Life in Poison
An Alabama town’s long struggle to survive
By Joaquin Sapien
ANNISTON, Ala., May 18, 2007 — On a walking tour along Henderson Hill’s quiet streets here, the Rev. Thomas Long pointed out vacant properties where weeds and vines now grow at homes where generations of families once flourished.
This neighborhood where Long lives is just a few blocks from a Solutia Inc. chemical manufacturing plant whose stark surroundings feel more like a cemetery than the active community that Long nostalgically described as he strolled its empty streets.
“Everybody here knew each other by name, everybody helped raise one another’s kids,” Long said. “But since this contamination has come into this community, it has killed this community.”
The minister was referring to the toxic plague here associated with polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs, which has hit Anniston so badly that scientists call this town the most polluted place in the country. The World Health Organization and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency consider PCBs to be “probable human carcinogens.”
From the 1930s to the 1970s, a PCB manufacturing plant formerly owned and operated by agricultural-chemical giant Monsanto Co. discharged contaminated wastewater into streams, ditches and landfills in the impoverished west end of town, exposing hundreds of people to the hazardous materials used in electrical devices as coolants, insulators and lubricants. Solutia, spun off from Monsanto in 1997, still uses the facility to make other chemicals.
Standing on the front porch of her childhood home in west Anniston, resident Pollie Goodman described how rampant death has become in her community. “If I went to the funerals of [all] the people that I knew, I’d be at a funeral [almost] every day,” Goodman said. “It’s just that serious.”
Goodman, like many of her neighbors, has high levels of PCBs in her blood, and struggles with a recurring skin rash and hyperthyroidism, two ailments that the federal Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR) has linked to PCB exposure.
According to Dr. David Carpenter, a public health scientist at the State University of New York at Albany, who studied the PCB problem in Anniston as an expert witness for plaintiffs suing Monsanto, residents here have some of the highest levels of PCBs he has ever seen. Carpenter suggests that there is likely a relationship between their exposure and the prevalence of cancer in the community.
“Now it is true that when you look at any one individual you are never able to say with 100 percent confidence that their cancer was caused by their exposure to PCBs, even if they have high levels in their body,” Carpenter said. “What you can say is that the risk of developing that particular type of cancer was increased because of their exposure to PCBs.”
In the mid-1990s, Monsanto bought out homes in two neighborhoods adjacent to Henderson Hill that had very high concentrations of PCBs. The company destroyed the houses, spread the contaminated dirt and capped it with layers of top soil and grass.
Long’s backyard now shares a chain-link fence with the capped landfill.
“Now, my mother died here,” Long said, as he casually pointed to a house with smashed out windows loosely held together by rotting, paint-peeled planks. “She died when I was 14. She had multiple tumors. She died with cancer. … I think she was about 40 or 42.”
In 2002, documents surfaced through years-long litigation brought by thousands of west Anniston residents who attributed a multitude of health problems to their exposure to PCBs. The papers revealed that Monsanto hid its knowledge that the wastewater could affect the health of those in contact with it.
Eventually, the case was settled for $700 million, to be split among nearly 20,000 plaintiffs.
As the lawsuit came to a close and cleanup began after plans were drafted in 2003, the media frenzy slowly faded away.
But Anniston residents are still struggling with illnesses that could be PCB-related, the presence of lead-contaminated sand in many of their backyards distributed by foundries and pipe-shops throughout town, and a chemical weapons incinerator built just outside city limits by the U.S. Army.
Despite this confluence of toxic chemicals, the contaminated areas in Anniston are not officially designated as Superfund sites — except for the Army depot outside town where the incinerator is located. EPA attorney Mike Stevenson said that while the amount of PCB and lead pollution in Anniston is worthy of designation as a Superfund site, since the agency found polluters to pay for the cleanup and it didn’t need Superfund money, there was no need to list it.
The Center for Public Integrity visited Anniston to observe the cleanup through the eyes of residents and EPA officials as part of its investigation, “Wasting Away: Superfund’s Toxic Legacy.” Watch residents tell their own stories of life in polluted Anniston.