Our Road to Walk: Then and Now: Recent Episodes
Deborah and Ken Ferruccio
Our Road to Walk: Then and Now is a podcast series hosted by Deborah and Ken Ferruccio broadcast from Warren County, North Carolina, known as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement. The purpose of the series is to share the inside, untold, documented, forty-four-year PCB landfill history which serves as a roadmap and guidebook for communities everywhere who want to actively help protect the environment, especially marginalized communities, through education and activism based on science for the people. Our goal is to raise the consciousness of our listeners by informing and inspiring them and by winning their hearts and minds so that they want to join Our Road to Walk on a mutual pilgrimage for the planet, person by person, community by community, region by region, and nation by nation.
Episode Photo: For this hard-hitting episode, we chose to feature this quote by Bryan Stevenson, Executive Director of the Montgomery, Alabama, National Memorial for Peace and Justice, because we agree with him that "an honest engagement with our past is essential if we are to create a healthy and just future."
In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to respond to EPA’s Senior Environmental Justice Policy Advisor Dr. Charles Lee’s invitation to Ken to share his ideas — past, present, and future — as part of a “We Birthed the Movement” panel discussion.
They follow where the last episode left off, explaining more about the reversal of the Warren County environmental justice movement, especially as it plays out in the detoxification cleanup process of the PCB landfill.
It’s important to know how and why this reversal in the birthplace occurred because the PCB cleanup process has informed the perceptions of the environmental justice movement at large.
Ken and Deborah share excerpts from a revealing, December, 1998 inside letter from PCB Working Group member Jim Warren, who was and still is Director of NC WARN, the North Carolina Waste Awareness and Reduction Network, to Co-chair Dollie Burwell. The letter follows how the original citizen/state agreed-upon goal of the PCB Working Group — to detoxify the landfill with qualified independent scientific oversight — is reversed, using subterfuge to create a rift in the PCB Working Group.
They remind Dr. Lee of the 1994 statement he wrote on behalf of the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice in support of detoxification of the PCB landfill with stakeholder decision-making and independent science. They then ask Dr. Lee if he was aware of Jim Warren’s letter concerning the rift in the PCB Working Group.
As they speak to present concerns, Ken and Deborah, address potential allocation of EPA Justice40 community grant funding, especially as it relates to the Warren County Environmental Action Team that has proposed a partnership with the Warren County Board of Commissioners in order to build an EPA-sponsored Warren County-based environmental justice grassroots leadership center of excellence in the county.
Ken and Deborah point out that members of the Action Team have clear governmental and institutional-affiliated conflicts of interest that are antithetical to grassroots citizen interests and that members of the Action Team are not experientially qualified to “develop and implement a grassroots leadership training model based on the PCB landfill struggle,” as Action Team Director Bill Kearney has stated is the objective.
Concerning the vision for the future of Warren County, Ken adamantly makes his point clear:
“An EPA institutional nexus of entangling alliances with the Warren County Environmental Action Team, in partnership with Warren County Commissioners, or any other entity, will not determine the future of Warren County, but the public sentiment of Warren County Citizens — landowners, tax payers, stake-holders —will determine the future of Warren County.”
Ken and Deborah end the episode with this question to EPA’s Charles Lee:
“Would you, Charles, consider coming to Warren County, joining Warren County Environmental Action Team Director Bill Kearney, and sitting down with the citizens of the county as we discuss our visions for Warren County and beyond going forward, as well as, if and how, proposed EPA Justice40 grant monies might best be allocated?”
This photo of Reverend Leon White and Ken Ferruccio, President and Spokesperson for Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs, was taken in December 1982, soon after the PCB protest movement as they spoke to audiences on an East Coat Tour organized by Charles Lee and sponsored by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice.
In this episode, Ken responds to a recent invitation from Dr. Charles Lee to serve as a panelist and to share his PCB experiences and insights at a “We Birthed the Movement” discussion hosted by the EPA-Research Triangle Park Management Council in partnership with the University of North Carolina’s Wilson Special Collections Library and its traveling Warren County PCB archival exhibit. Dr. Lee is Senior Policy Advisor for EPA’s Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights
However, Ken turned down the invitation because his knowledge of the documented history has little in common with the prevailing “We Birthed the Movement” narrative and because of the inherent constraints of a panel discussion format, so Ken told Dr. Lee he would be responding at length in this upcoming podcast episode.
In this episode, Ken and Deborah share two key historical experiences that they believe describe the trajectory of the Warren County PCB landfill environmental justice movement history, how the direction of the movement was reversed from a grassroots focus to an institutional focus, the reversal also following the arc of Dr. Lee’s environmental justice career.
In order to give context to the analysis that follows, Deborah refers to a leaked EPA memo and to the EPA’s Environmental Equity report that author Robert Bullard describes as part of the EPA’s “outreach strategy” to prevent “minority fairness flashpoints” from happening by “mounting a public relations campaign to drive a wedge between grassroots environmental justice activists and mainstream civil rights and environmental groups.”
Section 1, “The Reversal,” begins soon after the fall 1982 PCB protest movement when Dr. Lee asks Ken and Reverend Leon White to speak about the PCB history on an East Coast Tour sponsored by the United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice.
Ken refers Dr. Lee to the 1983 grant proposal he submitted to the Commission for Racial Justice at Dr. Lee’s request that Ken titled,
“An Institute for Environmental Justice,” the purpose which was for grassroots communities facing environmental pollution to work with institutions to integrate coordinate, and focus environmental justice efforts and resources.
Section 2; “The Rift,” focuses on the PCB landfill detoxification process and the wedge that was driven within the PCB Working Group and which created a major environmental justice rift which divided citizens from their right to decision-making power and independent scientific oversight during the PCB cleanup process.
They refer to Dr. Eileen McGurty’s use of the word “rift” in her book Transforming Environmentalism: Warren County, PCBs, and the Origins of Environmental Justice, and to her erroneous conclusion that this rift “allowed the state to avoid the sticky problem of the risks from the landfill.”
Ken and Deborah argue that Dr. McGurty’s explanation of the rift was not only erroneous, but it was personally harmful to them, and has the most serious and far-reaching implications for the environmental justice movement to this day.
Pulitzer Prize-winning author Than Viet “argues that the way nations remember and re-narrate their pasts isn’t random or coincidental. It’s intentionally curated in memories, monuments, museums, even in key-chains and mugs in gift shops.” He calls this the
“re-narration memory industry.” In other words, they change history.
In this episode, Ken and Deborah examine how the EPA’s environmental justice re-memory industry has and continues to re-narrate the Warren County environmental justice PCB narrative through the use of manipulated language and the efforts of the Warren County Environmental Action Team, a network of organizations and individuals with government, academic, and ecumenical affiliations, led by Bill Kearney.
Now, according to Kearney, the Warren County Environmental Action Team is seeking a partnership with county officials to get substantial EPA environmental justice community grant monies to “leverage the PCB history and the county’s close relationship with the leadership of the EPA” and “to build an Environmental Justice Center of Excellence here in Warren County,” on the PCB brownfield site or somewhere else in Warren County.
With a pot of EPA environmental justice grant monies on the horizon, Kearney, who is a preacher, researcher and consultant, calls for comprehensive assessments of the environmental and health impacts of the PCB contamination.
Ken and Deborah ask:
How, and more importantly, why, would the state have built and the EPA approved a landfill that immediately became such an abject failure in a poor, largely black community? Has an EPA-affiliated research community been preparing for, or is it now seizing the opportunity, for studies of a hazardous waste sacrifice zone, using more than forty years of PCB exposure as part of a research effort?
