Upon graduation, they planned to open an Atlanta office of LEAF, the Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation.

“She overwhelmed me with her energy and enthusiasm,” Sheppard says. “Then she said that she was the low key partner.”

When Vicki Breman called, very few Georgians knew her or her partner, Laurie Fowler. But they had been laying groundwork for years, and eighteen months later, were among the best known and most effective environmentalists in the state.

Breman began law school at age thirty-seven. At Athens, she met Fowler, twenty-five, also specializing in environmental law.

After hearing Birmingham attorney Suzi Ruhl talk about the LEAF office in Alabama, Fowler and Breman decided to start their own firm in Georgia.

“We weren’t sure if we should be a LEAF chapter or merely model ourselves after what LEAF was doing,” Fowler recalls. “We talked with activists all over Georgia about what the needs were and we decided to join with LEAF.”

A native of Marietta, Georgia, Fowler had worked with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund in San Francisco, the National Clean Air Coalition in DC, and environmental attorney Roger Leed in Seattle.

In its short existence, LEAF has become a remarkably effective tool for environmentalists in the Deep South. Its offices in Atlanta, Birmingham, Knoxville and Tallahassee, have opposed strip-mining, the spraying of paraquat in Georgia’s mountains, the construction of a nuclear power plant, air pollution, and hazardous disposal of toxic wastes. And, belying the usual sprout-eater image of lawyer-environmentalist groups, LEAF has targeted its resources to come to the aid of poor and working-class Southerners, the traditional victims of industrial toxins and chemical wastes both on the job and in their neighborhoods.

Toxic waste dumps, sanitary landfills, notorious polluting industries and major highways appear with more than coincidental frequency near poor neighborhoods.

In Alabama, where LEAF was organized by Birmingham attorney Ruhl in 1979, much of the group’s efforts have

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dealt with toxic waste disposal: currently operating landfills, abandoned dumps that contain chemical wastes and proposed dumps.

LEAF’S Jeff Roseman, an Alabama epidemiologist, helped in investigation of the health of residents of Triana, and black community whose water was poisoned with DDT by the Tennessee Valley Authority and the US Army. DDT levels in fish and in Triana residents were the highest ever recorded in a US population. The government settled out of court, paying residents more than twenty million dollars.

In promoting alternatives to the dumping of toxic wastes in Alabama, LEAF argues that virtually all toxics now created by industry can be safely disposed of with current technology. (Radioactive wastes are a major exception.) It has filed comments with the state of Alabama in support of applications for alternative disposal technologies and has drafted model legislation to provide tax incentatives for the applicants. Alabama’s toxic law, which LEAF has targeted for reform, now automatically grants a permit to dump within ninety days of application if the state doesn’t act on the request.

“Our goal is to make Alabama’s law at least as stringent as the federal law,” says Suzi Ruhl. “If not, then we will move to have the federal government take over enforcement.”

Currently, underground injection of toxics is prohibited in Alabama, but Stanley Graves, one of seven commissioners of the state’s Department of Environmental Management, owns a well drilling company and is pushing for injection. So far, LEAF has successfully opposed Graves.

Alabama LEAF is also fighting a DEM effort to allow blanket permits for emitting pollutants into state waterways. Present law requires a permit for each water site that a company wants to pollute. LEAF is opposing a change in the law which would allow one permit to cover all the discharges of a company. With the law changed, a coal company would need only a single permit to dump wastes into streams anywhere in Alabama.

“If the law gets changed,” Ruhl points out, “a coal company could apply for a discharge permit on June l, then there would be a hearing on June 15. Then, in December, you might hear that the company was going to pollute the water in your community, but you would not get a hearing because the company would already have its permit.”

Citing the legislative history of the Clean Water Act, LEAF has argued in written comments that the single permit proposal violates the intent of Congress. “If the change goes through the legislature,” Ruhl says,” we’ll sue. They’re probably waiting for us to disappear,” she adds, referring to the Alabama Department of Environmental Management, “but we won’t.”

LEAF is also grappling with air pollution in Alabama. It organized a state conference and is a cofounder of the Alabama Coalition for Clean Air. Pointing to deleterious

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health effects. it is opposing Alabama Power Company’s efforts to convert two natural gas fueled steam generating plants in downtown Birmingham to coal.

In addition to providing counsel for individual members, LEAF-Alabama serves as the legal arm for two chapters of the Audubon Society, the Alabama Conservancy and the Sierra Club.

Even as attorney Ruhl sets about to organize a LEAF office in Tallahasse, she continues to coordinate the work on Alabama toxics issues while attorneys Larry Putt and Sally McConnell carry on other concerns.

