Anniston Star
October 7, 2003

‘The land is sick’: Property, health issues constant reminders of legacy left by PCBs

By Elizabeth Bluemink
Star Staff Writer
10-07-2003

Third of a four-part series.

On a typical afternoon, Sylvester Harris can be found sitting at a small desk, greeting visitors to his funeral parlor with a wide smile and a jaunty cap covering his gray hair.

His shop is tucked away on West Eighth Street, on a narrow, lead-contaminated strip of land between the former Monsanto plant and the razed neighborhood of his youth. For 23 years, Harris has cultivated his business on the land he purchased long ago.

But today in his neighborhood, everything looks wrong.

Next door, a sidewalk ends in empty grass.

Near Harris’ small brick office are empty lots and dilapidated structures that remind him of his lost neighborhood and business district.

From his office door, he can turn left and look at the chain link fence that spans the northwest boundary of Cobb Town, the neighborhood where he grew up that was dismantled by Monsanto in 1997.

"The neighborhood is gone, it’s never coming back. The people are gone, they aren’t coming back," Harris says, his grin twisting into a grimace.

He and others in the area hope the journey to the community’s recovery will be eased by the settlement of the PCBs lawsuit — a seven-year court battle against Solutia Inc., a spinoff company that inherited liability for Monsanto’s PCB pollution.

Lives and memories have been transformed here. More transformations will come, longtime residents predict.

As a boy, Harris was a fast runner and was dubbed "the fox" by his playmates. He used to hunt for animals and swim in a pond on Coldwater Mountain, near the future dumpsite for millions of pounds of PCB-contaminated waste.

He says he will not set foot there again.

Decades of pollution, increased crime, reduced employment and other symptoms of blight have all created trouble in his old haunts.

"The land is sick," he says.

The PCB plaintiffs await the specific amounts they’ll be awarded in the settlement. The formulas are complicated, attorneys tell them. Weeks after the state and federal contamination cases were settled to the tune of more than $600 million, questions still abound in the area about who’ll get what, and what that will mean.

Some changes already are afoot in the neighborhood.

A handful of vacant buildings have been rehabilitated by Solutia Inc., which acquired many of the contaminated areas of the neighborhood because of a PCB-related company buyout program and lawsuit settlements.

For years, it has been difficult for private-property owners to find tenants in this neighborhood district.

"I don’t think that anybody wants to go out there," said Loretta Suggs, who owns a dozen properties in the area, including the former Anniston Funeral Home and the former Ray’s Chicken Shack, which has gone through at least three renters in the past few years. Additional lots are vacant, or about to become vacant, she said.

Although there is now settlement and resolution over who will run the cleanup — the Environmental Protection Agency will supervise Solutia’s work — it remains unclear what the impacts of the recent decisions over cleanup and lawsuits will be.

But it is here that the impacts of the pollution itself can be explored.

The neighborhood decline

Observers lump the negative effects of pollution in the contaminated blocks of Anniston into three broad categories: stress, health concerns and devalued, contaminated land.

Although it is difficult to measure the effect, pollution undoubtedly has contributed to the neighborhood’s decline.

"It can also be very difficult to debunk the stigma from pollution," said Dr. Harold Zumpano, director of the Alabama Real Estate Research and Education Center, based in Tuscaloosa.

An Anniston Star computer analysis of Census data gathered from the 1990 and 2000 surveys, selected to roughly correspond to the neighborhood blocks where contamination has been discovered since 2001, showed some clear demographic trends.

The neighborhoods tainted by the PCBs and heavy metal pollution straddle the boundary line of what city planners define as south and west Anniston. They are 60 percent black, 40 percent white.

From 1990 to 2000, the neighborhoods saw the opposite of white flight — a historical phenomenon that has occurred since the turn of the century in the larger, surrounding community that identifies itself as West Anniston.

The white population around the plant declined by 6 percent in the last decade. Instead, the community saw black flight as its dominant population shift.

From 1990 to 2000, the black population dropped by nearly 900 people – 18 percent. A portion of that likely was a result of Solutia’s neighborhood buyouts in the mid-1990s in Sweet Valley and Cobb Town, as well as the federal buyouts of flood-prone homes.

The number of housing units did not decline in step with the population, with the number of occupied homes dropping by only 2 percent, or in this case, 60 houses. A steady rate of occupied, available housing in the wake of declining population usually means there’s a high rate of vacant lots in the analyzed area.

Meanwhile, no one knows whether the recent lawsuit settlement will result in more residents moving away from the neighborhoods if they get enough money in their settlements to leave and buy homes elsewhere.

Dawn Landholm, the principal planner for the East Alabama Regional Planning Commission, who provided the raw data to The Star, said she was not surprised by the analysis.

"Because West and South Anniston are predominantly black, and most of the demolition occurred in these areas, the black population would have declined more sharply than the white population," she said.

Western Anniston has been losing both its black and white population. A report that Landholm helped compile for the city last year showed dramatic declines in population for both southern Anniston and western Anniston neighborhoods. From 1980 to 1990, western Anniston lost 28 percent of its population.

Officials say, however, that at least on the commercial front, redevelopment in western Anniston is moving along very well in a short period of time.

"The biggest problem is the blight, the ugliness," said Scott Barksdale of Spirit of Anniston, a redevelopment agency. "Anniston is full of sites that are perceived to be bad."

