Monsanto Hides Toxin for Decades

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http://commondreams.org/headlines02/0101-02.htm

Published on Tuesday, January 1, 2002 in the Washington Post

PCBs Drenched Ala. Town, But No One Was Ever Told

by Grunwald

ANNISTON, Ala. -- On the west side of Anniston, the poor side of Anniston,

the people ate dirt. They called it " Alabama clay " and cooked it for extra

flavor. They also grew berries in their gardens, raised hogs in their back

yards, caught bass in the murky streams where their children swam and

played and were baptized. They didn't know their dirt and yards and bass

and kids -- along with the acrid air they breathed -- were all contaminated

with chemicals. 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 ordered General Electric

Co. to spend $460 million to dredge PCBs it had dumped into the Hudson

River in the past, perhaps the Bush administration's boldest environmental

action to date. The decision was bitterly opposed by the company, but

hailed by national conservation groups and many prominent and prosperous

residents of the picturesque Hudson River Valley.

In Anniston, far from the national spotlight, 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

on cleanup efforts so far. 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 next Monday. Carpenter, an

environmental health professor at the State University of New York at

Albany, has been a leading advocate of the EPA's plan to dredge the Hudson,

but he says the PCB problems in Anniston are much worse.

" I'm looking out my window at the Hudson right now, but the reality is that

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 Inc., the name given to Monsanto's

chemical operations after they were spun off into a separate company in

1997, acknowledge that Monsanto made mistakes. But they also said that for

years, PCBs were hailed for preventing fires and explosions in electrical

equipment. Monsanto did stop making PCBs in 1977, two years before a

nationwide ban took effect. And the current scientific consensus that PCBs

are harmful, especially to the environment, masks serious disputes over

just how harmful they are to people.

Today, the old plant off Monsanto Road here makes a chemical used in

Tylenol. It has not reported a toxic release in four years. Kaley,

the environmental affairs director for Solutia who also serves as the 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

while 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's cinder-block

cottages and shotgun houses. Sylvester , 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 last few decades in a cottage

in back of a Waffle House behind the plant. But 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 -- along with and many of

their neighbors -- and she 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. "

The Model City

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 was named in 1879 for the

foundry owner's wife -- Annie's Town -- but it was nicknamed " The Model

City of the South " because it was supposed to be a kind of industrial

utopia, a centrally planned rebuke to the North's slums after the Civil

War. The company would provide the workers' cottages, the general store,

the church, the schools. It would take care of the community.

Anniston retains its Model City slogan to this day, but its paternalistic

social experiment was quickly abandoned. 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 by the EPA and

the World Health Organization, it is easy to forget that 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.

Monsanto did. Shortly after buying the 70-acre plant at the foot of

Coldwater Mountain 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.

One Aroclor manual reveals that " in the early days of development, "

workers at the Anniston plant had developed chloracne and liver problems.

In February 1950, when workers fell ill at a customer's Indiana factory,

Monsanto's medical director, Emmett , immediately " suspected the

possibility that the Aroclor fumes may have caused liver damage. "

Two years later, Monsanto signed an agreement with the U.S. Public Health

Service to label Aroclors: " 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 it did not warn its neighbors. " It is our desire to comply with the

necessary regulations, but to comply with the minimum, " an official wrote.

In 1998, a former Anniston plant manager, Papageorge, was asked in

a deposition whether Monsanto officials ever shared their data about PCB

hazards with the community. " Why would they? " he replied.

In the fall of 1966, Monsanto hired a Mississippi State University

biologist named Denzel Ferguson to conduct some studies around its Anniston

plant. Ferguson, who died in 1998, arrived with tanks full of bluegill

fish, which he caged in cloth containers and 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 , who

was one of Ferguson's graduate students at the time and is now chairman of

Middle Tennessee State University's biology department.

" I've never seen anything like it in my life, " said Mack Finley, another

former Ferguson grad student, now an aquatic biologist at Austin Peay State

University. " Their skin would literally slough off, like a blood blister on

the bottom of your foot. "

The problem, Ferguson concluded, was the " extremely toxic " wastewater

flowing directly 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, a group of Swedish scientists demonstrated publicly 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. They proved that PCBs are persistent -- which, as one

lawyer drawled in court last spring, " is nothing but a fancy word for

'won't go away.' " But 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 , the company medical director.

The first thing Monsanto's board did, in November 1967, was approve a $2.9

million expansion of Aroclors operations in Anniston and Sauget, Ill. The

vote was unanimous.

