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Tonight on Frontline...
It's going to be worse than Love Canal and worse than Times Beach based upon what we know is going into the soil.
Calvert City, Kentucky is at war with itself over the legacy of toxic waste generated by its only industry.
I can smell it from in my house. Makes you dizzy sometimes, burns your eyes, burns your throat, but I don't know what it is.
Clean it up, close it down. It's killing us.
People working in the chemical industry have morals just like they do.
Tonight, Who's Killing Calvert City?
From the network of public television stations, a presentation of KCTS Seattle, WNET New York, WPBT Miami, WTVS Detroit, and WGBH Boston, this is Frontline with Judy Woodroof.
Good evening.
Records at the Environmental Protection Agency say there are 27,000 potentially hazardous waste sites in the United States.
1,100 of them have been designated superfund sites, which means they are so threatening to public health that they warrant immediate cleanup.
One of these sites is located in a small town in western Kentucky called Calvert City.
Last fall, Frontline spent several months in Calvert City, traveling across the battle lines of its environmental struggle.
On one side, activists and townspeople worried about cancer.
On the other, politicians and businesspeople who fear a pollution panic will ruin the town's economy.
It is the story of one town's struggle to find the truth about itself.
Tonight's program was produced and reported by Michael Myrondorf.
It is called, Who's Killing Calvert City?
When Greenpeace came to Calvert City, they brought with them supporters from around the country.
They were here to protest what they believe is some of the worst toxic pollution in the United States.
For many of the people who live in this small Kentucky town, Greenpeace had come uninvited.
I question their tactics and things like that.
I think we have state agencies to monitor things like this.
Or they can take their goods and go home.
But many of those carrying signs that day were local people.
It was clear that environmental issues had deeply divided this community.
They say, starting today, clean it up, close it down.
It's killing us.
I am not a liberal.
I'm a conservative, extreme conservative.
But I march with liberals.
And I'm here with you, shoulder to shoulder, until we clean this mess up.
Western Kentucky is conservative, socially and politically.
For several months I had been here, watching the conflict that filled the streets that day.
It had been building for years.
I had arrived in Calvert City on the 4th of July.
It was hot, but it looked like most of the town had turned out for the parade,
including the mayor, Keane McKenney.
We get excited that when somebody new joins the church, comes into our community.
We get excited when a new home is built.
We get excited when a new business comes to town.
We strive to provide to our children the more opportunities than we had.
That afternoon, Calvert City did look like Norman Rockwell's America,
except for one thing, the string of chemical company trucks that dominated the parade.
Calvert City is an industry town.
Its chemical and metal alloy plants employ about 3,000 people.
Large multinational corporations like B.F. Goodrich, GAF and Penwalt built plants here in the 1950s.
These were some of the industries that fueled the post-war boom of American affluence.
And one of the things that you probably did in your kitchen this morning
is you walked on vinyl floor tile that is a PVC product.
Once a year, the Calvert City industries put on a trade show.
The chemicals they make are the raw materials for the products on display.
It's used in wire coating.
We make the wetting agent.
It allows for time-release nature.
It needs various consumer over-the-counter pharmaceuticals.
This Dippy-Doo bottle and all to keep the materials in suspension.
Crest toothpaste also uses carbapol.
Before the plants came, Calvert City was a very small community.
Probably 250 to 300 people.
It was a farming community.
It was a rather economically depressed area.
Bobbie Faust grew up in Calvert City.
She and her generation all remember harder times.
Even through the end of the war, it was a rather depressed area still.
Many people had to leave the area in order to find work.
After Bert Inman was discharged from the Navy in 1961,
he went to work at the GAF plant.
Today, he makes about $40,000 a year.
Oh, you're right in that tote.
It's give a lifestyle to people in a rural area that would have never had it before, I don't think.
I live about like I want to live.
I buy what I want, you know.
Right now, I've got one, two, three, four cars right now.
I got it in April.
Yeah.
What kind is it?
Civil A, Silverado.
Four-wheel drive, it's got everything.
Windows, door locks, tilt, cruise, AM, FM, stereo, seat scan, graphic equalizer,
350 four-barrel aluminum wheels.
It's got about everything you can get on a truck.
Most people are in church.
It's very quiet, very sedate.
Lloyd Ford publishes a small newspaper in Calvert City.
One Sunday, he offered to take me on a tour of his town.
This house here, here again, they are, she works at BF Goodrich.
He has his own business, or they also have their own business,
which sells products to the plants.
Folks in this house, school teachers.
Not bad.
Lloyd Ford took me to the house where he lived as a child
to show me what life was like before the plants came.
The plants power this economy.
They're the ones that give us the money.
That's how we make our living to do those things, to live here,
live like we do now, not in something like this.
