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Insight
Losing
a slanderous label
By Dennis Love
Special to The Star
08-13-2006
The system worked.
It didn't work perfectly, or with precise logic, or
without setbacks or turmoil or inequity or heartache. It worked slowly, in
exasperating fits and starts, gaining momentum and then losing it and then
gaining it again, in the way of all earthly things. And even now, as events
fade and the patina of history begins to form, could wide agreement be found
that it worked at all? Not on your life. People tend to disagree about history,
particularly those chapters they have lived through. But work it did, with a
ragged civic beauty, if there is such a thing.
The legal and political system worked when the
evidence ’Äî at first anecdotal, then circumstantial and ultimately scientific ’Äî
mounted that decades of industrial dumping in West Anniston by the Monsanto
Chemical Corp. had contributed to startlingly toxic levels of PCB contamination
in the soil and water and in the bodies of many people who lived there. The
system produced a historic, $700 million-plus global settlement that made
reparations, such as they could be made, to the victims of a wicked cycle of
pollution; established the terms and timetable for a cleanup; and, finally,
allowed Monsanto and its spin-off, Solutia, to put the very difficult issue of
Anniston behind them and get on with their corporate lives.
(And, yes, some lawyers were enriched along the way.
That, too, is the system, for good or ill. But Anniston plaintiffs attorney
Donald Stewart and his backers spent an estimated $15 million to prosecute
their case, money that would have disappeared down a dark rabbit hole had they
lost. Their clients, a great many of them poor, didn't risk a penny. Without a
legal environment where lawyers may reap spectacular financial rewards by
taking spectacular financial risks, the unconscionable situation in West
Anniston would still be unraveling somewhere in deep space.)
The legal and political system worked when the Army,
saddled with a lethal cache of decaying and increasingly unstable chemical
weapons at the Anniston Army Depot, elected to build a hi-tech incinerator at a
cost approaching $1 billion to destroy them once and for all.
A series of protests and lawsuits supported by local
citizens like Brenda Lindell and David Christian and out-of-state watchdogs
like the relentless activist Craig Williams and the Washington-based Chemical
Weapons Working Group, while falling short of their goal of halting
incineration, ensured that the Army and its contractors adhered to the letter
and spirit of established chemical demilitarization policy and procedure.
The Anniston Star's editorial page, the community's
most pervasive and influential voice, resisted any temptation to engage in
knee-jerk reactionism against the incinerator (which undoubtedly would have
made for some heated and attention-grabbing headlines), but also refused to
march in lockstep with the Army's often headstrong plans. Instead, its measured
response was to vigorously investigate the options on the table ’Äî incineration,
neutralization or doing nothing ’Äî and then to push, hard, for the safest,
fastest, most responsible incineration possible.
And, when the incineration endgame became mired in
political wrangling over the final details of the compact between the Army and
the county, Anniston Mayor Chip Howell stepped forward to forge a consensus
among his fellow mayors and other players in support of moving ahead with the
burn.
It wasn't a universally popular decision ’Äî certainly,
some members of the Calhoun County Commission felt they had been ’Äúsold out’Äù ’Äî
but one that Howell believed he had been elected to make. It was, in Howell's
view, time to get off the dime, to move Anniston resolutely down the road
toward ridding itself of what had become a nearly crippling Cold War legacy,
and he would stand by the consequences as they came.
It was the system, working.
There was no small amount of poetic juxtaposition when
two of the most significant and widely reported events in Anniston's history ’Äî
the announcement of the Monsanto legal settlement and the first day of
operations at the incinerator ’Äî occurred within a few days of each other three
years ago this month.
There was then, and still is now, a sense of cleansing
attached to it all. The two primary anchors of Anniston's development ’Äî
industry and the military ’Äî had, for all their massive contributions to the
city and its environs over the course of a century or so, also threatened to
kneecap its future. And then suddenly coming together all at once, it seemed,
were extraordinary opportunities for healing and closure.
For Anniston, it was an unusual example of
self-assessment. The town, as a general rule, has never been especially
introspective, with the possible exception of its proactive approach in dealing
with its various racial crises in the 1960s and 1970s.
Dating back to the days of the founding Noble and
Tyler families, Anniston has mostly been focused on promoting itself to
outsiders as an ideal. The towering figure in Anniston history, Sam Noble,
invited newspapermen by the trainload to his ’ÄúModel City’Äù and wined and dined
them, and they in turn tried to see who could out-effuse the other about this
utopian foundry town that had materialized from scratch in the foothills of the
Appalachians.
That civic hubris continued into the 20th century as
Anniston marketed itself as ’Äúthe Soil Pipe Capital of the World’Äù and then
worked feverishly in the 1980s to be named an ’ÄúAll-America City.’Äù Anniston was
smart, progressive, of a more elevated status than its peers. If you didn't
believe that, all you had to do was ask somebody who lived there.
All well and good. But the hard environmental facts
about what was happening on the West Side, in what traditionally has been the
working-class heart of the region, would not be contained forever. Bills
finally came due and were paid. Now Anniston, always a remarkable place, can
begin to look ahead again, rather than at what may be approaching from the
past.
The system worked.