Could researchers and the EPA, which is captured by the industry it regulates, benefit from learning about the human health risks of long-term exposures to PCBs, gathering human evidence that could be used, for example, by the epidemiological community to set ever-changing legal maximum contaminate exposure levels?
What kind of research ethics are potentially at play here in Warren County today? For forty years, from, 1942-1972, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the U.S. Public Health Services in collaboration with Tuskegee University, conducted studies on nearly 400 African-American men to learn about the effects of untreated syphilis.
Where will Kearney’s research take him with potential EPA community grant monies? How might a partnership with our own county government further such efforts?
In this episode, Ken and Deborah take off their gloves as the chemical war of words rages and is playing out in Warren County as a winner-takes-all battle for the PCB environmental justice narrative.
Currently, the Warren County Environmental Action Team — which includes local, state, federal, EPA and academic-affiliated members, seeks to partner with county commissioners to secure EPA Justice40 community grant monies in order “to leverage the PCB environmental justice history and the county’s close relationship with the leadership of the EPA” and to “build an Environmental Justice Center of Excellence,” preferably on the PCB brownfield site, or somewhere else in the county if not there.
In fact, the PCB history has been “leveraged” as a government-sponsored narrative since Ken’s March, 1983, nineteen-day fast in jail when the state-of-the-art EPA-approved PCB landfill was an abysmal failure within months.
Ken’s jailhouse statement: “Why I am in Jail, Refusing to Cooperate with the Government, and Fasting” and his legal “Statement for Defense” detail why he took such drastic measures to call attention to the environmental injustice of a landfill that was a pitiful poisonous mess from day one.
As significant EPA environmental justice grant monies promise to bury the truth of the failed PCB landfill in a feel-good, government-sponsored narrative that threatens to destroy more poor and often minority communities, Ken and Deborah speak out as never before.
The above photo of T. Mitchell Langdon, a Johnston County, North Carolina farmer, was published in Newsweek magazine on September 6, 1982, with an article titled "Toxic Time Bomb." The photo was taken in 1979 by Fayetteville Observer reporter
James L. Pate, Jr.
In this episode, Deborah and Ken are focusing more closely on what could have been behind the 1978 North Carolina PCB roadside crime, what Governor Hunt called the “dastardly deed.”
State officials maintained the PCB dumpers were attempting to avoid the costs of new hazardous waste rules under the Toxic Substances Control Act . But the state’s rationale for the midnight PCB dumpings made no sense.
Ken and Deborah explore other factors, including local, regional, and state hazardous waste landfill plans for Warren County that might have been connected to the roadside PCB crime.
Deborah shares what she can of her conversations with Mitchell Langdon and Wayne Brown who investigated the PCB crime. Langdon sued Governor Hunt, sixty state and EPA officials; Robert “Buck” Ward, Jr., and his Raleigh Ward PCB Transformer Company; and Robert Burns, Ward’s business associate. Langdon hoped his litigation would induce the Governor to stop delaying the PCB roadside cleanup.
As Ward and Burns receive minimal sentences for the PCB crime, Ken and Deborah consider the actual cost of the PCB crime, including the far-reaching and long-term environmental and health impacts on the thousands of people along the roadsides in fourteen counties and Ft. Bragg; on generations of Warren County residents; and on thousands of people in the Raleigh-Durham, Brier Creek area contaminated by the Ward Transformer Company PCB site for decades.
Deborah and Ken remind listeners that PCBs are “toxic time bombs” which continue to decimate people’s lives, as the public learns about significant PCB contamination recently found at North Carolina State University Poe Hall where one-hundred women with breast cancer form a cluster that is linked to the building’s PCB contamination.
Photo: At his parent’s home in New Hampshire, Ken works on his manuscript titled: Toxic Aggression, Fighting on the Front Lines: The North Carolina PCB Story (October, 1980).
In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to share with their listeners the events of 1980 as they relate to their PCB situation in particular and as the events relate to the larger hazardous waste issue in North Carolina and across the country.
As the history is unfolding in this second year of their PCB narrative — 1980 — what is occurring with EPA hazardous waste regulations will be an EPA toxic chemical watershed; a landmark victory for polluters; and a flashpoint for a chemical point-of-no-return for us all.
The Governor needs to slow down the roadside PCB cleanup process. He needs EPA hazardous waste landfill regulations to catch up with the state’s plans to bury the PCBs in Warren County perilously close to groundwater.
What to do with the roadside PCBs is vexing the Governor, and what to do with hazardous and radioactive waste across the state and nation is vexing industry and government as well.
Warren County citizens and citizens elsewhere are proving how politically explosive the waste issue is. Meanwhile, waste industries are busy capturing the EPA.
Ken and Deborah aren’t waiting passively for the state’s next move. They spend months writing a manuscript in hopes the documented PCB narrative will help stop the PCB landfill. As they complete the manuscript and submit it to a literary agent for review in October, 1980, EPA’s decimated hazardous waste landfill regulations are simultaneously implemented.
The regulations will help make waste disposal the growth industry of the 1980s, and chemicals in the environment a way of life.
“Only the NIMBYs stand in the way of this government/industrial overwhelming and unstoppable force” (William Sanjour, From the Files of a Whistleblower: Or How EPA was Captured by the Industry it Regulated).
In this late December, 2023, Podcast Episode 30, Deborah and Ken break from their chronological narrative in order to recognize and celebrate the 45th anniversary of the actual birth of the Warren County environmental justice movement. They follow the extraordinary events that take place in Warren County in late December, 1978, and early 1979, after citizens learn the Hunt Administration plans to bury the roadsides PCBs in Warren County, regardless of their public sentiment.
In this 45th anniversary episode, Ken and Deborah follow in detail how Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs responded to the state’s announcement; informed themselves and each other; on the issues; formed an unlikely, multi-racial coalition of citizens who opposed the proposed PCB landfill; affirmed their freedom to determine themselves and their county through the expression of their public sentiments; exposed and stopped a multi-state chemical dump plan for the county; got nearly a 1,000 citizens to an EPA public hearing, with coverage by local, state, and national media, and at breakneck speed, changed the course of Warren County’s environmental justice history — all in two week’s time,
After they describe the grassroots uprising, Ken and Deborah then return to the chronological narrative that their listeners have been following — to late December, 1979, after Ken has sent his PCB analysis to the gubernatorial candidates (Episode 29) and is waiting for their response.
1979 has been a long, hard year. Deborah joins her sister, Victoria, and they leave to spend Christmas in Columbus, Ohio with their family. Ken stays at the cabin, reflects on the year that has past and considers what lies ahead, and writes two poems that he shares with their podcast listeners. (Click transcript above for the text of these poems.)
In this episode, the Warrenton Rotary Club invites Ken to speak about the PCB problem. Citizens are really concerned about Warren County becoming a PCB and toxic waste dumping grounds. Ken presents his analysis titled: “PCBs: Issues Without Answers,” and Attorney Frank Banzet suggests that Ken shares his PCB analysis with the candidates running for governor.
Ken then sends his analysis to the three 1980 gubernatorial candidates, including Governor Jim Hunt, former Governor Bob Scott, and I. Beverly Lake, Jr., inviting them to share their responses on what to do with the PCBs that have been lying on the roadsides for more than a year now. Ken also shares his analysis and letter to the gubernatorial candidates with the news media.
Hunt and Lake respond briefly, but Scott answers in great detail, attesting to how he would take command of the PCB crisis and not remain indecisive as he says Governor Hunt has been doing. Scott says he would not leave the PCBs on the roadsides but would take action immediately. One course of action Scott suggests is to put a PCB dump in each of the 14 PCB-contaminated counties. This way these counties can each have a dumpsite for future use!