Lloyd Ford was proud of how his town had prospered,
but he was worried, too, about its future.
It's a interesting story about this particular house.
Unless I'm mistaken, the fellow who built this home had it sold,
or thought he had it sold.
We had one of the big stories on the environment break.
One of the coalitions had a meeting or something.
Anyway, the folks who were going to buy the house decided,
well, we shouldn't buy a home here because, you know,
we may make a big investment here and lose it, you know,
not be able to sell it, not be able to get our money out of it.
There is a fear in Calvin City that leaves houses unsold,
a fear Lloyd Ford thinks might undo his town,
a fear he traces back to one night.
My mother-in-law called me up that night, called my wife,
said, y'all have got to move out of that place.
You have to leave. You can't stay there.
What was she talking about?
Well, she thought we were going to die of cancer, you know,
that this threat to our health was so imminent
that we needed to pack up and take the kids
and get out of the house immediately, leave.
That was the night Dr. Paul Connett came to Calvin City.
I have just been exposed for the second time the joys of Calvin City,
a savage juxtaposition of human suffering and chemical stupidity.
Dr. Paul Connett is a chemist from New York
and a champion of environmental causes.
In November of 1987,
local activists invited him to talk about their town.
That night, Connett said Calvert City was dying.
It's going to be worse than Love Canal and worse than Times Beach
based upon what we know is going into the soil has gone into the soil.
At the time, Connett had gathered little information to support his allegations,
but his predictions touched a nerve.
We also predict that the cancer rate in Calvert City will blow our minds away.
He created a great deal of excitement.
Mr. Connett called Calvert City Cancer City.
And with that, I suppose that there was every conceivable emotion
expressed in our community,
everything from anger and bitterness and hatred
to rejoicing and jubilance and praise.
I'm doing fine. How are you doing, Howard?
Lynn Jones is one of Calvert City's leading citizens.
He can trace his roots here back three generations.
There have been people who have been friends in this community for a long time,
been neighbors, and this issue has strained that friendship.
Lynn Jones is president of the Calvert Bank,
and so he worries about what a pollution panic might do to his town.
And I had a concern when this started that this may be one of those things
that is going to get out of hand very quickly,
and irrational behavior is going to result.
And one of the most devastating things to our community that could happen would be
not only that the industry leave, but that our local merchants began to suffer.
These are great people, the Greenpeace people.
I found some of the people Lynn Jones is worried about at a yard sale
sponsored by one of the environmental groups in the area.
They had brought Dr. Paul Connett here
and were also responsible for the Greenpeace interest in Calvert City.
Irene, you want some?
On this day, the group was also asking people to sign a petition
urging the Environmental Protection Agency to clean up toxic waste
from the chemical plants in Calvert City.
When you explain to them that it's asking that EPA clean up these sites,
they grab it and sign it.
Kareem Whitehead was one of the first environmental activists in Calvert City.
She has been effective in drawing attention to her cause,
but many people see her as a radical and a troublemaker.
The EPA, the state, they have to recognize that it's a situation that has to stop,
and the companies, the industries.
What will you do?
Whatever it takes.
The extremists in these environmental groups,
not all of the people in them, not all the people in these groups,
but the extremists in these environmental groups have viewpoints
that simply are not shared by the most of us in a society that we have.
Most of us are not going to give up going to the fast food establishment to eat
because you have to look at it this way.
Those places can't operate without all that styrofoam.
But there's no doubt Calvert City has a lot of waste.
Its industries produce 76% of the hazardous waste in a seven-state area.
Within the industrial complex,
dumping and spillage of chemicals has created hundreds of areas
the government says may have to be cleaned up.
For example, when the B.F. Goodrich plant began operating in 1953,
much of its waste was disposed of by methods that today would be illegal.
Poisonous substances went into the air, the land, and into the Tennessee River.
As far as being in the chemical industry, it was at B.F. Goodrich.
Ray Faust worked at B.F. Goodrich for 31 years.
I think we had a total disregard for if we could flash it off,
if we could burn it and take the smoke and get the prevailing winds to take it away,
or flush it in the river, that's exactly what we did.
There was no laws to keep us from it.
Management didn't give a damn.
The only thing they wanted to do was make production.
As a result, this land next to B.F. Goodrich is one of over 1,100 Superfund sites
designated by the EPA as dangerous toxic waste dumps.
Goodrich has made efforts to clean up,
but much of the groundwater under the site is contaminated.
Roughly 30 toxic and cancer-causing chemicals are slowly moving underground toward the river.
Grace, you're going to take that to the wastewater treatment plant.
Goodrich monitors the underground pollution by drilling test wells.
The contamination threat from this well is so great,
the water can't be allowed to spill onto the ground.
