The dirty secret that poisoned a town
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They didn't know chemicals had contaminated their dirt and yards and bass and kids — and the acrid air they breathed. They didn't know they lived in one of the most polluted patches of America.
Now they know. They also know that for nearly 40 years, while producing the now-banned industrial coolants known as PCBs at a local factory, Monsanto Co. routinely discharged toxic waste into a west Anniston creek and dumped millions of pounds of PCBs into oozing open-pit landfills. And thousands of pages of Monsanto documents — many emblazoned with warnings such as "CONFIDENTIAL: Read and Destroy" — show that for decades, the corporate giant concealed what it did and what it knew.
In 1966, Monsanto managers discovered that fish submerged in that creek turned belly-up within 10 seconds, spurting blood and shedding skin as if dunked into boiling water. They told no one. In 1969, they found fish in another creek with 7,500 times the legal PCB levels. They decided "there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting discharges."
In 1975, a company study found that PCBs caused tumors in rats. They ordered its conclusion changed from "slightly tumorigenic" to "does not appear to be carcinogenic."
Monsanto enjoyed a lucrative four-decade monopoly on PCB production in the United States and battled to protect that monopoly long after PCBs were confirmed as a global pollutant.
"We can't afford to lose one dollar of business," one internal memo concluded.
Last month, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) ordered General Electric to spend $460 million to dredge PCBs it had dumped into the Hudson River in the past.
In Anniston, the sins of the past are being addressed in a very different way. Here, Monsanto and its corporate successors have avoided a regulatory crackdown, spending just $40 million so far on cleanup. But they have spent $80 million more on legal settlements, and another lawsuit by 3,600 plaintiffs — one of every nine city residents — is scheduled for trial tomorrow.
David Carpenter, an environmental-health professor at the State University of New York at Albany and a leading advocate of the EPA's plan to dredge the Hudson, says the PCB problems in Anniston are much worse than GE's problem with the Hudson River.
"The people who live around the Monsanto plant have higher PCB levels than any residential population I've ever seen," said Carpenter, an expert witness for the plaintiffs in Anniston. "They're 10 times higher than the people around the Hudson."
The Anniston lawsuits have uncovered a voluminous paper trail, revealing an unusually detailed story of secret corporate machinations in the era before strict environmental regulations and right-to-know laws. The documents — obtained by The Washington Post from plaintiffs' attorneys and the Environmental Working Group, a chemical-industry watchdog — date as far back as the 1930s, but they expose actions with consequences that are still unfolding today.
Officials at Solutia, the name given Monsanto's chemical operations after they were spun off into a separate company in 1997, acknowledge Monsanto made mistakes. But they also said that for years, PCBs were hailed for preventing fires and explosions in electrical equipment. And the current scientific consensus that PCBs are harmful, especially to the environment, masks serious disputes over just how harmful they are to people, they said.
Robert Kaley, Solutia's environmental-affairs director and PCB expert for the American Chemistry Council, said it is unfair to judge the company's behavior from the 1930s through 1970s by modern standards.
"Did we do some things we wouldn't do today? Of course. But that's a little piece of a big story," he said. "If you put it all in context, I think we've got nothing to be ashamed of."
But Monsanto's uncertain legacy is as embedded in west Anniston's psyche as it is in the town's dirt. The EPA and the World Health Organization classify PCBs as "probable carcinogens," and although no one has determined whether the people in Anniston are sicker than average, Solutia has opposed proposals for comprehensive health studies as unnecessary. And it has not apologized for any of its contamination or deception.
In the absence of data, local residents seem to believe the worst. The stories linger: The cancer cluster up the hill. The guy who burned the soles off his boots while walking on Monsanto's landfill. The dog that died after a sip from Snow Creek, the long-abused drainage ditch that runs from the Monsanto plant through the heart of west Anniston.
Sylvester Harris, 63, an undertaker who lived across the street from the plant, said he always thought he was burying too many young children.
"I knew something was wrong around here," he said.
Opal Scruggs, 65, has spent her entire life in west Anniston, the past few decades in a cottage behind the plant. In recent years, Monsanto has bought and demolished about 100 PCB-tainted homes and mom-and-pop businesses nearby, turning her neighborhood into a virtual ghost town.
Now she has elevated PCB levels in her blood — like many of her neighbors — and believes she's a "walking time bomb."
"Monsanto did a job on this city," she said. "They thought we were stupid and illiterate people, so nobody would notice what happens to us."
Customers cautioned
Anniston was born at the height of the Industrial Revolution as a mineral-rich company town controlled by the Woodstock Iron Works, off-limits to all but company employees.