Scott does not address that hazardous waste dumpsites deter positive businesses and attract more hazardous waste.
Scott says that he believes Warren County was chosen for the PCB dump because Warren County has few votes. Scott is right. The county’s few votes aren’t critical to Governor Hunt. The considerable political and economic investment in Warren County is worth much more that the few votes the Governor will need.
Photo: William Sanjour, Former Branch Chief of EPA's Division of Hazardous Waste Disposal, warned in the late 1970s that reducing the scope of Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) industrial hazardous waste disposal regulations would be devastating. He became an EPA whistleblower, speaking out about the dangers of weak and non-existent regulations of chemicals and predicting the horrific chemical age in which we now live.
See: From the Files of a Whistleblower: Or how EPA was captured by the industry it regulated, by William Sanjour, 12.25.13
https://chej.org/wp-content/uploads/william_sanjour_memoir.pdf
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In this episode, we ask our listeners why they should continue to take their valuable time to listen to this Our Road to Walk: Then and Now podcast series. We point out that our listeners don’t have to take our word that the Warren County, North Carolina PCB landfill history has significance to everyone who wants a safe environment and a livable planet.
The relevance of the Warren County, North Carolina PCB landfill history is affirmed in a recent October 5, 2023, National Public Radio Throughline podcast series in an episode titled: “Two Miles Down the Road.” This NPR podcast episode features how the Warren County PCB landfill opposition “helped birth a national movement, one that would eventually put environmental justice on the national agenda — and is shaping the fight for climate action today.” According to Throughline, “The past is never past,” and we must “go back in time to understand the present.”
This Our Road To Walk: Then and Now podcast Episode 28 is an attempt to go deeper into the conversation about how Warren County put environmental justice on the national agenda and how the Warren County environmental justice narrative has been shaped over time by a storytelling narrative known in research circles as ethnography, a research method that relies not so much on verifying history but a method that allows flexibility in remembering history.
In this episode, Ken and Deborah go back in time to the origins and the aftermath of the Warren County PCB environmental justice movement in an effort to clarify for their listening audience the difference between ethnographic storytelling narratives and documented historical narratives. Why?
Because, as the relevance of the Warren County PCB environmental justice movement is seen largely through a storytelling narrative lens, the focus is not so much on the documented history — on the scientific evidence and the environmental and justice truths we need to know if we are to take meaningful climate action and to create lasting, effective solutions.
Let’s face it. Most of us would prefer to forget the unhappy parts of the past, but in the case of the chemical assault on our lives, storytelling is not enough and can actually support the polluters. As we are in “a world awash in chemicals" (1), the public has the right and deserves to know the documented history of the PCB movement that is known for transforming environmentalism so that we can make scientifically informed choices for our environmental and public health future.
Don’t get us wrong. Storytelling, the most ancient means of keeping history and passing it on, is legitimate and important. It’s just that we need both storytelling and documented history telling, but we need to know the difference.
As primary sources, Ken and Deborah continue to share with their podcast listeners the Warren County, North Carolina PCB saga as a documented history they have archived and kept.
(1) Hertsgaard, Mark, “A World Awash in Chemicals,” New York Times, April 7, 1996.
https://www.nytimes.com/1996/04/07/books/a-world-awash-in-chemicals.&l
This episode continues to follow the first year of the Warren County, North Carolina PCB landfill opposition and the making of the environmental justice movement that is taking place in 1979. The local narrative is very much a national EPA narrative. PCBs in North Carolina, and EPA regulations in Washington, D.C. are the battle grounds.
EPA is turning hazardous waste regulations into a license to pollute, and the battle is for uncorrupted science. Warren County citizens who have the metaphorical gun to their heads in 1979 can clearly see that how things are playing out in Warren County are affecting what North Carolina and the nation will be doing with toxic, hazardous, and other dangerous waste.
The untangling of the local, state, and federal EPA web is exposing how the EPA is using “Stone Age science” (to echo a phrase from Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring) to legally unleash tens of thousands of untested, unregulated chemicals on the market.
More than six decades ago Rachael Carson wrote at the end of Silent Spring:
“As crude a weapon as the cave man’s club, the chemical barrage has been hurled against the fabric of life — a fabric on the one hand, delicate and destructible, on the other hand miraculously tough and resilient, and capable of striking back in unexpected ways. These extraordinary capacities of life have been ignored by the practitioners of chemical control.”
Episode 27 continues to focus on this “Stone Age science” as it is being legalized in hazardous waste disposal regulations and technology. A November 1, 1979, interview by Journalist Jim Klosty with Jeff Diver, of Waste Management, Inc., reveals just how our “stone age vogue for poisons” is being scientifically justified and instituted as a way that protects polluting industries, discriminates against and destroys ground-zero communities first, and then spreads pervasively and harms us all.
Photo: Screenshot of EPA Whistleblower William Sanjour,
“They Blew the Whistle at Work Then Paid the Price,” Phil Donahue Television Show,
February 28, 1996. Video Archives, YouTube.
In this episode, Ken and Deborah ask their listeners why they should care about the seeming web of toxic waste relationships taking place back in the summer and fall of 1979 in a backwoods part of the rural South.
This episode is the answer to that question.
They ask, “Why should their listeners care?”
Because that web of relationships in 1979 was part of a crucial turning point in American environmental history, a tragic watershed of EPA decisions and events that were taking the nation down the road to pervasive petro-chemical and other pollution and to the climate disaster that we are now on.
As they continue to tie the past to the present, Ken and Deborah focus on EPA official William Sanjour who exposes the EPA chemical waste name-game as EPA is shifting regulations originally written to protect public health and the environment to regulations written to protect industry’s economic bottom line.
Sanjour describes how “cruel, stupid, and short-sighted" the regulatory shift is and says, “by relieving industry of the burden of testing their wastes for harmful effects before dumping them, the EPA is transferring the testing to the livers, kidneys, and fetuses of people unknowingly exposed to the wastes.”
As they share this ongoing North Carolina PCB saga, Ken and Deborah continue to reveal how a multi-racial coalition of industrial developers, government officials, and politicians are targeting a sparsely populated but conveniently located poor, minority community, surely not having anticipated that the effort to stop them will continue to be an informed and impassioned multi-racial coalition of ordinary citizens that will be relentless.
In this episode, Ken and Deborah receive alarming information from two reliable inside sources about a connection in the planning stages between Soul City and the proposed Afton PCB landfill site. Ken shares the information concerning the connection with Concerned Citizens committee members who advise him that he needs to share the information with the public through the news media.
In addition to waste generated by industrial production at Soul City, other waste would be shipped to Soul City by rail. The sources said that near the rail head, which was then under construction at Soul City and which Ken and Deborah have a photograph of, would be two, large basins, one for municipal sewage and the other for chemical waste.
The alleged connection has credibility. In the county’s civil complaint attempting to stop the state from purchasing the Afton property for the PCB landfill, officials write that they “are informed and believe that the state has undisclosed plans for the Afton tract of land as a principle site for large quantities of other toxic and dangerous chemicals.”
In fact, the allegation is serious enough that Raleigh’s WRAL TV Action News 5 sends reporter Leila Tvedt to interview Ken. She arrives in a helicopter that lands in the soybean field adjacent to the Ferruccio cabin.
Ken and Deborah also learn that a local businessman close to the Governor had offered land for a radioactive waste dump.
As Ken continues to inform the public and the Hunt Administration through the news media, he addresses the way that the EPA is transforming the agency to legalize unsafe hazardous waste disposal sites. He says that the EPA’s latest Federal Register is in essence a confession of the many unknowns involved in the management and disposal of chemical waste.