It must be disposed of as hazardous waste.
Calvert City's water still tests safe,
but people worry because the wells are so close to the industrial complex.
And years of dumping in and around the Tennessee River
have threatened the water supply for the town of Paducah downstream,
where the water must be filtered to remove cancer-causing chemicals.
This permit is a license to pollute the Tennessee River.
While I was in Calvert City, the state of Kentucky held hearings on its new rules
to regulate the chemicals the plants could discharge into the river.
The new rules were much more restrictive,
but for the local environmentalists, not strict enough.
I mean, you know, these are some pretty big words in here.
I mean, you know, just as a dumb hillbilly, you know,
I look at this nitrobenzene, whatever that is, 35 pounds a day daily maximum.
You know, I just wonder about, there's some awfully big amounts.
Now, what happens if all of these daily maximums are all on the same day?
Industry argued the new rules were too cautious and too expensive.
Today, industry must compete in a global economy,
and the cost of excessive environmental regulation
infringes upon the firm's ability to compete in the marketplace.
As I listened, it was clear the two sides had little common ground.
And in one moment, I saw how far apart they really were.
It's not a matter of being obnoxious or contrary or ornery and stop laughing,
because people's lives are at stake.
You know, I stood and watched my friend die with cancer.
I did smile and lean over and whisper to him,
where they get these wild numbers, because each number just kept getting wilder and wilder.
The man Corrine Whitehead confronted was Ralph Hawk,
a widely respected chemical engineer and the manager of the GAF plant in Calvert City.
Unlike other industrialists here, he was willing to talk openly about his plant
and the opposition of the environmentalists.
Hawk feels the testimony he heard at the water hearings was an example of the unfounded hysteria,
which comes from the fearful imagination of people who don't understand chemistry.
And I have children and grandchildren that live here in this area.
And I wouldn't risk myself or my family or my descendants if I didn't think it was safe.
And I know chemistry.
Hawk's operation is enormously complex.
He manufactures more than a hundred different chemicals, half of which are made nowhere else in America.
Many are used in pharmaceuticals and others for the national defense.
Frankly, if the activists knew how much chemicals were involved in their life,
they would, without them, they would be thrown back into the dark ages.
They may as well be cave people.
Hawk says he's working hard on better pollution controls,
but he wouldn't tell me how much of his profits are being spent on the improvements.
He did say the new rules on wastewater pollution were unjustified
and go beyond what GAF can reasonably control.
It'll cut it by a factor of three, which means that this plant cannot do it as it currently sets.
Let's not talk about how bad it was.
If it was all that bad, let's talk about how it is now.
Another industry representative I met was Penwald engineer Bob Foster.
As president of the local industry organization, he often talks with journalists.
One day, Foster invited me to see another view of Calvert City.
It's important for you folks to see the Tennessee River where we discharge our waste effluent, our water.
It's important for you to see that it looks like everybody else's river.
There's grass, there's fish, there's ducks, there's hunting, there's camping.
It's probably not a whole lot better, certainly no worse, than any place else.
But industrial discharges from Calvert City don't only flow into the Tennessee River.
When the plants began operating, vast quantities of air pollution were carried by prevailing winds
across the river into Livingston County.
In the middle of the field, people there felt they were being hurt.
I met a school teacher named Jack Cawthorn, who for many years has owned a farm on the edge of the river across from the plants.
The pollution, Mike, to me is just as real as real can be.
I think I see too many of my friends that are suffering the effects of it around here not to be real to me.
Mike, I think it's kind of like smelling the skunk.
The skunk realizes there's a problem.
The man that hears about the skunk, he doesn't have to smell him.
And now I think my good friends in Marshall County, they are aware of this problem,
but they're not having to smell the skunk is the illustration I'm using here.
As I talked to more people in Livingston County, I became convinced that many of them thought something was wrong.
But I figured it'll just give me enough edge, just enough, to get out of the area or something,
and some day it's going to go. I know this.
Some people in Livingston County told me they no longer trusted the water from their wells.
A crop insurance salesman told me agricultural yields had declined drastically in an area directly across from the plants.
Cattle! Cattle!
Cattle! Cattle! Cattle!
A veterinarian who owns cattle in several counties told me his herds across from Calvert City
have gained less weight than his cattle raised in other places.
This bull right here ought to weigh about 1,200 pounds, and he'll weigh about 450 right now.
He is running tests to find out if there are traces of chemicals from the calvert industries in the animal's blood.
He's on his way.
Almost everyone I met in Livingston County told me I should talk to Jim Champion.
Champion was a colonel in the Marine Corps.
When he retired in 1981, he moved back here and now lives with his wife, five miles across the river from Calvert City.