It soon developed into a heavy-industry boomtown, dominated by foundries and factories with 24-hour smokestacks. In 1929, one of those factories began manufacturing polychlorinated biphenyls, or PCBs.
Now that PCBs are considered probable human carcinogens, it is easy to forget they were once known as miracle chemicals. They are unusually nonflammable and conduct heat without conducting electricity. Many safety codes once mandated the use of PCBs as insulation in transformers and other electrical equipment.
They also were used in paints, newsprint, carbon paper, deep-fat fryers, adhesives, even bread wrappers. The American public had no idea of the downside of PCBs until the late 1960s.
But Monsanto did. Shortly after buying the plant in 1935, the company learned that PCBs, in the double negative of one company memo, "cannot be considered non-toxic." A 1937 Harvard study was the first to find that prolonged exposure could cause liver damage and a rash called chloracne.
Monsanto then hired the scientist who led the study as a consultant, and company memos began acknowledging the "systemic toxic effects" of Aroclors, the brand name for PCBs. Monsanto also began warning its industrial customers to protect their workers from Aroclors by requiring showers after every shift, providing them with clean work clothes every day and keeping fumes away from factory floors.
In 1952, Monsanto signed an agreement with the U.S. Public Health Service to label Aroclors with the warning: "Avoid repeated contact with the skin and inhalation of the fumes and dusts." The company also warned its industrial customers about ecological risks: "If the material is discharged in large concentrations it will adversely affect ... aquatic life in the stream."
But Monsanto did not warn its neighbors.
"It is our desire to comply with the necessary regulations, but to comply with the minimum," one official wrote.
In 1998, a former Anniston plant manager, William Papageorge, was asked in a deposition whether Monsanto officials ever shared their data about PCB hazards with the community.
"Why would they?" he replied.
Warnings to clean up ignored
In the fall of 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University biologist named Denzel Ferguson to conduct studies around its Anniston plant. Ferguson, who died in 1998, arrived with tanks full of bluefish, which he submerged at various points along nearby creeks. This is what he reported to Monsanto about the results in Snow Creek: "All 25 fish lost equilibrium and turned on their sides in 10 seconds and all were dead in 3 1/2 minutes."
"It was like dunking the fish in battery acid," recalled George Murphy, one of Ferguson's graduate students at the time and now chairman of Middle Tennessee State University's biology department.
The problem, Ferguson concluded, was the "extremely toxic" wastewater flowing from the Monsanto plant into Snow Creek, and then into the larger Choccolocco Creek, where he noted similar "die-offs." The outflow, he calculated, "would probably kill fish when diluted 1,000 times or so."
He warned Monsanto: "Since this is a surface stream that passes through residential areas, it may represent a potential source of danger to children." He urged Monsanto to clean up Snow Creek and to stop dumping untreated waste there.
Monsanto did not do that — even though the warnings continued.
In early 1967, Swedish scientists demonstrated that PCBs were a threat to the global environment. The Swedes identified traces of PCBs throughout the food chain: in fish, birds, pine needles, even their children's hair. Monsanto's primary response was to prepare for a media war.
"Please let me know if there is anything I can do ... so that we may make sure our Aroclor business is not affected by this evil publicity," a Monsanto official wrote to Dr. Emmett Kelly, then the company medical director.
Records show the Anniston plant tried to reduce its mercury releases after the Snow Creek fish kills. But it did not try to reduce PCB releases, even though the Anniston plant was leaking 50,000 pounds of PCBs into Snow Creek every year, while dumping more than 1 million pounds of PCB-laced waste in its antiquated landfills. (By contrast, GE has been ordered to dredge 150,000 pounds of PCBs from the Hudson.)
Own tests show lethal toxicity
In September 1969, Monsanto appointed a committee to address the controversies swirling around its PCB monopoly, which was worth $22 million a year in sales. According to minutes of the first meeting, the committee had only two formal objectives: "Permit continued sales and profits" and "Protect image of ... the Corporation."
The committee recommended phasing out its PCB products, but only once it could develop alternatives. The idea was to maintain "one of Monsanto's most profitable franchises" as long as possible while taking care to "reduce our exposure in terms of liability."
But the company's own tests on rats, chickens and even dogs proved discouraging. "The PCBs are exhibiting a greater degree of toxicity than we had anticipated," reported the committee chairman. Fish tests were worse: "Doses which were believed to be OK produced 100% kill." The chairman pressured the company's consultants for more Monsanto-friendly results, but they replied: "We are very sorry that we can't paint a brighter picture at the present time."