Ken writes that since crucial aspects of landfills are dangerously unpredictable, and since without predictability there can be no scientific justification, a vocabulary of faith is infiltrating a vocabulary of science.
Photo: Secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety Herbert Hyde:
Was he "in good faith?"
On the heels of threats to Ken’s life and the break-in at the Ferruccio cabin,
Ken examines his contradictory leadership position as a proponent of non-violent civil disobedience who felt it necessary to protect himself and Deborah with arms.
In the aftermath of the statewide publicity about the “Anti-PCB Leader in a State of Armed Alert,” the Hunt Administration proposes the multiple-dump option. Seven of the fourteen counties agree to let the state test their solid waste landfills for potential PCB disposal.
Secretary Herbert Hyde comes to Warren County, meets with commissioners, says that he comes “in good faith,” and convinces commissioners to approve testing at the Warren County landfill as part of the multiple-dump plan. At the meeting, the state grants $565,142 as part of funds for the the proposed $4.6 million regional waste water treatment plant.
The next day, however, the Council of State allocates funds to purchase the Afton site for the PCB landfill in Warren County. County Commissioners call a special meeting where two-hundred citizens attend and express their outrage at Secretary Hyde's apparent in-good-faith double-cross.
They demand that commissioners take out a lawsuit to stop the state’s PCB plans. Commissioners agree, and Greensboro environmental and constitutional attorney Norman Smith is hired. In a complaint filed by the county to stop the sale of the property, the county says it is informed and believes that the state has undisclosed future plans to use the Afton property not just for PCBs but as a principle dumping site for large quantities of other highly toxic and dangerous chemicals.
Herbert Hyde resigns as Secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety, possibly because he had in fact been in good faith and had been double-crossed himself.
Governor Hunt goes to Washington, D.C. to meet with President Carter to secure $926,000 in federal funds for the Warren County regional waste waster treatment plant with plans for the federal government to hand over portions of Soul City to the state.
Citizens question what is going on, but they are fairly certain officials are not acting in good faith.
For once, the EPA uses the precautionary principle — something the Agency seldom applies to its decisions. Since January, 1979, the Hunt Administration has been looking to delay the EPA’s decision on the PCB landfill in Warren County and has been pretending to seriously consider the in-place carbon treatment of the roadside PCBs. Then the Agency decides to require a 50-year study of PCBs treated in-place with carbon.
It comes as no real surprise, then, on June 4, 1979, that Ken receives a phone call from Raleigh radio station WRAL FM asking him to comment on EPA’s rejection of the carbon treatment plan and the news that the EPA has just approved the state’s Afton Warren County PCB landfill plan.
The next day, Ken receives a phone call from Paul Pope whose family owns the property for the PCB landfill site. The state hasn’t actually paid him for the property yet. Mr. Pope threatens Ken as the “one who stirs the people up.” The next day, Mr. Pope’s son calls Ken and threatens him. That night, Ken, his brother Richard, and Deborah stay at Frances and Sylvia Davis’s house. The next morning Ken and Deborah find that their cabin has been broken into.
Sheriff Davis and Deputy Bartholemew tell Ken and his brother Richard that law enforcement cannot protect them. Richard buys a firearm, and Ken already has one. Ken and Sylvia send out press releases stating that "PCB committee members are in a state of mutual protection and armed alert." The Ferruccio cabin break-in hits statewide news.
Sylvia and Ken meet with District Attorney David Waters to see if there is any way he can help them get protection. District Attorney Waters tells Ken if anyone really wants to harm him, it is unlikely that that person would break into the cabin again and that it would probably be through a telescopic lens.
For once, the EPA uses the precautionary principle — something the Agency seldom applies to its decisions. Since February, 1979, the Hunt Administration has been looking to delay the EPA’s decision on the PCB landfill in Warren County and has been pretending to seriously consider the in-place carbon treatment of the roadside PCBs. Then the Agency decides to require a 50-year study of PCBs treated in-place with carbon. Such a longitudinal study of a chemical was and still is unheard of and at the time was the EPA’s way of shutting down for good any more consideration of treating the PCBs in place.
It’s comes as no real surprise, then, on June 4, 1979, that Ken receives a phone call from Raleigh radio station WRAL FM asking him to comment on EPA’s rejection of the carbon treatment plan and the news that the EPA has just approved the state’s Afton Warren County PCB landfill plan.
The next day, Ken receives a phone call from Paul Pope whose family owns the property for the PCB landfill site. The state hasn’t actually paid him for the property yet. Mr. Pope threatens Ken as the “one who stirs the people up.” The next day, Mr. Pope’s son calls Ken and threatens him. That night, Ken, his brother Richard, and Deborah stay at Frances and Sylvia Davis’s house. The next morning Ken and Deborah find that their cabin has been broken into.
Sheriff Davis and Deputy Bartholemew tell Ken and his brother Richard that law enforcement cannot protect them. Richard buys a firearm, and Ken already had one. Ken and Sylvia send out press releases stating that PCB committee members are in a state of mutual protection and armed alert. The Ferruccio cabin break-in hits statewide news.
Sylvia and Ken meet with District Attorney David Waters to see if there is any way he can help them get protection. District Attorney Waters tells Ken if anyone really wants to harm him, it is unlikely that that person would break into the cabin again and that it would probably be through a telescopic lens that they would get Ken.
What should have been a slam dunk by the Hunt Administration to bury the roadside PCBs in Warren County by March or April of 1979, weather permitting, has been anything but that. Apparently, Governor Hunt had been so confident that he would bury the PCBs in Warren County, that he warned citizens there that public sentiment would not deter the state from burying the PCBs in Warren County.
His strong-armed warning only serves to ignite the wrath of Warren County citizens who are vehemently opposed to a PCB landfill in their county, not just because they believe that science predicts that the landfill will fail but because they believe that the Governor knows it will fail, and that’s why he doesn’t plan to give them a say in the matter.
Citizens contact “60 Minutes,” the television show, because they believe that the midnight PCB dumping spree was strangely criminal and needs journalistic investigation.
As spokesperson for Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs, Ken is asked by Warrenton Attorney Frank Banzet to address a North Carolina Senate Subcommittee and to share concerns about the roadside PCBs and the intrinsic dangers of landfills designed to temporarily contain toxic chemicals that last perpetually.
Ken warns legislators that flexible EPA regulations are a recipe for environmental disaster and that House Bill 290 threatens to extinguish the fundamental human and civil rights of people to determine their own ecological fate. Ken might as well have been whistling in the wind; lawmakers are working with the Governor to pave the way for economic development by making it easy to site hazardous waste landfill facilities that will serve to attract industry. One senator says to Ken after he makes his presentation, “But, Mr. Ferruccio, if we let the communities decide, how shall we ever get these dumps?”
Her question strikes at the heart of the dilemma of our chemical age.
As the EPA and state regulators permit the production and disposal of deadly chemicals that last forever and create regulations that are unsafe but legal, they can only do this with the help of laws that take from communities their basic constitutional right to protect their persons and properties.
As the EPA and North Carolina legislators are institutionalizing environmental injustice, Governor Hunt continues his plans to dump the PCBs in Warren County as the investigation into the in-place treatment plan buys the Governor time.
Meanwhile, the toxic contamination is spreading. One Johnston County farmer, T. Mitchell Langdon, says that the “Hunt Administration has messed around long enough” and has a erected a 4’x8’ plywood sign that captures the sentiments of many North Carolina residents that reads: “PCB Cleanup Hunt’s Folly” and features a skull and crossbones in the upper corners of the sign. A photo of Langdon's sign is in Newsweek magazine.