There's been times that you could not stand out here like we are today.
It would take your breath if you walked out of that house.
Both myself and my wife, in the spring and the fall, when the windows are open and the air conditioner is not on,
have been awakened at two, three o'clock in the morning by horrible odors.
So we don't raise a garden. We don't set out on our patio.
Champion began complaining to the state whenever fumes from Calvert City blew his way.
His efforts caused one industry, GAF, to be fined, and eventually the plant shut down the odor producing process.
It just never entered my mind that those people would be violating the environment like they were.
As Champion began talking to his neighbors, he found he was not alone in his concern about the calvert industry.
You have to ask yourself the question, is it doing something to your body?
Fred Lorantz is pastor at Friendship Baptist Church, which gets some of the heaviest pollution from the plants.
About two years ago, he was diagnosed with colon cancer, and he soon realized he wasn't alone.
But by all of us having it almost at the same time, this is when the question popped in my mind, is there a common cause?
How are you doing? Pretty good. Have a seat.
People knew Champion was fighting the plants and turned to him to find out why there seemed to be so much cancer.
Several gave him lists of people who were sick or who had died.
National carbide is right over there. Air products is right in through here.
Champion took the list of cancer victims and began visiting their homes.
I went along, taping the conversations as he talked to them for the first time.
See, you can see what it's done to this.
That's what you get off of a car every day that you wash, that right there.
You can wash a car tonight and the next morning you get up and you've got to take a soap pad or something.
He just lets the truck go because he did use it for his fishing truck.
But you can just feel the rough.
The Walkers have lived across the river from the plants for many years.
Despite the corrosion of their property, they always tolerated the pollution.
But the Walkers see things differently now.
Not a healthy place to live, is it?
No, and like I said, if I'd have known it 20 years ago, I'd have been young.
W.T. Walker worked in the plants for 16 years, but he was laid off many times
and today has no pension and only union health insurance.
Now he's dying of cancer.
Mr. Walker, how long have you had your cancer?
Through a year, maybe through a year in January.
Do you think your employment had something to do with the cancer
or do you think living over here had something to do with it, or both?
I think both, but don't you get that dirt, don't you get dirt, get dirt.
Right.
When he worked over there, when he would come home, he would have blisters on him.
If that hit there, it would blister.
And they had to wrap up, like this real hot weather,
they had to wrap up head, ears, and all.
And anywhere it touched, it blistered.
But it's just too much cancer.
I thought it, and we talked about it, just too much cancer right here in this area.
And oh, it was, well, it's the worst thing that ever happened to me.
It's just, it's really undescribable.
And to see how she really suffered and at the last,
it just kept getting worse and worse.
Don Anglin's wife had died just one month before a champion came to see him.
Like others in the area, Anglin said he's always gotten heavy pollution here at his home.
This picnic table he built six months ago became pitted and discolored,
even with many coats of varnish.
Don's wife thought it was the same pollution that was killing her.
She was 33 years old.
And the doctor said that it was chemical cancer.
Of course, my wife smoked.
And of course, if one smokes, the first thing they have when they have cancer,
everybody starts hollering that it's caused from smoking.
And he says her cancer was not caused from her smoking.
He said it was a rapid spreading chemical cancer.
He never told me what.
I mean, I don't know that they could tell, just to be truthful about it,
but he did say it was a chemical cancer.
Did she ever work at the plants?
No.
As Champion did more interviews, he noticed there seemed to be a pattern in their location.
I used his information to create my own map.
Most of the cancer victims Champion had interviewed
lived in an area about two and one-half miles downwind from the industrial complex.
And in one low-lying area, along a mile and a half stretch of road,
roughly half the homes had been affected by colon cancer.
Here's the plants right here.
Champion didn't believe the state's cancer statistics,
which showed the local cancer rates were normal.
So he asked the federal government to do a study.
Use your words. Tell me what you think the problem is right now.
I think it comes from across the river, because we get a west wind here.
An agency under the Center for Disease Control came to Livingston County for a day last fall
to decide whether to begin a full health study.
Champion showed them around, explaining his findings about the cancer cluster,
and introduced them to some victims.
But months later, the agency would base their preliminary conclusions
not on Champion's information, but on the official cancer statistics.
And in a speech to the Calvert City Industry Organization,
the agency said there seemed to be no cause for concern.
Rich people don't have to live down here.
Rich people can live anywhere they want, and so they can live in a place that's not polluted.
Poor people accept the pollution because most times it means there's a job on the other end of the smoke.
Now folks, to volunteer for anything we need, do you have some name to some folks
that we need to contact for the American Cancer Society?
Lynn Jones is the president of Calvert City's chapter of the American Cancer Society.