Officials say that it will perhaps be less difficult because of a positive, double whammy effect: broad pressure to clean up the pollution and rally additional resources to attack problems of blight in the contaminated areas.

"If you are going to suffer the reputation, you might as well get the benefits," said Bobby Stringham, in a meeting at the Anniston City Hall held to discuss redevelopment projects in western Anniston.

Health related

For many, health concerns are far more important than tainted real estate.

"Forget about the properties, take care of the people," Walter Elston demanded during a summer meeting in Anniston. The 39-year-old blames PCBs for an intestinal disease and the rashes on his body. He said doctors have not found a cause for his ailments.

Johnny Bynum, a thin, elderly man who has elevated PCBs in his blood, stood up angrily during the same meeting in the Carver Community Center gym, hosted in July by the Environmental Protection Agency.

Rapping his cane repeatedly on the bleachers, Bynum asked an EPA official, "What are you going to do about the people who are sick now?"

EPA is only involved in property cleanup, EPA’s Pam Scully replied.

Bynum’s reaction was to hobble out of the gym while Scully slowly pronounced the name of the federal agency that has produced reports on PCB-related health concerns — the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.

"I don’t even need to talk to you and Solutia any more," Bynum declared. "This is not fair to us. The people who are sick." He stopped in the hallway to stuff his EPA brochure in a trash can.

Many western Anniston residents allege they have cancer and other diseases. Yet few of them have talked on the record about their suspected illnesses because they were concerned about damaging their lawsuits against the company.

Some residents also have complained about respiratory problems from foundry air pollution, but there has been no momentum for studying illnesses potentially linked to foundries in the neighborhoods.

By and large, residents’ biggest complaint has been cancer.

The state health department has not been impressed with that complaint.

Yes, overall cancer rates in Calhoun County are elevated, compared to the state of Alabama and the United States, but the difference is not "statistically significant," said Rida Wilson, director of the Alabama Cancer Registry.

She said she has not seen any unusual cancer clusters in any Alabama Zip code since the cancer registry began in 1996.

However, the victims of cancer and other diseases did not ever get their opportunity to present their illness claims from PCBs in court.

Until the recent settlement, the state court case in Gadsden was scheduled to shift from property damage to personal-injury claims in mid-September.

And in October, plaintiffs attorneys in the upcoming Tolbert vs. Monsanto case (initiated after celebrity lawyer Johnny Cochran came to Anniston and promised to help clean up west Anniston) had planned to present claims for liver diseases and cancer, according to David Byrne, a lawyer involved in the case.

Emotionally speaking

Concern about the pollution and the chemical weapons incinerator first fostered fear, then anger, then, among many on the contaminated blocks, an attitude of despair over cleanup.

Now that the incinerator has begun to burn weapons, the stress has increased, according to James Hall, executive director of the Brownfield Institute, a western Anniston non-profit that focuses on redevelopment and job training.

A few residents and activists said they feel the pollution can never be fully eliminated. Others don’t trust any of the people in charge of the cleanup.

"I have gotten so disgusted with this that I am not going to let it worry me," said one woman who declined to be named in this story, who has PCBs in her blood and an undiagnosed liver condition. She was a plaintiff in the PCB pollution trial in Gadsden.

"What have our kids and grandkids got to look forward to? The land is useless," she said.

The pollution has just spread too much to be cleaned up, said Hall. "West Anniston is a close-knit community," he said, explaining that people have been tracking their dirty shoes into each others’ yards and kitchens for decades. Surely they carried the pollution in their shoes everywhere they went, he said.

Harris, who owns the mortuary near the plant, was able to build a new home on the edge of the woods in southern Anniston, thanks to Solutia settlement money for his old home in Cobb Town. But he suspects that PCBs are in that yard, too.

"It’s everywhere," he said.

The EPA and Solutia have focused attention on cleaning yards with the highest levels of PCBs and lead – resulting in a patchwork of cleanups that led many residents to believe that their neighborhoods will be re-contaminated over time as rainwater and floodwater shifts the dirt around.

If the yards don’t re-contaminate each other, a breach in the landfills will certainly do the job, they say.

"They didn’t get the source," Harris said, referring to the landfills that contain millions of pounds of PCB-contaminated waste on the slope of Coldwater Mountain.

Finding some priorities

Generally speaking, confusion has reigned about which problems should take priority in the contaminated blocks.

The courts are the only venue in which people are seeking redress for their alleged emotional distress from pollution. Government agencies are focusing on the alleged health effects and property cleanup

Meanwhile, many people like Harris, who grew up in the contaminated zone, have dug in their heels, put their trust in the legal system to eventually fix the pollution problem instead of the government or the company that they feel duped them for decades.

Approximately 200-300 property owners have not provided access to the company for PCB and lead testing, according to Solutia officials. That number is actually a drop in the bucket compared to the number of properties that may eventually be evaluated for PCB and lead contamination.

The residents’ litigation strategy has led others to heap on criticism: Why don’t they let the company clean the properties? It’s all about money, isn’t it?

The PCB pollution is just like a tar baby, Harris said, invoking the old, Deep South tale of a small, sticky creature that created a mess for everyone who touched it.

Harris is determined not to budge from his land until he receives an offer that will allow him to restart his mortuary business elsewhere. "I hate to come down here (to work), but I got to come," he said.