In this episode, Ken goes to Johnston County with Wallace Neal in the PCB truck to protest the state’s testing of the Weber plan to see if carbon can be used to treat the roadside PCBs in place. However, it is highly unlikely that the EPA will approve the carbon treatment plan which has only been studied in the lab and that will require perpetually monitoring 270 miles of highway shoulders.
Ken decides to have a little fun and wears an old, military, chemical gas mask and immediately gets the attention of news media reporters who are uneasy at the sight of Ken’s gas mask. He explains to the reporters why Warren County citizens are opposed to the Weber plan and to the PCB dump in Warren County and banters with EPA official Dave Hopkins and with a Johnston County health official.
The Warren County Board of Commissioners meets with commissioners from the fourteen counties, and the counties decide to support picking up the PCBs on the roadsides and to haul them to an already EPA-approved hazardous waste landfill.
As the state delays its decision on the Warren County PCB plan, it continues its circus to entertain the public with the in-place carbon treatment plan. At a conference in Durham titled: “Cancer and the Toxic Environment,” Ken and Sylvia Davis present a talk on the PCB situation in North Carolina. They learn about another cleanup alternative that the state doesn’t even seem to consider, a permanent detoxification method explained by Jesse Riley who says that he “does not favor excavation and burial of the PCBs in a landfill because it simply assembles a larger, more potent time-bomb in one place.”
The take-away of this Episode 21 should get our listener’s attention as we explain how bad things could have become in Warren County and North Carolina if history had taken a different turn.
In this episode, the meeting with Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs delegates and EPA Office of Toxic Substances officials continues. Delegates discuss EPA’s hazardous waste disposal regulations and express their skepticism.
They have every reason to believe that Warren County’s future is in peril. Their groundwater is at best about seven feet deep, and now the EPA is going to permit hazardous landfills to be built five feet from groundwater, even closer. The impossible claim is that new, state-of-the-art landfills will have zero percent discharge.
Citizens don’t buy the concept, and Wallace Neal, a contractor who has much experience with excavating soil for roads and industrial infrastructure, is really aggravated. They describe the strange roadside PCB dumpings; the temporary PCB dump in Warren County; the local and state attempt to build a 500-acre multi-state hazardous waste landfill in Warren County, owned and operated by Chemical Waste Management, and their suspicions lead them to speculate if the PCBs were spewed along the roadsides in the fourteen counties in order to leverage a dump in Warren County.
In this episode, a delegation of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs meets with EPA officials to find out if the rumor is true that the EPA is going to drop the 50 foot required distance between the bottom of a toxic waste landfill to only 5 feet. They learn that the agency does plan to drop this regulation, and they learn much more.
Throughout the meeting, delegates express their skepticism and distrust of the EPA’s toxic waste disposal landfill design. They can see that the EPA is really marketing a landfill concept that will become in reality a rationale for selective human sacrifice.
Wallace Neal, the foreman of John Tom Harris’s construction company, cuts through the EPA officials’ discussion on why they thought dropping the 50 foot standard to 5 feet would be safe because the engineering design of the landfill would make up for the closeness of the bottom of the landfill to groundwater.
With down-home, disarming and brilliant insights, Wallace addresses a fundamental question the EPA officials don’t attempt to answer.
If the landfill is designed for zero percent discharge, why are landfills not located where the waste is produced?
Wallace: “What difference does it make if you’re gonna fix it where you got zero?… It doesn’t make any difference. You can put it in your back yard if that’s the case. What difference is there putting it where they make it, even if there are lots of people if your going to fix it like Matt (the EPA official) said?"
In this episode we are returning to our Warren County PCB landfill narrative as the history is unfolding in January and February, 1979. Why should our listeners care about what happened forty-four years ago? Because the Warren County PCB landfill history is actually a history of the EPA’s war of toxic aggression, and to know this history is to understand (as EPA whistleblower William Sanjour put it) “how the EPA was captured by the industry it regulates.” The history is as relevant now as ever.
As the January 25, 1979 EPA ruling on the state’s Warren County PCB landfill plan is pending, the Hunt Administration asks the EPA to delay its decision. The residents in the 14 counties want the roadside PCBs picked up, but Warren County citizens are adamantly opposed to becoming a statewide PCB dump.
A letter to officials from the Sierra Club criticizes the state’s PCB landfill plan and advises Hunt Administration officials to withdraw its application until new regulations become effective.
The state considers an in-place PCB carbon treatment plan that citizens consider to be a strategic delay tactic, and Warren County Citizens’ executive committee members decide to seek advice from federal officials in Washington, DC.
John Tom and Frances Harris decide to sponsor something dramatic and decide to donate the use of one their dump trucks for a 15 mile per hour ride to Washington, DC.. The Harris Construction foreman, Wallace Neal, and Deborah join the farmers’s serpentine tractorcade to Washington DC and meet Ken, Frances, and John Tom and then meet with federal officials.
While Frances tells officials that “The hand that rocks a cradle can also make a fist,” Wallace drives the PCB truck, complete with signs, round and round the capitol. The Warren County crew returns with advice to commissioners to ask President Carter for federal disaster aid and to ask Warren County Commissioners to reach out to commissioners in the 14 counties to work together on a PCB solution.
Nearly two-thousand years ago, the Emperor Nero played music and partied as he watched 70% of Rome burn to the ground. Today, we are metaphorically watching Rome burn as our environment and health are assaulted again and again by pollution from loosely-regulated petrochemical and related industries, causing communities to be poisoned, global temperatures to rise, and climate disasters to worsen.
Three times in recent months, the signature black smoke of toxic chemicals on fire provided visceral reminders of how dangerous living in our chemical age can be. Three communities were evacuated; three communities were told soon after their air and water were safe.
In this episode we look at the intersection of our environmental past and present, taking our listeners back to the late 1970s and early 1980s, back to the 1982 testimony of William Sanjour, who was Chief of the EPA's Hazardous Waste Implementation Branch responsible for writing the EPA’s original hazardous waste disposal regulations and who had warned Warren County citizens that the PCB landfill would fail.
As an EPA whistleblower, Mr. Sanjour also warned US House of Representative committee members that the EPA’s approval of failed landfills was a part of a disaster relief model that was taking us down a road to environmental disaster, a road we did not have to take.
The above photo is one of EPA Whistleblower William Sanjour taken just after he spoke to Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs during the 1982 PCB protest movement. In this superimposed past and present photo, Mr. Sanjour looks toward the toxic chemical black smoke from the February, 2023, East Palestine, Ohio train derailment.
As Warren County citizens and their supporters marched during the fall 1982 PCB landfill protest movement, they knew from scientific evidence that the PCB landfill was doomed to fail.
Citizens knew that the EPA and Governor Hunt knew the PCB landfill would fail, and that the Governor’s use of $787,000 of police force to bury the PCBs against the will of the people of Warren County was an admission that government would go a long way to establish EPA’s disaster-relief environmental injustice model where the agency legalizes pollution and then sometimes offers relief to the polluted communities afterwards.
Forty-five years later, it’s easy to see that EPA’s disaster-relief environmental
injustice policies and regulations have led to why Rome is burning, why global warming continues, climate disaster is already here, and why the EPA, state, and local governments continue to promote our Chemical Empire of Death while they claim to care about environmental protection and justice.
Yet, we, the people, must choose the other road far less traveled, the environmental and justice road based not only on attending to the wounded in this burning war of toxic aggression but on looking keenly ahead so that we can stop pollution before it occurs.
