All that separates Tina Awkard’s front lawn from a chemical graveyard is a few hundred feet and a chain link fence. Yet Awkard, who moved here with her children three months ago, wasn’t aware that the “waste and lagoon treatment center” next door is a toxic dump with a file at the Environmental Protection Agency that’s as thick as sludge.
Welcome to Newtown, a place where streams meander, children play and the main street is the bucolic Summerest Lane, tucked into the foot of Afton Mountain. It’s about the last place on earth you’d expect to find a Superfund site—an area so contaminated by toxic wastes the EPA considers it a threat to human health. Yet, demographically, this tiny town with its population of about 35 black families is all too typical of one. The pastoral nature of the century-old village is matched only by its poverty.
Charlottesville lies barely 20 miles east, but few of its residents have ever heard of Newtown. You won’t find it on any “10 best places to live” list, but thanks to Greenwood Chemical Company, you will find it on the National Priorities List among the nation’s dirtiest sites.
That puts this otherwise picturesque village overlooking the Rockfish Valley right in line with a dirty national trend. Numerous studies have shown that toxic sites are disproportionately found in poor and minority communities.
The term “environmental justice” first gained prominence in 1994 with an executive order issued by President Clinton that directed Federal agencies with programs affecting public health and the environment to meet the nondiscrimination requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964. In effect, it merged civil rights with environmental policy.
But justice is not what happened in Newtown.
For years, people lacked the resources to do much of anything but watch and wait, according to Janet Sims, who grew up on Summerest Lane and now lives in Charlottesville. At the other end of the short stretch of road sat the 18-acre chemical company, the community’s only industry, which employed less than a dozen workers at a time. For years, “nobody cared,” says Sims, of the neighborhood’s reaction to the factory that perched like an elephant on their doorsteps. Apathy was understandable. Families here struggled to obtain everything from food to fuel. Many had already lost their homes to make way for the construction of Interstate 64 in the late 1960s.
In 1992, at the age of 44, Sims received the first definitive diagnosis of a long-standing lung condition, sarcoidosis. Recently, the disease worsened and she underwent a lung transplant, moving to Charlottesville to be near the hospital. Another term for the condition that reduces lung capacity and has left her gasping for air at times is “minority lung disease,” as it occurs more often in blacks. Yet it isn’t considered hereditary, and the American Lung Association can only suggest the cause of the disease to be “an immune system defense reaction against some unknown substance.”
Sims vividly recalls dark, mysterious clouds that filled her years in Newtown. By the 1970s, her mother had begun to worry, she says, while their neighbor, Don Nobles, started telling people to wash everything touched by the crystal residue that drifted down like snow from the plant after explosions occurred, sometimes several times a month. A neighbor’s dog, seen wandering on the unfenced site, died the same afternoon, its legs paralyzed.
On another occasion Sims and her son, searching for a Christmas tree, wandered onto the property and encountered one of the five waste water lagoons. “Solid green,” she says, describing the impenetrable surface where a dead squirrel was floating. The smell was unbearable.
“We were afraid to breathe.”
Throughout Greenwood Chemical’s decades of production, regulatory agencies were also questioning what was in the waste lagoons’ stew. Built in 1947 by former Dupont chemist F.O. Cockerille, the company, which went through three changes of names and owners over the years, considered its full inventory a matter of “trade secrets,” according to the EPA. Even after closing in 1985, the company refused to disclose its products to State and local officials.
Many of the chemicals were pesticides and pharmaceutical agents. Former workers, including Sims’ friend Percell Carr, told the EPA about the production of military gases. Some said Agent Orange might be buried there. In fact, it was impossible to identify many compounds, according to EPA documents. Those identified are a litany of poisons with unknown effects if mixed. They include carcinogenic solvents like trichloroethylene, volatile organic compounds such as toluene and deadly inorganic chemicals like arsenic, another carcinogen. Documents from the Bureau of Toxic Substances show that the company used between 1 metric ton and 10 metric tons of cyanide each year.
But when the plant “went off,” as Sims describes the explosions that often had people jolting from their beds at night, no one asked what made up the thick smoke congesting the heart of Newtown. The question that echoed through the 10 or so households on Summerest Lane was “Where do we go?” says Sims.
On various occasions the fire department would arrive and tell everyone to clear out. “How far?” asks Sims, incredulously. “Where were we supposed to go? How far was far enough?” Residents had been warned by the Crozet Fire Department that the explosions represented a hazard even to Crozet, four miles away.
Closer still was the town of Greenwood with its sweeping lawns and patios—and drinking wells. It was hard to know what to fear most: the fire, ash or water. All around, fields irrigated by groundwater produced products they consumed, including milk, meat and fruits.