Records show that the Anniston plant did act 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 burying 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.)

Jack Matson, a Pennsylvania State University environmental engineering

professor who has consulted for Monsanto, concluded in a report for the

Anniston plaintiffs that the company failed to observe even basic industry

practices here. It had no catch basins, settling ponds or carbon filters to

clean its wastewater. It washed spills straight into its sewers.

It was only in December 1968 -- after PCBs had been discovered in

California wildlife, setting off a furor in the United States -- that

Monsanto officials even began to write memos about controlling PCBs. " It

only seems a matter of time before the regulatory agencies will be looking

down our throats, " one warned. A consultant scolded Monsanto to stop

denying problems and start cleaning up: " The evidence regarding PCB effects

on environmental quality is sufficiently substantial, widespread and

alarming to require immediate corrective action. "

Another memo -- labeled C-O-N-F-I-D-E-N-T-I-A-L, with each letter

underlined twice -- said the company was finally thinking about limiting

releases of Aroclors. But the memo did not go so far as to propose a

cleanup -- " only action preparatory to actual cleanup. " " We should begin to

protect ourselves, " it said.

The Company Committee

In September 1969, Monsanto appointed an Aroclors Ad Hoc 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. "

But the members agreed that the situation looked bleak. PCBs had been found

across the nation in fish, oysters and even bald eagles. They had been

identified in milk in Georgia and land. They were implicated in a major

shrimp kill in Florida. Their status as a serious pollutant, the committee

concluded, was " certain. " " Subject is snowballing, " one member jotted in

his notes. " Where do we go from here? "

One option, as a member put it, was to " sell the hell out of them as long

as we can. " Another option was to stop making them immediately. But the

committee instead recommended " The Responsible Approach " -- 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. " The

committee even drew up graphs charting profits vs. liability over time, and

urged more studies to poke holes in the government's case against PCBs.

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. "

The picture was not bright in Anniston, either. Company studies were

finding " ominous " concentrations of PCBs in streams and sediments. In

Choccolocco Creek, Monsanto had discovered deformed and lethargic fish with

off-the-charts PCB levels, including a blacktail shiner with 37,800 parts

per million. The legal maximum was only 5 parts per million. " It is

apparent to us that there is a cause-and-effect relationship, " the

consultants wrote.

At first, the committee members proposed reducing PCB releases to an

" absolute minimum. " But then they removed the word " absolute. " They saw no

benefit in a unilateral crackdown on Monsanto's PCBs when Monsanto's

customers were still dumping, too: " It was agreed that until the problems

of gross environmental contamination by our customers have been alleviated,

there is little object in going to expensive extremes in limiting

discharges. "

And before Monsanto even began to phase out its best-selling PCBs, its top

customer intervened: General Electric, according to a memo by Papageorge,

insisted that it needed to keep buying PCBs to prevent power outages and

that the environmental threat was still " questionable. " Monsanto agreed to

slow down its plan, and kept making PCBs until 1977, although only for

closely monitored industrial uses.

And what, Kaley asks, is wrong with that? Corporations, after all, have

obligations to their shareholders, and the federal law banning the

manufacture of PCBs did not take effect until 1979. Monsanto's critics,

Kaley says, do not understand capitalism.

" Look, this was a good product, " Kaley said. " Did we try to save it as long

as we could? Absolutely. Was the writing on the wall when we stopped

producing it? Sure. But we did stop. "

The Reluctant Regulators

By May 1970, PCBs were a hot topic in the national media. Members of

Congress were calling for hearings. It seemed like 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

(AWIC) on its own that PCBs were entering Snow Creek. And AWIC helped the

company keep its toxic secrets.

According to a company memo, AWIC's technical director, Joe Crockett, had

been " totally unaware of published information concerning Aroclors. " The

Monsanto executives assured him that everything was under control, and

Crockett, who is now deceased, 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.

" In summary . . . the full cooperation of the AWIC on a confidential basis

can be anticipated, " the memo concluded.

That summer, Crockett again came to Monsanto's rescue after the federal

Food and Drug Administration found PCB-tainted fish in Choccolocco Creek.

(There were no fish -- or any other aquatic life -- in Snow Creek.)

Monsanto's managers told him not to worry, saying they hoped to reduce PCB

emissions to 0.1 pounds per day by September.

" 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. Instead, the public kept

fishing. But Monsanto's daily PCB losses, after dipping from a high of 250

pounds to a low of 16 pounds, ballooned to 88 pounds -- 880 times its goal.