What can we do?
We can look to the history of democratic movements for social change for some insights and answers.
We can look to Warren County citizens, how their great refusal to accept the iron rule of EPA’s environmental repression and their great refusal to accept Governor Hunt’s disrespect for their human dignity was an affirmation that created an historical flashpoint that would ignite hope for resistance in communities facing pollution everywhere.
In this episode, we’re pausing our historical narrative of the Warren County PCB history to focus on the horrific February 3, 2023 Norfolk Southern Railroad train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. Eleven train cars spilled 115,580 gallons of toxic vinyl chloride and other chemicals, including benzene, on the ground, and the chemicals were then deliberately burned off in order to avoid an explosion.
Described as an epic disaster, the East Palestine, Ohio train derailment is a wake-up call to Americans concerning the inherent dangers of our chemical age as were Love Canal, New York and Warren County, North Carolina.
The East Palestine train derailment exposes the lack of regulations needed to govern the safe transportation of deadly chemicals. It exposes how antiquated single-car brakes and defective heat sensors caused the train to derail, and how railroad authorities have purposely avoided investing in safety measures that could have prevented the disaster. It exposes the lack of liability for chemical producers, haulers, and disposers, and why people can't necessarily believe the EPA and other government agencies are actually protecting their environment and public health.
In this episode, we share a statement from former EPA Chief of the Hazardous Waste Implementation Branch and whistleblower William Sanjour that is relevant to the East Palestine disaster and why pollution continues to be pervasive and ongoing.
In his 1982 testimony to congressional committee members, Sanjour described in documented details how unsafe hazardous waste disposal practices are based on EPA “regulations which, instead of preventing disaster, knowingly allow it, by promising to provide disaster relief.”
He pointedly illustrated this dark practice of focusing on effects rather than causes by asking, “Can we expect EPA to carry this line of thinking into other areas by issuing gas masks as a means of regulating air pollution?”
On January 18, 1979, we recorded and later transcribed our meeting with Governor Hunt. This episode is based on the transcript of that recording.
In this Part 2 of the Warren County delegation to Governor Hunt, Warren representatives continue to make their case against the PCB landfill perfectly clear to Governor Hunt.
Larry Limer queries the Governor hard on the PCB landfill site selection criteria, and
Henry Pitchford mentions inalienable human rights.
Frances Davis asks, “Upon what basis does the state have the right to consider only the evidence of its own paid people?” while Earnest Turner shares his concerns about a waiver for a fifty-foot separation between the landfill site and groundwater and asks, “What is an unreasonable risk, and how is it determined?
Historian Edgar Thorne asks, “How can we attract home buyers if Warren County has a popular image associated with the disposal of toxic waste?”
The Governor’s answers are evasive and contradictory. He says he respects delegates’ feelings and asserts his belief that EPA approval of the PCB landfill will be not based on an “unreasonable risk”, even as he admits that there are no good measurements for assessing the consequences of the impact of the PCB landfill.
Governor Hunt assures our delegation that the PCB dump will to be a one-time dump only, and then he tells Mr. Thorne, “If there were an open, continuing dump, your concern would be especially appropriate, almost overwhelming.”
To delegate Frances Davis, the Governor claims that he knows nothing about the chemical waste landfill industry that has been looking at Warren County, even though both the News & Observer and the Warren Record have published articles describing how the governor’s task force for small community economic development, led by Bob Goforth, has recently flown nine Warren County officials to Alabama on a state-owned turbojet to inspect the landfill facility there in order to consider duplicating the operation on a 500-acre tract of land in Warren County.
Our take-away? Governor Hunt hears what we are saying, but he doesn't seem to be listening. The option to haul the PCBs to Alabama appears to be an empty option, and the Governor has no other backup plans. If the EPA determines that the PCB landfill won't pose an “unreasonable risk,” then it seems clear the Governor plans to bury the PCBs in Warren County — regardless of the public sentiment; regardless of the closeness of the water table or the inappropriate soils, or the known failures of landfills and the dangers of PCBs and dioxins; regardless that Warren County already is the second poorest county in the state.
Governor Hunt thanks the delegation for coming and says, “This is what democracy’s all about,” but delegates can see that when it comes to the disposal of deadly chemicals, neither the state nor EPA regulators seem to care much about democracy.
On January 18, 1979, we recorded and later transcribed our meeting with Governor Hunt. This episode is based on the transcript of that recording.
In this episode, Warren County Citizens send representatives to fill the nine chairs the Governor finally agreed to have. Leading the delegation, Deborah presents the 4,500 signatures of citizens who signed petitions against the landfill.
She stresses the lack of criteria the state is using to base its decision that the Afton PCB landfill will not pose an “unreasonable risk” and asks what specific investigations and studies have been made by the state into all the potential impacts of the PCB landfill.
J.T. Fleming reminds the Governor that Warren County is 99th in per capita income and that a toxic waste landfill would destroy the chance to attract positive, healthy businesses.
Mr. Lucius Hawkins presents Governor Hunt with a resolution against the PCB landfill passed by the Kerr-Tar Regional Council of Government that the Governor tells him he will read later.
Understandably, Governor Hunt doesn’t want the resolution to be read for the delegates or the public to hear because it says that the “State of North Carolina has confirmed that no area within the Piedmont Region of North Carolina will comply with all of EPA’s site requirements for the disposal of PCBs;" that “any waiver would make an unacceptable site useable without providing maximum protection;” that "the State of North Carolina has requested waivers for three of the five main technical requirements for a chemical waste PCB landfill;” that a “PCB disposal landfill may pose a threat to the environment and to the health, safety, and welfare of Warren County and Region K citizens.”
Mr. Hawkins argues that the current tax surplus which North Carolinians want spent on effective services justifies the one-time cost of hauling the PCBs to a commercial EPA-approved hazardous waste landfill in Alabama.
And then comes the dramatic end of the first half of the meeting, culminating with the fiery eloquence of Reverend Willie T. Ramey, who electrifies the room with his comments and questions to Governor Hunt as he prophesizes a nonviolent, multiracial, multi-ecumenical, and overall unified response to the trucking of the PCBs to the Warren County landfill site, while cautioning in vivid imagery, violence that could happen but that didn’t:
**“Has the state considered the retaliatory steps that it will take when citizens — black, white and Indian; young, old, and middle-aged; male and female; Jews, Catholics, and Protestants stand side-by-side and hand-in-hand to peacefully and non-violently protest bodily at the storage site? . . . .”
“What is the state going to do when this problem magnifies itself to the point of civil disobedience? Will we be tear-gassed? Jailed? Fire-hosed? Shot with electric cattle prods? Attacked by vicious dogs? Shot or killed? Just what form of tyranny will be used in what we consider an unjust and immoral provocation by the state?”**
In our last podcast, Episode 12: Now, we fast-forwarded to the present because of recent testing at the PCB landfill conducted in conjunction with the 2022 40th anniversary of the 1982 PCB protest movement.
We shared the documented evidence from four independent scientists who had studied the PCB landfill over the years and who had reported the problems and failures they had found. The take-away from Episode 12 is that there is no scientific or ethical justification for developing the contaminated PCB landfill site. Warren County has thousands of acres of land available for development.
In this Episode 13: Then, we’re returning to our chronological narrative of the environmental justice movement as it begins to take shape in early 1979.
Time is of the essence. Warren County citizens have only three weeks until January 25th when the EPA plans to either approve or disapprove the state’s Afton Warren County PCB landfill plan.