Like residents, State and County officials were casting a wary eye on the company long before the EPA arrived on the scene. It was determined in the early ’70s that the plant was responsible for fish kills that occurred in Stockton Creek whenever rain would cause the poisonous lagoons to purge, leading to absolute stillness along several miles of streambed. Not a sign of life, said an inspection report from the State Water Control Board. A note of alarm runs through several such reports as County officials demanded answers to the massive aquatic kills. Even cows in nearby fields perished mysteriously.
Greenwood Chemical continues to drain into a stream that runs along Summerest Lane, a tributary to Stockton Creek that makes its way to Mechum’s River, the South Rivanna—and the County’s drinking water.
Greenwood Chemical’s dubious business practices eventually caught the attention of the EPA. But a 1982 “Desktop Preliminary Assessment of Greenwood Chemical Dump,” a report by a New Jersey consulting firm for the environmental agency, reveals that no action was taken. The document compiles the findings of two inspections by the Virginia Department of Health’s Division of Solid and Hazardous Waste Management, one of four agencies in charge of regulating the company. The others included the State Water Control Board, Virginia Department of Health and the Bureau of Occupational Health.
In 1978 and again in 1979, a State inspector had found “no problems with the site.” The inspector did find, however, 60 to 70 55-gallon drums in a 30-foot-long trench the owner claimed were there for “further chemical breakdown.” Had the official raised an eyebrow and requested further investigation, one of the company’s many dirty secrets might have been unearthed: Hundreds of barrels leaking wastes.
The EPA later hauled away more than 600 drums, while documents state that in 1985 aerial photos revealed an area where drums had been buried in trenches for more than two decades.
Other secrets had already been exposed: There were numerous reports of fires, explosions, injuries—even fatalities. And even though the inspection noted the 1971 fish kill caused by the plant’s waste water lagoons, there was no mention of these unprotected holding ponds, themselves. No barrier prevented the seven poison lagoons from spilling over when it rained—or seeping into the ground.
The consulting firm’s desktop assessment is filled with inane contradictions. While the “apparent seriousness of the problem” wasn’t even marked as “low,” and the box checked as to seriousness was “none,” next to “waste characteristics” the document’s preparer didn’t check “inert” or “unknown,” but rather, “toxic, ignitable and highly volatile.”
These reports concluded with a strange recommendation: “No action needed (no hazard).” If that weren’t enough to dismiss the chemical company from scrutiny, the assessment provided an even better argument for doing so. The consulting firm, Ecology and Environment, Inc., declared that the State hadn’t followed up on, or prosecuted the plant for, the vast fish kills in Stockton Creek.
Case closed.
Residents, though, weren’t assessing the hazards of a toxic waste plume from behind a desk. They were in their backyards. Groundwater beneath the steeply sloped, 18-acre chemical site links to all of the drinking water aquifers within three miles.
Beneath the surface, the aquifers joined Greenwood and Newtown, neighborhoods which at one time didn’t even share the water table. Back when blacks weren’t allowed to attend Greenwood’s well-equipped school, Newtown was without running water.
That changed after the Newtown Community Center was born in 1980. Fostered by the Monticello Area Community Action Agency, an anti-poverty group, the goal was to bring services to the isolated village. Pictures show Newtown residents hard at work fixing up the former schoolhouse across the road from the Greenwood plant. The plan was to create a meeting hall and bring it the amenities the school never had: a toilet and well.
Later, chromium would be detected in the community well, bringing a whole new meaning to the issue of running water.
“Everyone here, without exception, gets their water from a well,” says Greenwood resident Scott Peyton, who was assistant director of the Greenwood Citizen’s Council, which served as a community liaison with EPA in the early stages of cleanup. When testing of the chemical property’s soil, rock and water got underway in 1987, it showed extensive migration of contaminants into all of these materials. On-site tests showed pollutant levels that were “off the scale,” says Peyton.
EPA documents corroborate this, describing chemical concentrations near one lagoon that exceeded the capacity of the equipment. But on January 5, 1988, the agency announced in a public meeting that sampling of residential wells had not detected contaminants related to the site.
“It was a notion the community held very suspect,“ says Peyton. “Testing of private wells was always a source of controversy.”
In fact, correspondence to residents revealed that the wells initially contained substances found in the EPA file on Greenwood. A letter to Newtown resident Don Nobles from the EPA claims that the following chemicals were detected in his drinking water in 1987: Cadmium, 14 parts per billion (EPA’s “safe” level is 5ppb), the pesticide Endrin and a concentration of lead—a suspected carcinogen—of 123ppb, more than twice the maximum level allowed in public drinking water in 1987, and more than eight times what is allowed today. In the same letter, though, the EPA said that since the samples were from an outdoor spigot, they might not be of the same quality as the water inside the home. A follow-up test was done and the water declared safe for consumption.
But the news was not reassuring. The EPA still cannot say just where off-site contaminants might migrate at any given time.