Jones feels the risk from pollution is nothing compared to smoking and other causes of cancer.
I think that our opportunity in the American Cancer Society to educate folks
that in many of these instances, cancer is something that should never happen.
If we eat right, and I'd say we live right, then cancer in many cases is not going to develop.
I have a basic trust of government.
I don't think the government blatantly lies to everybody.
I have complete confidence that the monitoring is being done
and that the tolerance range is acceptable.
One morning at 2 a.m., a man named Jim Owen called me to say that a giant flare was pouring black smoke at B.F. Goodrich.
I met Jim in the industrial complex where he showed me what was happening.
People around here worry about that kind of stuff?
Well, some do and some don't.
Some people don't even know such things as that around here.
They don't even know them flares are going, probably.
Never seen them. A lot of people in Calvert City, I don't think, have ever seen them flare.
They think it's just something normal going on.
But on this big flare here, I've seen it smoke for miles.
And if it does come my way, I can smell it come in my house.
Makes you dizzy sometimes, burns your eyes, burns your throat.
But I don't know what it is.
Did you call the Air Pollution Authority?
There's no use calling now in this time of day.
If they had answered the telephone, you'd have to call them at home and they'd say,
We're not on duty now. We can't do anything about it until in the morning.
A B.F. Goodrich spokesman told me later that the black smoke was not dangerous.
It was caused, he said, by equipment failure.
In 1987, about 10 million pounds of airborne pollution was released from the calvert industries.
And the state of Kentucky, because it lacks the personnel and technology,
is limited in its ability to inspect and analyze these emissions.
You breathe the air first through the two carbon beds to get a zero level.
And then you open ports in the back of the centimeter.
Linda Byerly runs the Calvert City Air Inspection Program.
I went with her one day to find out how she enforces the state law regulating 734 air toxins.
You hold the device to your nose. Breathe in through the device.
The centimeter detects pollution violations based on whether the inspector can smell an odor
with a dilution of filtered air.
This is the regulatory basis for any enforcement action we might take.
Sometimes you look at a problem and go, Well, I wish I knew what the answer was, and you don't.
Stan Cook is another state air inspector. He's been working around calvert industries 10 years.
He told me he feels caught in the middle between defensive industry and fearful citizens.
They think we have something like on Star Trek, a tricorder, on the old Star Trek things.
Let's walk out here with a box, flip it on, immediately give us an answer.
Oh, yes, 14 parts per million of carbon tetrachloride and 13 parts of vinyl chloride.
And, yep, this is above the limit. Let's go get somebody.
It just doesn't exist.
Why do you do this? Why do you do this job?
Some days I wonder. I really do.
We don't know what's being discharged from the plants.
We don't know what's being discharged into the air or into the water,
what's seeping into the ground and the groundwater.
We don't know. I mean, I would defy anybody to dispute that.
When I met Don Harker, he had just taken over the waste division
of the Kentucky Environmental Protection Agency because of its poor performance.
People were fired when Harker discovered they had let citizens in one county
drink water that was dangerously contaminated.
There are a lot of people in government that I think have a contempt for the public almost.
Not even almost. There's some people that have a contempt for the public.
You know, the interaction with the public is just something that bugs them.
Y'all ready? We're going to open the floor and I'll take anybody who's got an issue.
Harker was the driving force behind a series of public meetings his agency held
around the state to solicit views on the adequacy of environmental laws
and their enforcement.
When they start dumping their stuff, regardless of where it goes,
in the river, on the land, or wherever it be, or in the air, they should be fined.
In Calvert City, people told Harker the state was not doing enough to protect them.
But I damn sure don't think it's reasonable to expect me to live downwind or downstream
of a toxic waste or hazardous waste generator and not do something about it.
So the level of risk that you're willing to take from the involuntary exposure is apparently zero.
That's your bottom line.
We're in a real battle right now as to who's going to be in control
and who's going to call the shots.
Right now the people, I think, are losing in that dogfight for democracy.
And you just can't let the doors of government swing freely open
for industry and big business and multinational corporations
and leave the people out of it.
We have got some photographs here that were taken during the St. Louis, their visit to St. Louis.
Our plant has a large expanse of river, Tennessee River frontage here.
By fall, the Calvert Industries had a new concern.
The environmental group Greenpeace had announced it was coming to Calvert City.
News reports like these convinced the plants they should prepare for confrontation.
The Greenpeace activists came ashore in a sneak attack.
Since the late summer, Greenpeace had been moving down the Mississippi River,
staging demonstrations against industrial polluters.
They were due in Kentucky by early October.
Troops, what are you guys doing?
Since I'd been in Calvert City, a Greenpeace advance team had been organizing in the area.
One day, the team's leader, Ben Gordon, asked Jim Champion for a tour of Livingston County.