On the momentum from the historic January 4, 1979 EPA Public Hearing, the press is eager to know more, and Ken is busy as Warren County spokesperson. Others are circulating petitions and educating the public on the dangers of PCBs and failed landfills. The plan is to try to meet with Governor Hunt before the January 25th deadline and deliver the petitions.
With the guidance of Mary Hinton Kerr, the wife of the late Senator John Kerr, and her friend, Ida Martin, Assistant to Warren County Attorney Charlie Johnson, Ken negotiates for a meeting with the Governor as they play a game of chairs.
In this episode, we are pausing our chronological narrative of the origins of the Warren County environmental justice movement in order to address current issues related to the status of the PCB landfill site.
On September 24, 2022, EPA Director Michael Regan and an entourage of EPA officials, civil rights representatives, and fence line community leaders from across the country met on the Warren County Courthouse Square to announce the EPA’s newly branded Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights. Director Regan announced the new office will be funded $3 billion in order to ensure that underserved and overburdened communities are at the forefront of EPA’s work.
In connection with the 2022 40th anniversary of the 1982 PCB protest movement, county officials had hired a hydrogeologist, Joan Smyth, to investigate the PCB landfill site.
At a January 9, 2023 Warren County Commissioners’ meeting, Smyth presents her report of the limited four test samples that she had taken from the PCB landfill site and says that the levels of PCBs in the soil were well below the EPA threshold.
She explains that much of the early PCB records are difficult to find.
In this episode, Ken and Deborah address Smyth’s report and provide damning evidence based on the documents and reports of four independent scientists who served Warren County citizens at different times between 1978 - 2004.
These records provide an in-depth and comprehensive characterization of the PCB landfill site and raise the most serious questions about any initiative that would argue for development at the site.
Ken and Deborah address the manipulation of science to protect principle responsible parties, in this case, the state of North Carolina and the Environmental Protection Agency.
Commissioner Davis describes the PCB landfill as an “open wound.” He is right.
The PCB landfill is not only still a literal toxic wound in the body of Afton and Warren County; the coverup of the landfill’s failures is an open, festering wound that has spread like a pervasive cancer in the environmental justice community and across the nation.
Based on the evidence they share, the Ferruccios maintain that there is no scientific or ethical justification to develop the PCB landfill site and that to do so would be antithetical to the principles of environmental justice.
The Hunt Administration’s “regardless of public sentiment” statement and the threat of becoming a dumping ground for PCBs, and perhaps for an interstate hazardous waste dumping ground as well, have driven an estimated 700-800 Warren County citizens to the January 4, 1979 EPA Public Hearing held at the National Guard Armory in Warrenton, N.C.
In this episode, Part 3 of the January 4, 1979 EPA Public Hearing, citizens each get five minutes to speak. They have listened to state and EPA officials’ argument about how EPA-approved landfill technology can compensate for intrinsic geological inadequacies, and they have heard how the state is asking for three out of five waivers. They have listened to Independent Scientist Dr. Mulchi’s counter-argument.
Ninety-two people sign up speak, and those who can, stay until 2:30 am. Their public comments last for five hours. As citizens address their technical and scientific PCB landfill concerns, the overarching issue is local sovereignty. The hearing is epic and is one for the history books.
Reverend Willie T. Ramey encourages resistance to the PCB landfill and says, “There are times when there is something worth dying for….and if it means that we have to bodily stand in front of the trucks, bulldozers, and the road scrapers — even if we have to give up our lives so that somebody else can live many years in the future — I say it is our duty to sacrifice that.”
In the last episode, Part 1 of the January 4, 1979 EPA Public Hearing, our listeners hear state and EPA officials describe the conceptual engineering design of landfill technology. As officials argue that the application of this landfill design will transform the geological (soil) and hydrogeological (groundwater) inadequacies of the proposed Afton PCB site into a safe site, Warren County citizens are not buying the argument.
In this episode, Part 2 of the January 4, 1979 EPA Public Hearing, University of Maryland Soil Scientist Dr. Charles Mulchi presents his assessment of the proposed Afton PCB landfill site and of the state’s PCB landfill plans.
Dr. Mulchi had been hired by Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs to independently conduct test borings and to take soil samples at the proposed landfill site and to study the state’s sampling evidence and landfill plans.
From his findings, Dr. Mulchi concludes that the proposed landfill site is unsuitable. He finds from his own test borings at the site that the soils are not appropriate for containing chemical waste. Dr. Mulchi argues that the state has misrepresented critical data in its report.
He also points out that the state plans to build the landfill just seven feet above the mean water table when officials can’t even identify where the mean water table is.
At the end his presentation, Dr. Mulchi says that he hasn’t just trusted his own judgment but has had his findings peer-reviewed, and the conclusions were the same, which made him feel at least that he was “not totally whistling in the wind.”
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Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs has done the unthinkable. In just two weeks, an executive committee has quickly formed an unprecedented multi-racial grassroots coalition and conducted a hard-driving education and action campaign in order to get the people to the January 4, 1979 EPA Public Hearing where it is critical for them to speak their sentiment concerning the PCB landfill.
This episode takes our listeners right inside the hearing at the National Guard Armory in Warren County, North Carolina. In Part 1, the state presents its plans for the PCB landfill in Afton to EPA Region IV Administrator John White, who is in charge of approving the PCB plans. 700 seats are filled with citizens, and those left standing crowd at the back and along side walls.
Warrenton's WVSP Radio Host Jim Lee is broadcasting the hearing live. Before the hearing begins, he shares with his listening audience a detailed synopsis of PCB-related events that began with the roadside midnight PCB dumpings the summer before. Ken and Deborah transcribed this and other WVSP recordings of key PCB events and are thus able to share the exact words of state and EPA officials as well as of Warren County citizens.
What drove so many people, at such short notice, on such a frigid night, just after the holidays to attend this public hearing that lasted from 7:00 pm until 2:30 am because ninety-two citizens signed up to speak?
First, it was Governor Hunt’s NC Assistant Secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety David Kelly’s incendiary statement that public sentiment would not deter the state from buying land and constructing a PCB landfill in Afton, Warren County.
Next, it was Warren County Citizens Spokesperson Ken Ferruccio who delivered the people’s bottom line: “due process first, then civil disobedience.”
Then came the news that the Governor’s plane had just flown Warren County officials to tour an EPA-approved hazardous waste landfill facility in Alabama owned by Waste Management, Inc. Citizens had just learned the giant waste disposal company had purchased an option on 500 acres of land in Warren County for a multi-state hazardous waste landfill facility on property in Warren County owned by Governor Hunt’s campaign manager.
The million-dollar questions citizens are asking themselves are, "Will the state's PCB plans be safe? What is the underlying intention for the PCB landfill, for the 500-acre interstate hazardous landfill, and for industrial development in North Carolina? Is Warren County slated to be a hazardous waste center, a chemical waste landfill nexus to attract chemical-producing industries wanting cheap and convenient dumping grounds?"
In this Part 1 episode of the EPA Public Hearing, three state officials testify to the alleged safety of the state’s PCB landfill plans and claim that the Afton site is the best site possible in the state, even as the state is requesting waivers for three of five important regulations.
EPA Official Jim Scarborough shows a slide presentation of the Alabama hazardous waste facility and emphasizes the pervasive need for hazardous chemical waste landfills in order to contain the waste generated during production, as well as a need for a landfill for the PCBs spewed along 240 miles of roadsides in 14 North Carolina counties and at Ft. Bragg.
Scarborough’s description of how landfills work is illogical and unsettling, and citizens see that the EPA seems to be more like an executioner than an impartial judge.