" There is extreme reluctance to report even relatively low emission figures

because the information could be subpoenaed and used against us in legal

actions, " wrote an executive at Monsanto headquarters in St. Louis.

" Obviously, having to report these gross losses multiplies, enormously, our

problems because the figures would appear to indicate lack of control. . .

.. Is there anything more that can be done to get the losses down? "

There was. The problem had festered for 36 years, but the Anniston managers

finally began to act that fall, installing a sump, a carbon bed and a new

limestone pit to trap PCBs. And 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. One executive noted with relief in a memo

that a federal prosecutor had tried but failed to obtain Monsanto's

customer list: " I shudder to think how easily it would have been for

someone . . . to start spilling the beans as to whom we have been selling

PCB products. "

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 details lingered until a new attorney general named

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 go forward 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 Bill Clinton

about Anniston's PCBs, pointing out " the severity of the situation " and

requesting federal funding. 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 plan.

" It's hard to know how that one slipped through the cracks, " said

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 bluegills

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 the residents of the working-class Sweet Valley and

Cobbtown 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, offering early sign-up bonuses and moving expenses as

incentives. " Monsanto intends to be a good neighbor -- to those who wish to

leave, and to those who wish to stay, " its brochures explained.

Sally lin, a 64-year-old retired mechanic with a girlish voice,

decided to stay; she couldn't afford to buy a new home with the money

Monsanto was offering. One spring afternoon, she looked down from her

PCB-contaminated home overlooking what used to be Sweet Valley, now just an

overgrown field around an incongruous stop sign. So much for good

neighbors, she grumbled.

" They must not think we know a black cow can give white milk, " she said.

The Dredged-Up Past

Anniston is not much of a model city anymore. The EPA officials who set up

an Anniston satellite office to deal with the PCB problem are now alarmed

about widespread lead poisoning as well. The Army is building an

incinerator here to burn 2,000 tons of deadly sarin and mustard gas.

And the Anniston Star has been questioning Monsanto's past mercury releases.

Duane Higgins runs the Chamber of Commerce here in Calhoun County -- motto:

" Near Atlanta . . . Near Birmingham . . . Near Perfect " -- and like many

civic leaders here, he's sick of headlines about pollution. " I'm tired of

paying for the sins of our fathers and grandfathers, " he said. " I don't see

the point of dredging this stuff up. "

He meant that literally, too. Local activists want Monsanto to dredge all

its PCBs out of Anniston's creeks and move all its buried PCBs to

hazardous-waste landfills. That could cost billions of dollars. But state

and EPA officials do not agree that such drastic measures are necessary.

They have no evidence that PCBs have escaped from the dumps since Monsanto

was required to cap them after a spill in 1996; they believe most of

Anniston's PCBs spread from the creeks during floods. And dredging projects

such as the one approved for the Hudson River remain scientifically as well

as politically controversial.

" There's a very pervasive problem in Anniston, but so far we haven't seen a

need for those kinds of dramatic actions, " said Wesley Hardegree, an EPA

corrective action specialist.

Part of the problem is that despite all the publicity, much remains unknown

about PCBs. Various animal studies have linked them to various cancers.

Other studies suggest possible ties to low IQs, birth defects, thyroid

problems, immune problems, diabetes. A federal research summary titled " Do

PCBs Affect Human Health? " concluded: " No smoking gun . . . but plenty of

bullets on the floor. "

But no one has found a link between PCBs and any cancer as definitive as

the link between, say, cigarettes and lung cancer. A recent GE-funded study

-- conducted by the same toxicologist who originally discovered that PCBs

cause cancer in rats -- found no link to cancer in humans. And some

independent scientists remain skeptical of any serious health effects from

real-world PCB exposure.

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 " insure

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 Cain, the current

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. " The

company's critics say little has changed. And they warn that Monsanto,

which no longer produces chemicals, is now promising the world that its

genetically engineered crops are safe for human consumption.

" For years, these guys said PCBs were safe, too, " said Mike Casey of the

Environmental Working Group, which has been compiling chemical industry

documents on the Web. " But there's obviously a corporate culture of

deceiving the public. "

On Jan. 7, the two sides will have their day in court. Kaley said his

company has nothing to hide.

" I'm really pretty proud of what we did, " Kaley said. " Was it perfect? No.

Could we be second-guessed? Sure. But I think we mostly did what any

company would do, even today. "

© 2002 The Washington Post Company

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