Right up here is our fifth hole.
It seemed an unlikely meeting.
The Greenpeace team was young and idealistic and had a reputation for law breaking.
Lieutenant Colonel Jim Champion was a seasoned pragmatist who had commanded combat troops in Vietnam.
Champion told me he saw Greenpeace as another asset in his battle against pollution.
I can remember I had troops in Vietnam with a big band of bombs hanging on their neck
and make love, not war, things written on their clothes, and they were some of the best killers I had.
Like I say, I'm a guerrilla fighter. I'll use any tool that's available.
The trick is knowing when to play which tool.
We have a lot of tools. We have a lab. We have direct action. We have money. We have people.
Ben Gordon's job was to plan strategy for the Greenpeace campaign against the calvert industries.
So Champion took him to survey the plants from across the river.
I'm going to make some proposals to you.
Gordon asked Champion to support the Greenpeace campaign and explained what Greenpeace was demanding from industry.
We want steady reductions. We want a timetable.
We want you to publicly say that the ultimate goal is zero discharge, even if you don't think you can get there in 100 years.
We want you to say it.
That's right. We agree. I mean, I'm having a heartburn with any of that.
You agree with that?
Sure.
Carcinogenic material released by B.F. Goodrich is approaching half a million pounds per year.
The big emitter of cancer-causing chemicals is GAF.
Ben Gordon set up Greenpeace headquarters on a farm owned by local activists.
One of his main jobs before the campaign arrived was to compile a report of the industrial wastes in Calvert City based on newly released public information.
How does the management for GAF legitimize this kind of burden on the community for a few jobs, for a paycheck?
And those ringers are almost always the last question that a reporter asks.
Another Greenpeace goal was to make local activists more effective.
At lunch one afternoon, Gordon gave a lesson about TV news.
And that's an example of giving a snappy answer to the question that doesn't end with a period but is the introduction to a longer sentence which restates your basic points.
And it takes only a few sessions with a video camera to get it down so that you're just hot, red hot.
Well, the Greenpeace deal, I think most people in the area, they felt it was kind of a threat because they'd heard, oh, you know, they've heard the reputation of Greenpeace.
You know, they fabricate a lot of stuff, you know, just like the stuff they told on us down here was all untrue.
I went with Bert Inman one morning to the brake shack at GAF where there was a lot of talk about Greenpeace.
Nearly all have health problems are related to someone who does.
Someone had a copy of an article about Calvert City Greenpeace had published in its national magazine.
Everyone was angry because the piece contained factual errors.
The region also shows the nation's highest rate of lupus, a deadly immune deficiency disorder.
Connick calls Kimberly induced AIDS.
We all got AIDS.
But behind the workers' ridicule, there was a disquieting fear the controversy might drive the plants away.
Just think of what we'd have if this plant was to leave.
Would we be in a world of hurt?
I think we've got a lot of problems, but I don't think we can do all this.
But the opposition to Greenpeace was not unanimous.
Because I'm sure these plants are not going to sit down and tell everybody, say, hey, this, you know, everybody, there's nothing coming out in the river and just leave it at that.
I'm glad there's people to check it.
There may be a little radical, but still, I'm glad there's people to check it.
It's been very obvious in talking with Ben Gordon.
He didn't know soup from nuts about chemicals.
And yet he's out here ranting and raving and causing trouble.
Not far away, plant manager Ralph Hawk was holding a meeting to discuss the Greenpeace problem.
Hawk saw Greenpeace as a genuine security threat and assigned his staff to take extra precautions.
That's where I met Joe Martusi.
Martusi told me he'd grown up in the 60s, concerned with civil rights in the Vietnam War.
At one time, he'd studied in the seminary.
He seemed an unlikely person to be making security preparations for a Greenpeace demonstration.
People working in the chemical industry have morals just like they do.
I mean, when you make an accusation of an organization, be it a GAF or an Air Products,
you're not attacking some impersonal organization.
You're attacking the people that do that work.
And essentially, they accused us of being immoral with respect to the environment.
Early in October, industry was on full alert as the Greenpeace ship, the Beluga,
led their campaign to western Kentucky.
Here in Calvert City, we've got a very large influx of chemical companies that are discharging on a minute-by-minute basis
millions of pounds of toxic waste that are feeding into the Ohio
and then eventually end up in the Mississippi in a gulf.
Ladies and gentlemen, let the games begin.
On a cool, clear morning, the Greenpeace toxic commandos began moving downriver,
towing a mysterious raft toward the industrial complex.
I don't know if you can receive me.
We are passing by D.F. Goodrich, which has now gone into a red alert,
and we're still proceeding towards intended target, honor.
I listened in on Greenpeace and industry radio communications.