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1978 is ending on an existential note for Warren County citizens. The county is under attack on two fronts — the PCB landfill in Afton and the 500-acre, multi-state hazardous waste landfill in Inez. Citizens take the dual threat seriously, and an unlikely coalition of citizens begins to form. Representatives of the Afton Gun Club, the NAACP, and the Warren County Board of Education reach out to Ken and Deborah and offer support.
At the January 2, 1979 county commissioners’ meeting, members of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs express their public sentiment individually against both proposed landfills. Most of the officials now publicly support the citizens’ opposition, but not all. One key official even warns citizens there is probably little they can do to stop the PCB landfill. Nevertheless, the Warren County Board of Commissioners passes a resolution against the PCB landfill that they plan to share at the upcoming January 4, 1979 public hearing.
The county is more than buzzing from the Hunt Administration’s announcement that public sentiment will not deter the state from burying the roadside PCBs in Warren County and from the time-crunch citizens are under with the EPA public hearing just days away.
The steering committee meets and decides that citizens need to hire an independent soil scientist and decides to ask Dr. Charles Mulchi who is a soil scientist at the University of Maryland. He is a native of Warren County and happens to be home for the holidays.
Members also decide to press county commissioners to pass a resolution against the PCB landfill at their January 2,1979 meeting and to go to civil disobedience if necessary.
As official spokesperson, Ken releases a press release stating there will be “due process first, then civil disobedience” and calls on the NAACP and other organizations to participate in civil disobedience if it becomes necessary. In effect, Ken is issuing an ultimatum and drawing a line in the sand on behalf of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs.
Then citizens learn that the Governor has just flown local officials down to Emelle,
Alabama to tour Waste Management, Inc.’s chemical waste facility. The company had purchased an option earlier in the year on 500 acres of land in Warren County. The land is owned by Governor Hunt’s Warren County campaign manager, land that is not far from the temporary PCB dump that is on land he also owns.
With news of the PCB landfill and a multi-state hazardous waste landfill targeted for Warren County, citizens are more fired up than ever!
Ken and Deborah’s lives change forever on December 20, 1978, when they hear an announcement on Warrenton’s WVSP NPR radio station that the state plans to buy property in the Afton community of Warren County to bury PCBs that had been spewed along the roadsides of 15 counties that previous summer. Afton is the rural community where they live. They also learn that a public hearing is scheduled for two weeks later when the state will present its PCB landfill plans for EPA approval.
Perhaps it is serendipity that night when Deborah brings home a year-high stack of Margie Watson’s News & Observer newspapers for mulching their garden the next growing season. Devastated by the PCB announcement, Ken and Deborah decide to be proactive and to pore through the newspapers that Margie has kept in meticulous chronological order.
By morning, they have two notebooks full of articles that reveal facts about the danger of PCBs and other deadly chemicals, and they see the scale of the threat, not just to Warren County, but to the state.
For Ken and Deborah, this eye-opening night is the beginning of their journey as archivists, historians, and researchers who believe in evidence-based education and activism.
With what they’ve learned, Ken and Deborah meet with Afton residents who begin to join forces as a multi-racial grassroots opposition to the state’s PCB plans.
On Christmas night, 1978, Ken speaks on WVSP radio, beginning, “We of Warren County and the surrounding counties are united this Christmas night not only by the spirit of Christmas but by the cancer-linked PCBs that live in the soil along our highways…."
Ken ends his radio talk by saying, “And, so, I am urging the citizens of Warren County to participate in the political spirit of Christ, of Socrates, of Mahatma Gandhi, and Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.. These men had the political spirit because they did for their own times, and for all times, what they knew in their hearts to be right.”
On WVSP radio, Ken hears an announcement that is seismic. The state of North Carolina intends to bury the roadside PCBs in a landfill in Afton, Warren County, their rural community. PCB-laced oil had been spewed the previous summer along the roadsides of fifteen North Carolina counties. He learns also that the state will present its PCB landfill plan at a jointly sponsored EPA hearing on January 4, 1979, only two weeks away.
With a stack of nearly a year of Margie Watson’s News & Observer newspapers that Deborah has serendipitously just picked up that night, Ken and Deborah become archivists. By morning, as they learn about the dangers of PCBs and the pressure to find toxic waste disposal sites, they are alarmed more than ever.
Ken finds a political “powder keg” in a statement made by Assistant Secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety David Kelly on behalf of the Hunt Administration that “Public sentiment will not deter the state from burying the roadside PCBs in Warren County.” Ken writes a letter to the editor of the Warren Record and responds to the Hunt Administration through the media. An Afton community steering committee begins to form and to mount a defense.
Although citizens are unaware at the time, the fall of 1978 is critical to Warren County’s future. The state manages to pick up a test-mile of roadside PCBs in the county and to temporarily store them on land owned by the Governor’s 1976 campaign manager who is also a member of the Industrial Development Commission. The foo is in the door.
Governor urges community to be “mature enough, and responsible enough to take the PCBs.”
In November, citizens passed a bond issue as part of a state and federally-backed regional waste water treatment plant.
Then in early and mid December, the public sentiment of Chatham County citizens sends the state packing after an attempt to site one of two PCB landfills planned for disposal of the roadside PCBs.
In early August, 1978, with high hopes, we leave for a weekend camping trip to Bear Island, NC but find the broiling temperature, windless air, and teeny, carnivores “no-see-um” sand fleas too much. On our ride home, for mile upon mile, they encounter large, yellow warning signs that read: “CAUTION PCB CHEMICAL SPILL ALONG HIGHWAY SHOULDERS.” The tense ride home is a foreboding introduction to PCBs that that will dominate the next forty-four years of our lives.
As knowledge of the PCB crime begins to spread from person to person and in the news, and the midnight dumping continues for two weeks, the state responds in ways that even health experts describe as “slow and standoffish.” Two weeks later the state’s director of Public Health Dr. Koomen resigns.
In this special segment, our daughter, Kyra Ferruccio Ramirez, offers a personal glimpse into our environmental work and what those years looked like from the perspective of a child — a child surrounded by environmental awareness and action. She discusses the personal costs of our work and the effects it had on her. Speaking her personal journey of environmental awakening, Kyra finds herself unexpectedly leading a campaign in her Chapel Hill neighborhood to raise awareness of the dangers and health impacts of conventional lawn care and pest control methods and to transition to safer treatment options. Though, as Kyra admits, it is natural to want to run from pollution and to search for a life free from its dangers and the stress community involvement often brings, she reminds us that pollution affects us all, no matter where we live, through the water we drink, the air we breathe, and the products we buy and consume.
The day was hot, but so were the people. It was September 15, 1982; the time for civil disobedience was at hand. Warren County citizens were fired up because Governor Jim Hunt was using military force to bring in the first of 10,000 truckloads of toxic PCBs to a landfill built just above the county’s groundwater. The multiracial coalition of citizens and supporters kept up their heated campaign throughout the six-week PCB rucking operation. They marched into history their human right to protect themselves from the harm caused by a toxic dumpsite doomed to fail, and their non-violent resistance, sent up an inspirational warning flare to citizens across the state and nation who were and would ever be fighting on the front lines against toxic aggression.
On December 20, 1978, Warren County, North Carolina citizens learn that the state intends to bury PCB-contaminated soil in a landfill in their county regardless of public sentiment. On behalf of citizens, Ken Ferruccio responds that there will be “due process first, then civil disobedience.” These six words are probably the first time in history that a Massachusetts Yankee speaking with a Northeastern accent, poses an ultimatum to a southern governor through the news media concerning his intention to locate a toxic waste landfill in a poor, predominantly black community. These six words would become the framework for the opposition to the PCB landfill that would span the following four years.