Garbage ash that nobody wanted

PHILADELPHIA - Orange rinds, beer bottles, day-old newspapers. Junk mail, aluminum foil, chicken bones. Cigarette butts, old shoes, dead batteries. Coffee grinds, half-eaten hot dogs, tin cans.

It was trash, like all trash, the refuse of everyday life collected door to door and trucked to an incinerator in Philadelphia's Roxborough neighborhood.

The ashes, like all ashes, would be carted away, into oblivion - or at least into New Jersey.

Except it didn't happen that way.

In 1986, 15,000 tons of ash were packed onto a ship, the Khian Sea, for disposal. But at one port after another, the ship was turned away.

The Khian Sea roamed the Caribbean, sailed to Europe, Africa and Asia. It changed its name - twice - was sold, switched its flag of registry, dumped some of the ash on a third-world beach and the rest in the ocean.

Still, the odyssey of ash did not end. Even now, 14 years after the ship set off from Philadelphia, a barge sits off the Florida coast, loaded with 2,050 cubic yards of Khian Sea ash that has returned to the United States for final disposal.

Nobody wants it - even though it is, said one lawyer, "the most tested ash on the planet," and most everyone agrees it is no more toxic than ash dumped into landfills every day.

In 14 years, countless Philadelphians who contributed waste to the Khian Sea ash heap have preceded it into the ground; their garbage has seen far more of the world than they ever did.

"This is not a typical story," said Ken Bruno, a 42-year-old environmentalist who has followed the ash from his youth into middle age. "It's peculiar, it's bizarre, it's weird."

Contract to dispose of trash

In 1986, city and suburban transit workers went on strike, and municipal workers walked out for 20 days, leaving trash piled high.

But the city had a trash crisis even when workers were on the job. Ash was piling up at an alarming rate. Ohio, Virginia, South Carolina and Georgia landfills had refused it; nobody wanted to be Philadelphia's ash heap.

Joseph Paolino & Sons had signed a $6 million contract to take the ash away, but the company kept getting doors slammed in its face.

Finally, it hired Amalgamated Shipping Corp. - operator of the Khian Sea, a 17-year-old, 466-foot rust bucket registered in Liberia, its name pronounced like cayenne pepper - to dump the ash on a man-made island in the Bahamas, where Amalgamated was based. Loaded with 14,855 tons of ash, the Khian Sea set off Sept. 5, 1986.

But before the ship arrived, the Bahamian government announced it had not given permission to take the waste.

It returned to the United States, perhaps to determine its next move. Then it took off again on its abortive journey.

It was turned away again and again, even as the manifest was changed to make the cargo more appealing - from "incinerator ash" to "general cargo" to "bulk construction material."

By the time the Khian Sea reached Gonaives, Haiti, on Dec. 31, 1987, the ash was described as "top soil fertilizer," and it seemed it had found a resting place; a contract had been signed with two brothers of Col. Jean-Claude Paul, a corrupt leader of the Presidential Guard.

But there was clamor from Greenpeace and local activists. The Haitian government stepped in, but not before 4,000 tons of ash had been unloaded on a beach.

The Haitian government ordered the crew to reload the ash and depart. The ship departed, all right, but left the ash on the beach.

Next stop was Philadelphia; the idea was to find a place for the remaining ash nearby. But while the ship was anchored in the Delaware River, fire destroyed the pier. The ship took off again, violating a Coast Guard order to stay put because its radar and sonar were not working and its hull was covered with barnacles.

On Aug. 2, 1988, the Khian Sea put in at Yugoslavia for repairs. Except it was no longer the Khian Sea - it was now the Felicia, it was sailing under the Honduran flag and it had been sold to another company, Romo Shipping. (Romo and Amalgamated had the same president, and the sale price was $10.)

In November 1988, more than two years after it first left Philadelphia, the ship - now called the Pelicano - arrived in Singapore.

Its holds were empty.

Where did the ash go?

Years later, the captain of the Khian Sea/Felicia/Pelicano would admit in court that the ash had been dumped in the Atlantic and Indian oceans. The rest remained in Haiti, sitting uncovered on a beach where children played.

Ken Bruno had gone to Haiti for Greenpeace in 1988. He found the mound of ash, 8 feet high, 10 feet wide, 100 feet long. Amid all the black stuff, Bruno saw pieces of glass and aluminum foil; he reached into the pile, pulled out a shred of newspaper and read a classified ad for a used car, with the phone number in Philadelphia's 215 area code.

Lighter particles were carried away by the wind and water. Haitians complained their goats were dying.

Greenpeace commissioned an analysis of the ash and nearby soil by the University of Exeter in England, and it found lead, cadmium and other heavy metals, along with dioxin.

Patrick O'Neill is Philadelphia's senior environmental attorney; he started work for the city in 1987 and has labored on the Khian Sea case ever since. He dismisses Greenpeace's claims as alarmist, pointing to tests by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and state environmental agencies from Pennsylvania and Florida.

The trouble started, O'Neill said, when "Greenpeace politicized it, and once they did that, it became impossible to send it anywhere."

Bruno agrees the stigma attached to the ash far surpasses its toxicity. This is not nuclear waste, he said.

Greenpeace started a campaign to shame Philadelphia into paying for proper disposal of the ash piled in Haiti.

Forget it, Philadelphia said. This is the contractor's problem. The city has no legal responsibility, O'Neill says.

Enter an unlikely hero: New York City.

In 1996, to end mob involvement in the city's garbage industry, Mayor Rudolph Giuliani established a Trade Waste Commission.

So when a company called Eastern Environmental Services applied to do business in New York, the commission investigated - and found links between Eastern and the now-defunct Joseph Paolino & Sons, Philadelphia's contractor. And the commission learned about the ash in Haiti.

The commission issued an ultimatum: If Eastern wanted to haul trash in New York, it had to deal with the Khian Sea ash.

Three years ago, Eastern agreed to pay two-thirds of the cost of transporting the ash, and to find a place in its landfills for it. Philadelphia agreed to kick in $50,000.

Earlier this year, what was left of the ash departed Haiti. By this time, Eastern had been absorbed by trash behemoth Waste Management, which intends to put the ash in one of its landfills. So it sits off Florida on a barge, and it waits.