Angie, come in.
Go ahead.
I've got a possibility, so I'm coming down now.
Aye.
Greenpeace towed the raft to a spot directly above GAF's submerged discharge pipe.
Industry made no move against them, but their hostility was plain.
Hey, Carter, help a maker of that thing.
Throw some of that riprap out there on it.
Don't miss and hit the guy in the head, though.
What's wrong with hitting him in the head?
What's its purpose?
It's got a pump on it and some hoses, and we can use that to bring effluent to the surface.
As the Beluga maneuvered reporters closer to the demonstration,
industry officials and police watched from shore.
Go ahead and charge them with disorderly conduct,
unless there's some damage, and then it'll be criminal mystery.
Happy birthday, GAF.
Greenpeace did not plug GAF's discharge pipe as everyone thought they would.
They told me that in conservative Kentucky,
any illegal act would obscure their goal of publicizing the discharge,
and the theatrical pump, which they called their toxic fountain,
did just that, spraying GAF's hidden discharge in the air for people to see.
It's essentially a battle over turf.
It's on social status. It's not a battle over truth.
It makes the issue very difficult to cover as a reporter.
Michael Harwood, a reporter for the New York Times, was on the Beluga,
and I listened as he talked with local journalists.
Industry, on the one hand, says there's no proof, so we'll do it.
We don't know if it's doing any harm, so we'll continue to do it.
And environmentalists on the other side, we don't know if it does any harm, so let's stop.
And they can all adduce little bits and pieces of information that support their side,
but nothing really concrete.
But as I was saying before, part of the problem is that
there's not enough money available to do the science
that would really reveal what the facts are.
And in an issue, a situation like this, where you've got hundreds
or maybe thousands of different kinds of compounds coming into the river at one time,
how do you do deliberate science
that demonstrates clearly a connection between A, B, and C?
Man the bird! Man the bird!
As the climax of their visit to Calvert City, Greenpeace organized a protest march.
Hundreds of people from as far away as Atlanta came to join local activists in the demonstration.
It's all, you know, the same planet.
I mean, just because we're not experiencing the particular problems that are happening in Calvert City
doesn't mean that we don't have, you know, experiences in our own backyard.
Man the bird! Man the bird!
The target of the march was a company called LWD.
Like the other companies, LWD seemed prepared for an assault.
Before the march, I'd seen workers installing electronic security devices.
And now, several men were perched on cranes and catwalks videotaping the crowd.
We say, start today, clean it up, close it down.
It's killing us.
There's only one firm around here that we feel has to lead, and that's this one.
My political feelings are to the right of Attila the Hun.
I am not a liberal. I'm a conservative, extreme conservative, but I march with liberal.
And I'm here with you, shoulder to shoulder, do we clean this mess up.
The rhetoric at the march was the most intense I'd heard during my stay.
In Calvert City, the fear about LWD runs deep.
LWD stands for Liquid Waste Disposal.
The company operates incinerators that burn the hazardous waste from the Calvert chemical plants.
In recent years, as regulations on disposal of hazardous waste have tightened,
companies like LWD have become indispensable to the chemical industry.
But when LWD began importing hazardous waste from around the country,
people on both sides of the environmental issue here began to worry.
The only thing that concerns me really about the plants down here, all this area, is the LWD deal.
I'm not sure I like the idea of them bringing stuff in here from everywhere and burning it.
That kind of upsets me to a point.
The rest of those plants, I believe in my own mind, if they would, and they'd apply themselves a little bit,
could clean up their act and they'd be good neighbors and I'd be proud to have them over there.
I don't see a set of circumstances where LWD could exist, co-exist with me in this environment.
Much of the fear about LWD seemed to come from the secrecy that surrounded the plant's operations.
Citizens could not find out what was being shipped, burned, or buried there.
Claiming trade secrets, LWD had been able to keep virtually all information about its business locked away in government files.
So I took my questions to LWD's general manager, who was also the mayor of Calvert City.
What would you say to them to put their mind more at ease about what's happening at LWD, about the incineration of hazardous waste?
I'm not going to respond to just LWD.
The mayor evaded my questions and told me to talk to LWD's owner.
But at the plant, the answer was no interview and no comment.
During my months in Calvert City, I heard a lot of stories about LWD, stories which made its mysteries even greater.
If it wasn't being completely incinerated, it would fall on our area over there.
Hardy Williams works at another plant near LWD.
He told me about one night several years ago when smoke from the incinerator blew in his direction.
One time the windshield on my truck, the glass was etched.
I also heard stories about what might have been buried near the incinerator, even before LWD existed.
What landfill?
That's right under LWD's buildings. That's where all this stuff is.
