Political Marginalization, Protest, and PCBs: Double Diversion in Warren County

In the middle of a July night in 1978, trucks owned by Ward Transformer Company drove down the dark highways of North Carolina pouring out thousands of gallons of highly contaminated transformer oil as they went. This continued for months, unbeknownst to anyone besides the company, and the oil seeped down into the soil, running into groundwater and nearby lakes. Polychlorinated biphenyls (PCB), one of the most abundant and toxic chemicals in the waste, is known to cause various cancers, birth defects, liver and skin disorders. By the time the dumping had been discovered, the residents of Warren County, North Carolina were already at risk of feeling these effects.

The Toxic Substance Control Act was passed just two years prior in 1976 following the illnesses from toxic waste in Love Canal to prevent similar environmental disasters. It mandated that these soils had to be removed and landfilled to prevent further contamination and health impacts to the nearby communities, and the North Carolina government decided Afton would be the site. Afton is a small town in southwest Warren County that had traditionally lacked political capital. In 1980, the census reported that 59% of the population was black and 30% lived below the federal poverty line. The residents grew fearful of damages they could suffer, especially as there had been no research into health or environmental impacts a landfill could have on the town prior to the decision to place it in Afton.

The social dynamics of this event can be better understood looking through the lens of a double diversion. A double diversion is a phenomenon in environmental sociology described by William Freudenburg as the interaction between two factors. The first is disproportionate access to environmental rights and the second is attention. These come together to allow certain actors with greater access to environmental rights to divert attention away from themselves and control narratives surrounding environmental damages. Privileged groups that benefit from double diversion are able to craft privileged accounts — stories that they tell again and again so often that they obscure unequal resource use to be little more than a fact of life that should go unquestioned. In a paper from early in the next year, Freudenburg clarified his conception of a double diversion to relate directly to instances of environmental injustice. He talks of how environmental injustice issues have raised awareness of disproportionality of not only environmental harms, but also of the ability to produce environmental harms, and that these “status-quo inequalities will be maintained ‘mainly by ideological power, secondarily by political and economic power…’” .

Ward Transformer Company took a privileged position in their access to both attention and environmental rights. Though involved parties were shortly jailed, they still largely did not deal with the fallout of their actions. Instead, the damages were shifted onto uninvolved communities. It is the disproportionate access to environmental rights that allowed Ward Transformer Company to begin this process in the first place. Rather than comply with existing waste disposal laws that would have had an initial cost of implementation, executives felt confident enough that they would be able to illegally dispose of transformer oil without repercussions that it was worth it to do that instead. An assumption that their economic success would equate to political power and immunity propelled a decision to bypass proper disposals to cut costs. After their release and fines, the employees of Ward Transformer who did not live in the area were not at risk of harm and were able to resume their operations with only a stain on their reputations.

On the other hand, the people of Afton were facing an immediate threat. They did not know how deep the contaminants had already sunken into their soils or if it had entered the water they had to drink, and the government was planning to bring even more toxic waste into the city. Reverend Bill Kearney, a local church leader, told filmmaker Pavithrain Vasudevan in 2012 of the overwhelming fear citizens felt every day. Tasks as simple as washing hands, brushing teeth, or grabbing a midnight glass of water felt as dangerous as handling arsenic. The crux of the objection to the landfill was the potential impacts it could have on the health of those living in close proximity to the site. As stated above, PCBs can have immense detrimental human health effects and citizens were rightfully concerned that there had virtually no research on this before Governor Jim Hunt announced the landfill. Scientists pointed toward the shallow water table as a clear indicator that the site would be prone to leakage into local water supplies and called for a reevaluation of the decision, but were denied. In order to get the government to pay attention to these concerns, citizens organized and sought further help from experts to validate their concerns. Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs was formed in 1979 and began to cite existing research and conduct door to door surveying to make a credible argument about the danger they were being placed in without proper justification. The group sought to meet with Governor Hunt to voice their discontent but was not given this seat at the table.

Ken Ferruccio, the leader of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs, is quoted as saying “The trend is very clear. They would rather experiment with poor black people, poor white people, than to experiment with the middle and upper classes…The regulations are such that allow landfills to be placed in environmentally unsafe, but politically powerless areas.” The citizens of Afton had historically been left out of political decisions in favor of catering to the interests of wealthier populations. They were seeing the impacts of a lack of environmental rights potentially at the cost of their health and safety. Clearly, the diversion of attention was not in Afton’s favor, as the state government determined this town would host the landfill with no clear reasoning, leaving residents to believe it could only be their demographics and political marginalization. Instead of taking the impacts in silence and allowing a privileged account to prevail, residents mobilized. Led by community and church leaders, the residents of Afton and surrounding towns turned out by the hundreds to protest by the early 1980s.

