The EPA chose this county for a toxic dump because its residents were ‘few, black, and poor’
Warren County mobilized a remarkable resistance movement
Looking to skirt costly new environmental laws, the Ward Transformer Company began dumping toxic waste along the shoulders of North Carolina roads in 1978. From June to August, a team of men used the cover of night to spray transformer oil — laced with hazardous chemicals such as dioxin, dibenzofurans, and polychorinated biphenyls (PCBs) — onto the ground, polluting lakes, farmland, and groundwater. In final tally, some 31,000 gallons of transformer oil were dumped, contaminating 60,000 tons of earth along 240 miles of highway.
Ironically, the toxic dumping travesty in Warren County, North Carolina, owed its existence to a separate environmental disaster. The same year Robert Ward and Robert Burns began dumping their waste along the highway, the town of Love Canal, New York made headlines as its citizens fell ill from the toxic landfill beneath their feet. Reacting to the crisis, in August, 1978, President Jimmy Carter declared Love Canal a disaster area, and the EPA moved to prevent a similar catastrophe from happening again.
It was this subsequent regulation — which made toxic waste disposal more expensive — that the surreptitious dumpers were looking to avoid. Robert Burns and his sons released the valves of tanker trucks to spray tens of thousands of gallons of waste along tracts of highway in 14 counties. The oil left dark stripes on the grass, generating the swift attention of law enforcement. The dumpers, as well as company owner Robert Ward, were briefly jailed and fined under the new Toxic Substance Control Act, drafted in the wake of the Love Canal disaster. That same law also stipulated that the soil, contaminated by an abundance of PCBs, had to be put in a landfill.
Where does one put a heap of toxic earth, laced with a chemical reputed to cause birth defects, skin and liver problems, and cancer? The state decided on the politically neglected Warren County, North Carolina— the population of which was 65 percent black. It ranked 97th of 100 for GDP by county statewide. As of the 1970 census, 40 percent of the county’s homes lacked indoor plumbing.
A public hearing on the Warren County landfill was held in January, 1979. Around 800 people attended to protest the dump site, which residents worried would pollute the water and deter new investment in what was an already vulnerable local economy. Governor Jim Hunt’s administration was unfazed, and one official that the construction of the landfill would continue, “regardless of public sentiment.”
Residents and sympathizers opposed the Warren County landfill for nearly four years. They suggested an already active chemical waste site in Emelle, Alabama, but shipping contaminated soil there was estimated to cost $8.8 million. Reverend Joseph Lowry called it “an assault on the life and dignity of the citizens of Warren County.” Organizations and community leaders, including the NAACP and a black Baptist church, mounted a lawsuit against the dump, which they argued chose the town of Afton because its residents were “few, black, and poor.”
‘’These folks believe that they’re fighting for their lives, more so now than ever,’’ said Ken Ferrucio, the president of a 400-member group established to fight the PCB disposal site. ‘’People believe that PCB’s are just the beginning. That’s what frightens them.’’
But the state yielded little. And when a delegation from the community visited Washington to meet with the EPA, where they discovered that the agency was actually working to loosen requirements about a landfill’s proximity to groundwater to enable the dump’s construction. Governor Jim Hunt had also loosened state laws concerning public hearings, which were required to precede major civil projects.
In 1982, the EPA Superfund, headed by Anne Gorsuch Burford (mother of Supreme Court nominee Neil Gorsuch), allocated $2.5 million to create the Warren County landfill. Workers were to scrape up soil along the roads in three-inch-deep, thirty-inch-wide tracts, turning up enough to fill 10,000 truckloads. In late summer, the project officially began.
Even before the first trucks rolled in the atmosphere was tense. In August, a vandal used a knife to cut a slice into the plastic liner of the dump site. Taking it as a promise of violence, the state assigned 200 patrol officers to the area and put the National Guard on alert.
But protesters were almost entirely peaceful. They marched and held signs asking for the protection of their community. Many lay on the road to prevent the trucks from dispatching their loads of PCB-laden soil. High-profile names, like Walter E. Fauntroy, chairman of the Congressional Black Caucus, were among the protesters taken into police custody. Ken Ferrucino, president of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCB, was arrested, and staged a 19-day hunger strike in prison. During the six weeks of protest, police arrested over 500 people.
The protest efforts did not stop the landfill’s construction, but they did, in 1982, lead to the election of local black officials, as well as galvanize the cause of environmental injustice. Duke University’s student newspaper called the protest “the largest civil disobedience in the South since Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., marched through Alabama.” It tied black leaders, especially in the case of the Congressional Black Caucus, to the cause of toxic waste disposal, which almost always affected poor communities, and often impacted African American ones.
Following the impetus set by the Warren County protests, in 1987 the United Church for Christ released a report detailing how minority communities bear the brunt of hazardous chemical sites. It found three out of every five African Americans and Hispanics live in a community housing toxic waste, and confirmed the intuitive conclusion that the government was most likely to dispose of dangerous materials in poor and politically marginalized neighborhoods. As the issue of environmental justice gained traction, in 1994 President Bill Clinton signed an executive order requiring the federal government to account for the harm posed to minority communities by new hazmat disposal sites. With Warren County, environmentalism became not just about whales, or acid rain, or holes in the ozone, but also about people protecting their own homes.