Joe Washington also received letters concerning his well. He and his wife have lived in the same house in Newtown for 33 years, but Washington says he wasn’t too worried because he lives on the other side of the freeway—more than half a mile away. Nevertheless, initial tests detected low levels of cyanide (12 ppb) in his drinking water. In 1988 the EPA considered that amount below the less stringent “health standard” of 200ppb, but today that guideline level has dropped to .2ppb, according to Paul Shoop of the County Rivanna Water and Sewer Authority.
Greenwood resident Peyton considers the site an ongoing threat to groundwater, despite the treatment facility which has been in place the past few years. That structure is expected to remain for 35 years, according to Gary Funkhouser, who works at the site 40 hours a week as an employee of OMI, Inc., a Denver-based waste water treatment company. He isn’t surprised by the lengthy clean-up.
“It took 40 years to get that way,” he says.
But EPA documents state that the groundwater on site may never return to drinking water quality.
“There’s a limit to how deep you can dig,” says Peyton. “You can pump and treat, but rain will continue to carry it through.”
EPA spokesman Phil Rotstein agrees, conceding that the wastes can not only travel for miles, but in unpredictable patterns due to the area’s complex geology.
Soon after Greenwood Chemical became an official Superfund site in 1987, the EPA held meetings at the Newtown Community Center, today a ramshackle hollow along Route 690. By then people were voicing health concerns related to both water and airborne particles. Ailments like rashes, sores and headaches were attributed to the plant.
Jimmy and Frances Steppe have lived next to the community center and across the road from Greenwood Chemical for more than 40 years. Frances recalls attending at least one meeting, but for the most part says she’s kept to herself about it. “I’ve always been concerned, but people have their own way of dealing with things. When it comes to testing and getting involved, I don’t do that.”
Steppe adds that she knows many people in Newtown who have gotten cancer. Off the top of her head, she says she can think of 12 in this village of about 35 families. Peyton also claims that there seem to be a large number of degenerative diseases in the area, while Janet Sims knows of five others from Newtown who’ve been diagnosed with the same lung disorder she has—sarcoidosis. Some have died from the disease, she says. Based on the average occurrence rate cited by the American Lung Association, the expected number of cases in this tiny population would be less than one. Sims’ son also had childhood seizures, and other residents report diseases ranging from asthma to cancer.
Jeff McDaniel, who works at the County Department of Health, received a grant a few years ago to look into how Greenwood-Newtown has fared since the plant’s closure, but says that a survey sent to 300 residents was returned by only three. Steppe claims she did receive—and return—a survey, but later got a letter stating that she hadn’t returned it. No follow-up has been pursued.
But it wasn’t the contamination of residential wells or the public water supply or concern for the health of a community where children play in almost every yard that ultimately sent Greenwood Chemical and its shareholders packing.
On April 18, 1985, Sims was walking up Summerest Lane to meet her son at the bus when a huge explosion rocked the plant 50 feet away. Soon after, four men came running out, engulfed in flames, she says. They were racing toward the road, screaming, while a fifth man followed, throwing water from a pail at them as they fled.
Terrified, Sims ran next door to the church where her friend, a member of the rescue squad, was working that day. After calling for help, they carried sheets and water back and had the men sit down. Sims was horrified: The flames were out but the men’s faces were raw and their boots and clothes had melted into their skin, which was peeling from their bodies in strips. The women had to cut away the charred material before wrapping them in sheets soaked in water.
Conscious and talking, the men asked in disbelief, “How could this happen to us?” recalls Sims. Looking closer, she realized that she was looking into the torn face of a friend she’d known for years.
“It’s me, Janet…Maurie.”
“It took them forever,” says Sims, suddenly angry, remembering the long wait for the ambulance.
None of the four men, who ranged in age from 26 to 41, survived: Maurie Clark, Keith Woods, John Harper, Charles Ward.
Three years earlier, following an inspection of Greenwood Chemical, the Virginia Department of Labor and Industry recommended, but didn’t mandate, that the company comply with a law it was found to be violating. The law, recognized at both State and Federal levels, requires the installation of spark-proof electrical equipment.
What caused the explosion and fire that left nine children fatherless and four men sitting by the road, bodies seared, wondering in their last moments how this could happen to them? The accident was caused by electrical equipment lacking State-required safety devices, say EPA reports.
There were no goodbye ceremonies for Greenwood Chemical Company. What the company buried may never be laid to rest. Not for Janet Sims, not for Newtown or its once pristine surroundings. It gave the world a few more products people apparently can’t live without. More pesticides, more drugs, all with a grand tab well over 30 million dollars and climbing, says the EPA. Then factor in the hidden costs: death, loss and sickness are still dirty secrets. The toll will rise, but no one will ever know for sure. You can’t prove it.
It seems Greenwood Chemical was counting on that.