State bails out Monsanto
By May 1970, PCBs were a hot topic in the national media. Members of Congress were calling for hearings. It seemed only a matter of time before regulators would notice the river of PCBs spewing out of the Anniston plant. "This would shut us down depending on what plants or animals they choose to find harmed," the committee had warned.
So Monsanto decided to inform the Alabama Water Improvement Commission on its own that PCBs were entering Snow Creek. And the commission helped the company keep its toxic secrets.
According to a company memo, the state commission's technical director, Joe Crockett, had been "totally unaware of published information concerning Aroclors." The Monsanto executives assured him everything was under control, and Crockett, who is now dead, said he appreciated their forthright approach.
"Give no statements or publications which would bring the situation to the public's attention," he told them, according to the memo.
That summer, Crockett again came to Monsanto's rescue after the federal Food and Drug Administration found PCB-tainted fish in Choccolocco Creek. Monsanto's managers told him not to worry, saying they hoped to reduce PCB emissions.
"Crockett will try to handle the problem quietly without release of the information to the public at this time," announced a memo marked "CONFIDENTIAL: F.Y.I. AND DESTROY." Crockett explained that if word leaked out, the state would be forced to ban fishing in Choccolocco Creek and a popular lake downstream to ensure public safety.
Anniston managers finally began to act that fall, installing a sump, a carbon bed and a new limestone pit to trap PCBs. In 1971, facing as much as $1 billion in additional pollution-control costs in Anniston, Monsanto shifted all PCB production to its plant in Illinois.
Before the year was over, Crockett helped out once more. The Justice Department was considering a lawsuit against Monsanto over PCBs, and the EPA wanted it to dredge Snow Creek. So Crockett set up a meeting between Monsanto and an EPA regulator and helped argue the company's case. The company's problems disappeared.
Monsanto's luck with regulators held in 1983, when the federal Soil Conservation Service found PCBs in Choccolocco Creek but took no action.
In 1985, state authorities found PCB-tainted soils around Snow Creek, but a dispute over cleanup lingered until a new attorney general named Donald Siegelman took office in 1988.
In a letter that April, Monsanto's Anniston superintendent thanked Siegelman — who is now the state's Democratic governor — for addressing the Alabama Chemical Association and meeting Monsanto's lobbyists for dinner. Then he got to the point: Monsanto wanted to proceed with its own cleanup plan, dredging just a few hundred yards of Snow Creek and its tributaries.
The company soon received approval to do just that.
A spokesman for Gov. Siegelman noted that in April 2000, he wrote to President Clinton about Anniston's PCBs, pointing out "the severity of the situation" and requesting federal funds. But several state officials acknowledged that a dozen years earlier, Alabama should have tested a much larger area for PCBs before approving Monsanto's limited cleanup plan.
"It's hard to know how that one slipped through the cracks," said Stephen Cobb, the state's hazardous-waste chief. "For some reason, no one investigated the larger PCB problem."
The larger problem finally burst into public view in 1993, after a local angler caught deformed largemouth bass in Choccolocco Creek. After studies again detected PCBs, Alabama issued the first advisories against eating fish from the area — 27 years after Monsanto learned about those bluefish sliding out of their skins.
By 1996, state officials and plaintiffs' attorneys were finding astronomical PCB levels in the area: as high as 940 times the federal level of concern in yard soils, 200 times that level in dust inside people's homes, 2,000 times that level in Monsanto's drainage ditches.
The PCB levels in the air were also too high. And in blood tests, nearly one-third of residents in neighborhoods near the plant were found to have elevated PCB levels. The communities were declared public-health hazards. Near Snow Creek, the state warned, "the increased risk of cancer is estimated to be high."
That's when Monsanto launched a program to buy and raze contaminated properties. "Monsanto intends to be a good neighbor," its brochures explained.
Damage-control strategy
Today, Solutia is negotiating a final Anniston cleanup plan; EPA officials say the company has been aggressive in pressing for lower standards but generally cooperative. It employs 85 workers in Anniston and donates computers and science labs to area schools. Its brochures pledge to ensure "environmental safety and health for the community" and to hide nothing from Anniston residents:
"You have a right to know, and we have a responsibility to keep you, our valued neighbor, informed."
"We don't have horns coming out of our head," said David Cain, manager of the Solutia plant in Anniston. "We're not evil people."
Still, the company's credibility problems linger in Anniston. A recent company e-mail revealed that even the gifts of computers and labs were part of a new damage-control strategy, along with donations to Siegelman's inaugural fund: "The strategy calls for significantly increasing ... community outreach, contributions and political involvement while aggressively seeking ... to contain media issues regionally."