Before the onset of the protests, the government of North Carolina benefitted from a part of the double diversion. With the authority to make and enforce environmental laws and regulations, and in this instance, to site a landfill, the government is responsible for the allocation of access to many environmental rights. It also often helps to publicize and control narratives surrounding such issues. When it was first determined the landfill would be brought to Afton, a government official was quoted as saying it would be placed and constructed “regardless of public sentiment.” The enforcement of the status quo, like Freudenburg says, is done through the use of political and ideological power. In order to maintain this power, government officials seek legitimacy often in the form of reelection. Giving Afton residents the short end of the stick by siting the landfill was anticipated to cause less of a political stir. They believed their ability to maintain power hinged on the support of wealthy constituents and industry and they would be able to shape the narrative. Under the guise of compliance with established law, the government sought to preserve the rule of industry and the privileged at the cost of the health and safety of those historically marginalized.

The conflict in Warren County was not the product of an isolated incident, but a result of multiple underlying issues within the governance structure of the 1980s. Existing command and control regulations emphasized the state’s job to set and enforce environmental standards. However, the government was and continues to be limited in monitoring the enforcement of environmental policies. In the case of Warren County, companies responsible for contamination were not immediately met with sanctions, proving the constraints of state-centered governance. Additionally, the corruption embedded in both the state and markets allowed actors to ignore the rights of community members. By overlooking the people’s rights, the state was able to diminish its burden of monitoring while freeing companies from implementing costly adjustments.

But after years of being overlooked, the citizens would not be silenced. Nearly 500 people were arrested in peaceful protests following the model of the recent Civil Rights Movement as they refused to accept the narrative of a necessary evil of a landfill from the government. They gained public support and through litigation and continued efforts, they stalled the landfill’s creation for four additional years while studies on health and environmental impacts that residents demanded were conducted. Through community action, activists forced the government to recognize the credibility of community concerns and crafted legislation accordingly. In 1983, North Carolina passed a bill requiring records of landfill contents to track the associated environmental hazards. This legislation was the first step towards meeting community concerns on environmental toxins. The landfill was eventually constructed, but its size was smaller than proposed and the government promised to convert the site to a recreational facility once it was deemed free of toxicity. The citizens of Warren County were able to overcome the impacts of double diversion and oppression that should have benefitted the government and the corporation that caused the harms. And in doing so, they set forward a lasting legacy that grew into the environmental justice movement.

In line with their now generational practice of demanding representation and accountability, Warren County’s community leaders have been consistently pursuing local initiatives aimed at building community and economic resilience by aiming to establish more collaborative methods of governance. Citizens Advisory Board began this process in the early 1990s when it was founded as a working group within the state government. The Board worked with state officials to conduct investigations and study detoxification methods to treat the waste in the landfill. Following 25 years of monitoring and negotiating, they unanimously declared that the PCB site is “clean.” This is a clear win, but the community is still seeking to close the landfill and revitalize it as a community park.

Activists in Warren County are still working to combat the remaining environmental justice issues. Churches maintain their place as trailblazers who lead the charge toward developing economic resiliency. The United Shiloh Missionary Baptist Association (USMBA), a four-county church association is beginning to develop a solar farm that would be responsible for the creation of nearly 100 new jobs, both for initial construction and for long term maintenance. The association plans to sell all energy produced to Duke Energy and to reinvest the revenue into the community. The USMBA is working hard to reclaim a voice that has been stolen from them time and time again and to give Warren County political capital without compromising their commitment to community.

The problems faced by the citizens of Afton were not, and are not, unique. In 2010, the number of hazardous sites in areas with a majority of non-white residents was more than double the number in predominantly white affluent neighborhoods. The struggle for environmental rights is on in communities every day. Last year alone, contaminated water sickened approximately one billion people primarily in low income areas. People above the poverty line are 1.3 times more likely to have long-term exposure to particulate emissions linked to various cancers and degenerative cardiac diseases, and even more so, black people are 1.5 times more likely than white people to have long-term exposure. Non-white children are twice as likely as white children to be diagnosed with asthma and early onset heart disease.

Warren County contrasts the notion of a double diversion in that the privileged were not victorious. Despite government attempts to shape the narrative and Ward Transformer Company’s assumption that industry was too powerful to be held accountable, citizens and activists would not accept their denial of rights. It is this persistence and commitment to fighting for what is just that has led scholars to cite the Warren County protests as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement. Afton serves as a beacon of hope that if shouted loud enough, change for the better is possible. Reverend Kearny was asked once what it is he imagines that kept him pushing to demand justice through all the hardship Warren County experienced: “I think about when I was a kid, and how we used to frolic through the woods. In the spring we’d go through branches and streams, we’d find those little crayfish, tadpoles, the frogs, mussels, all the life in the water.” And like Reverend Kearney, communities at risk keep the legacy of Afton alive, dreaming of and fighting for the day they can head into the world safely and worry free, “aware of the life around [us] and the importance of it.”