Monsanto Hid Decades Of
Pollution
PCBs Drenched Ala. Town,
But No One Was Ever Told
"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."
The Sweet Valley and
Cobbtown neighborhoods were vibrant working-class areas with mom-and-pop
businesses and modest homes. Then investigators found astronomical levels of
PCBs and declared the communities public health hazards.
By Michael Grunwald
The Washington Post
January 1, 2001
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.
David 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. Robert 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 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 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 Harris
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 Kelly, 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, 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.
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
George Murphy, 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 Kelly, 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 Maryland. 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 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 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 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 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 Franklin, 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 with
the 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 David
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."