“We’ve grown faster than I ever expected,” says Suzi Ruhl. LEAF is currently operating in Alabama, Georgia, Tennessee and Florida. The goal is to expand into seven more Southern states. All the staffers are natives, most are women.

“Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund, Natural Resources Defense Council and the other national environmental law groups are very active in other areas of the nation,” LEAF boardmember Ogden Doremus notes, “but they don’t have offices down here. So we’re doing it ourselves.” Doremus, an attorney from Metter, Georgia, has argued many environmental cases over the last thirty years.

Stones in Their Pathway

Florida is the nation’s fastest growing state and many developers there see ecological concerns as nothing more than stones in their pathway to profits. LEAF-Florida, which did not begin operations until January of this year, is already involved in several efforts to protect the state’s close-to-the-surface groundwater from contamination and from depletion under the pressures of population growth and development.

LEAF-Florida is monitoring a state department of health epidemiological study of the impacts of the controversial fungicide ethyl dibromide (EDB).

Joining with the Romona Civic Association and residents of Jacksonville, LEAF is involved in a PCB clean-up and public education project at a chemical storage site which exploded, contaminating the surrounding community. One of the aims here is to have the site included on the Superfund list, making it eligible for federal money.

LEAF-CAO

The LEAF-Central Appalachian Office opened in Knoxville in 1982 with support from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. Attorney Carol Davis left her job with the US Department of Interior’s Office of Surface Mining to work on strip-mining issues. Attorney Gary Davis, an appalachian native and former aide to California Governor Jerry Brown, is covering toxics. Davis set up California’s program for alternatives to land disposal of toxic wastes, a model. LEAF boardmember Neil McBride, an attorney with Rural Legal Services in Tennessee, has worked with Ralph Nader on

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environmental issues, including a well-known investigation of pollution on the Georgia Coast described in the book The Water Lords.

In Tennessee, LEAF has taken on the US nuclear facilities at Oak Ridge where, from 1950 through 1963, nearly 2l/2 million pounds of mercury were dumped into the surface and groundwater–threatening the health of residents along the Clinch River.

Current standards used at Oak Ridge for toxic waste dumping include “unlined surface impoundments” (Department of Energy jargon for holes in the ground) which, says Gary Davis, “don’t even meet the standards of the 60s.”

The DOE, which operates Oak Ridge, says that the toxic waste laws don’t apply. It claims that the Atomic Energy Act exempts facilities involved in nuclear production from other regulation, a contention which Davis disputes. LEAF represented SOCM (Save Our Cumberland Mountains) on the Oak Ridge issue in state administrative proceedings and, in September of 1983, LEAF and the Natural Resources Defense Council filed suit in federal district court in Knoxville against the dumping. If LEAF wins, the case will provide a precedent for other DOE operations, including the Savannah River Plant.

In Memphis, LEAF-CAO is assisting the League of Women Voters’ review of the Superfund cleanup of the Hollywood Dump–where Velsicol Chemical Company dumped toxics.

“The state people know we’re here,” says Gary Davis, pointing to notes of a meeting in which Tennessee regulators said they would have to comply with “the letter of the law since LEAF will be out there watching.”

The lack of enforcement of strip mining laws by the Tennessee Division of Surface Mining led, in the summer of 1983, to LEAF’s serving as legal representative for a coalition which included SOCM, Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning, the Tennessee League of Women Voters and the Tennessee Environmental Council. On behalf of the Sierra Club, LEAF has filed notice with the Division of an intention to sue unless substantial progress is made in the enforcement of strip mining law. Barbara Kelly of Chattanooga, active with the Sierra Club and SOCM, believes that state efforts to control strip mining “have fallen apart.”

On behalf of SOCM and TCWP, LEAF filed motions to intervene in a class action suit in Campbell County chancery court. Forty-nine coal companies were arguing that they should be given more time to comply with the state strip mining law. The case was removed to US district court in Knoxville whereupon the companies withdrew.

As it challenges the state’s overall laxity, LEAF is aiding various citizen groups in efforts to protect particularly fragile locations from the erosion, flooding and water pollution which accompany surface mining. It is representing citizens seeking protection for land adjacent to the Frozen Head Park in Morgan County and for the Douglas Branch Watershed in Campbell County.

In an effort at harassment, the M.C. Coal Company of Chattanooga sued the Sierra Club and Tennessee Friends of the Earth in March 1983, alleging libel in the groups’ request for a hearing concerning M.C.’s water quality permit and for articles in the Tennes-Sierran (the Club newsletter) which dealt with violations in the strip mining law. Following presentation of a brief and an oral argument by Carol Nickle of LEAF, the case was dimissed.