These oodles of it on our fellow had drilled down there, you'd find it.
Don Harker of the state's Environmental Protection Agency was hearing the same stories I was, and he began to investigate for himself.
We'd be, I think, kidding the public and kidding ourselves if we really believed that we know what has been going on at that incinerator. We don't.
As I was nearing the end of my stay in Calvert City, I finally got inside LWD's gates when its owner, Amos Shelton, agreed to talk with me.
There's no way to operate in this business without being right.
You have to comply to the laws.
Amos Shelton told me he'd grown up poor in rural Kentucky, but he'd done well in the past 10 years since he started LWD.
Now, he says, he's the largest local investor in the county, employing 200 people.
As he guided me on a tour of LWD, his operation appeared neat and efficient. Men in white suits, well-kept grounds and buildings, and a landfill covered with green grass on which he'd built a golf course.
What's after the landfill, a country club? Just one of the sales tools, a way to leave a neat, nice impression.
But Shelton let me see only limited parts of the incinerator, and as I began to ask more questions about the operation, his answers were often vague.
The secrecy, he said, was because he'd developed a lot of new technology that could be stolen by competitors.
So you go through this preparing thing, and then you start running your stuff.
But he did show me LWD's lab, where I asked him how he knew for sure what he was burning.
We don't accept, do, or handle nothing unless we know what we're handling, 100 percent.
So it ain't no, fuck you, buddy, come through the goddamn front door, remember that.
He didn't like my question, and my tour that day ended there in the lab.
Hard information about LWD was difficult to find, but I was able to talk privately to several former LWD employees.
This man would only speak anonymously, saying he feared retribution. Like the others, he questioned the practices of LWD.
I really didn't know, you know, what it was. You know, when I first come in there, and after, say, I'd been there six months, I found out by talking and stuff like that, that it was wrong.
But this man says he did what he was ordered to do, dumping hazardous residues from the incinerator on the land nearby.
Kentucky law says that kind of dumping is a felony.
I was dumping ash, and he told me, anybody catch you doing that, I don't know nothing about it.
Lots of times I think, you know, I shouldn't be doing this, you know. I also note if I went up and, you know, told the foreman, hey, we shouldn't be doing this, it's illegal.
I wouldn't be there the next day.
LWD denies that they illegally dumped any hazardous waste.
I was also able to obtain this confidential report of a federal audit of LWD's 1985 records.
The audit concluded that LWD could not account for almost six million pounds of hazardous waste it took in that year.
And LWD's record showed it had burned waste too quickly, which could release toxins into the air.
The report also questioned the authenticity of LWD's records, noting, for example, that the company said it had burned waste on nonexistent days of the year, like February 31st and November 31st.
How are you kept accountable? How does state and federal government keep you and LWD accountable?
Through our reporting our records and our inspections and across their site inspections, they can see that we are accountable.
They do not have to keep us accountable. We are accountable because by choice, not by force.
If the dollar was the only thing that motivated me, I could do real well, cut and leave, and leave the community with a tremendous problem.
I live here. My family lives here. We're very responsible. My family works in there. My children work when I turn that plant.
And I haven't killed anybody yet. And I haven't got up and bragged to meetings about how many people I have killed.
I try not to kill anyone.
The reality is it would be nice to trust Amos Shelton. It would be nice to trust anybody who's going to operate a hazardous waste incinerator.
But I think the reality is we have to build permits and monitoring systems so that we don't have to take anybody's word for anything.
In the last year, Don Harker fined LWD $100,000 for failing to adequately answer the state's questions about its operation.
And the Kentucky Attorney General began a criminal investigation into the practices at LWD.
Almost all the people I met during my five months in Calvert City told me they wanted to know the truth about their town.
But in Calvert City, the truth is that no one, not the industrialists, the environmentalists, the regulators, or the scientists,
has enough knowledge to be certain what will happen to Calvert City.
And so for the people here, the truth they are left with is the truth they choose to believe.
What is the truth about Calvert City?
The truth is that Calvert City is a small community with residents who express traditional values,
who love their neighbors, who have a great love for their town, and want the very best for it.
The truth is that Calvert City pollutes a hell of a lot, and that they don't have to, and that local industry is not taking steps
to solve this problem with any great gusto. In fact, they're hardly taking any steps at all.
Our society, I believe, has said by its own actions, you know, we're going to have certain things and we're going to do certain things.
And since we do that and we have those, we're going to have a problem with pollution.
It's not something that got invented in Calvert City.
Next month, federal and state environmental agencies in Kentucky are expected to begin a comprehensive environmental audit
of the water, soil, and air around Calvert City.
This unprecedented study of an industrial complex will take three years to complete.
Thank you for joining us. I'm Judy Woodruff. Good night.
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