LEAF-Georgia

LEAF-Georgia opened its offices in Atlanta in July of 1983. Six months later it had become one of the busiest and most effective environmental organizations in the state.

In August of 1983, LEAF-Georgia challenged the federal Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) use of paraquat on marijuana plants in the North Georgia mountains. Local residents and campers were outraged as helicopters sprayed the deadly substance (a half-ounce on the skin can be lethal) onto small patches of marijuana as DEA movie cameras whirled. The DEA intended to convince the government of Colombia to adopt spraying, in spite of Colombia’s questioning its safety. Area residents organized Citizens Opposed to Paraquat Spraying and asked for LEAF’s help.

LEAF worked with private attorneys David Walbert, John Bell and Paul Hermann who obtained a restraining order in August from federal court in Georgia’s Northern District. Meanwhile, LEAF joined with the Sierra Club Legal Defense Fund and three other national organizations in a successful suit in US District Court for the District of Columbia preventing the spraying of paraquat on all federal

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land unless and unfit DEA prepares an environmental impact statement.

Following the DC court’s ruling, in a January 1984 hearing in Atlanta (which DEA called a “scoping session”), DEA officials suggested that critics of the spraying were smokers and growers who were hiding behind environmental issues. (The DEA photographed all oponents at the hearing.) White County Presbyterian preacher Jerry Brinegar said that the citizens of area would be happy to go in with the DEA and pull the marijuana plants up by hand. Pointing out that the headwaters of the Chattahoochee River (which supplies drinking water for Atlanta, Columbia and towns below) rise on National Forest land, LEAF attorney Vicki Breman concluded that “Georgia’s water supply and wildlife are seriously threatened by the use of paraquat and other herbicides.”

The Forest Service’s use of the herbicides tordon and velpar are being challenged by LEAF Georgia on behalf of residents of Rabun County. These herbicides, explicitly labelled not for use in areas where water contamination is possible are being applied in the nation’s second-rainiest county. Both of these herbicides have been linked to health problems. Tordon, called “Agent White” when used in Vietnam (and chemically close to Agent Orange) is presently being investigated by the government of Brazil as the suspected cause of forty-two deaths along the route of a power line where it was sprayed. LEAF is raising money to test the Rabun County water and to publish an organizing handbook for residents.

Acting as legal counsel for the Campaign for a Prosperous Georgia (see “Money on the Mainline,” Southern Changes, March/April; 1983), LEAF has also prepared a petition for intervention against the Vogtle Nuclear Power Plant now under construction by the Georgia Power Company. Plant Vogtle, the most expensive construction project in state history, is being challenged on environmental, safety and economic grounds. It is a prime example of economic and environmental concerns paralleling, not contradicting each other. If completed and placed in the rate base, Plant Vogtle would cause the largest electric rate hike in Georgia history. LEAF will provide ongoing assistance to citizens groups working to stop the plant.

LEAF-Georgia is working on many other issues: trying to force the state Department of Transportation to install promised noise barriers along the interstate highways near Atlanta residences; attempting to stop construction by Oglethorpe Power of a high-voltage line through a historic district of White County; presenting comments on the proposed restart of the L-Reactor at the Savannah River Plant where tritium and plutonium for nuclear weapons are produced; and providing technical advice on legal environmental issues to private attorneys around the state.

LEAF has financed itself through a variety of means. Most of the support for the Alabama and Tennessee offices has come from the Mary Reynolds Babcock Foundation. LEAF-Georgia has gathered money from individual donations and fundraising events A benefit concert by the new-wave band REM brought in more than six thousand dollars; an auction raised another thousand According to Sissy Kegley, administrative coordinator, LEAF-Georgia already has some 150 members who pay annual dues or monthly pledges.

LEAF’s rapid emergence and its frequent successes come with the dedication of its staff, the sophistication of their work and familiarity with the issues and the region, and–in view of the traditional tentativeness of established conservation groups in the region and the single-minded development policies often followed by Southern governments–from the fact that there is so much to do in the South.

Legal Environmental Assistance Foundation (LEAF)

Alabama
2330 Highland Avenue, South
Birmingham, Alabama 35205
205-324-0932

Florida
203 North Gadsden Street
Tallahassee, Florida 32301
904-681 -2591

Georgia
1102 Healey Building
57 Forsyth Street, NW
Atlanta, Georgia 30303
404-688-3299

Central Appalachian Office
602 Gay Street, Suite 507
Knoxville, Tennessee 37902
615-637-5172

Tim Johnson is executive director of the Educational Campaign for a Prosperous Georgia.

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.

******

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.

******

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.