INDEX PCB Digest - 2/18/02
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1) PCT - Press Release - February 17, 2002
PCB Battle Spills Over Into Quebec
2) The Toronto Star - Sunday, February 17, 2002 -
Section B, Page 1
Monsanto's PCB scandal
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1) PCT - Press Release - February 17, 2002
PCB Battle Spills Over Into Quebec
Thornloe– Over 60 people from Northeastern
Ontario and Northwestern Quebec attended an organizing meeting in
Temiskaming this afternoon to form a joint coalition against a
proposed international PCB waste incinerator.
The meeting, held in the farming village of Thornloe,
was the first official meeting between Quebec and Ontario activists
in the effort to stop the Bennett incinerator from going ahead. If
approved, the incinerator would be the largest of its kind in Canada.
The company is looking to use the site to burn contaminated materials
from the U.S. and Mexico. .
David Martineau and Lise Chartrand, who are members of
Union Paysanne, a Quebec agricultural organization, told the crowd
that their organization would turn the Bennett fight into a national issue.
“We will be organizing through our villages,”
Ms. Chartrand told the crowd. “We will work with national
organizations. We will not let you down. We will fight this to the end.”
Union Paysanne told the crowd it has been meeting with
Quebec politicians and provincial organizations to organize against
the cross-border threat of potential PCB and dioxin contamination.
The region, on both sides of the Ontario/Quebec border, is heavily
dependent on a $100 million a year agricultural industry. The threat
posed by dioxin to agriculture is well established. In 1999, a mere
50 milligrams of dioxin contamination caused billions of dollars
worth of damage to the Belgian farming industry.
Charlie Angus, speaking for Public Concern
Temiskaming, told the crowd the dioxin threat was worse than they imagined.
“Bennett Environmental has told residents of
Northern Ontario not to worry about dioxins,” said Angus.
“And yet they are telling U.S. investors that they are actively
seeking out dioxin-contaminated sites. The people of this region have
a right to know that we are being set up as a dumping ground to burn
dioxin-contaminated materials from the U.S.”
Both the Quebec and Northern Ontario organizations
left the meeting with the pledge to work closely with each other and
with First Nations to beat the Bennett proposal
For more information:
Charlie Angus (705) 679-5533 / (705) 648-5784
David Martineau (819) 761-2177
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2) The Toronto Star - Sunday, February 17, 2002 -
Section B, Page 1
Monsanto's PCB scandal
Dirt-poor residents seek compensation in Alabama town
that was secretly poisoned for decades
William Walker
WASHINGTON BUREAU
ANNISTON, Ala. HER ARMS ARE folded tightly, hands
clenched beneath her armpits, as she peers warily through the screen
door at the stranger talking to her son.
Johnny Hanvey has just wrenched his head out from
under the gas pedal of the pickup truck he's trying to fix on the
front lawn of the family's sagging clapboard bungalow.
Across the street, white plumes of smoke billow from
the old Monsanto factory, now part of the giant biotechnology
conglomerate's Solutia Inc. pharmaceutical division, behind a
barbed-wire fence ominously marked, "Danger."
Finally, Jura Hanvey, frail at 79, toddles out
gingerly, wrapped in a red bathrobe, her hair finally grown back
after chemotherapy.
"Are you here about Monsanto?" she asks, her
eyes suddenly alight. "I hope someone does something about that Monsanto.
"I lost a breast to cancer, I've had open-heart
surgery and now I have acute asthma. They don't do anything to help
me. Now, I've got to go see three different doctors."
Johnny Hanvey knows how lucky his mother is to be
alive, given the almost unbelievable circumstances of Monsanto's
decades-long role in secretly turning this would-be-picturesque rural
Alabama town into one of the worst environmental disasters in America.
Anniston (pop. 45,000) sits among rolling hills in
eastern Alabama, almost halfway between Birmingham and Atlanta. It
seems quaintly frozen in time. "Cowboys" is the popular gas
station, "Good Hearted Bob's" is the car dealership and
eateries boast of "genuine BBQ."
From 1935 to 1972, Monsanto manufactured
polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) at its Anniston plant.
Documents show that Monsanto knew as early as the
1950s that PCBs were a toxic danger, but that the company skilfully
hid that evidence from residents, all the while dumping PCB waste
— sometimes more than 110 kilograms of it a day — into two
huge unlined landfill sites near the Hanveys' neighbourhood.
The company stopped making PCBs, once widely used as
industrial coolants and electrical insulators, only because it knew
Washington was going to ban their manufacture because of safety
concerns, as the government finally did in 1979.
For years now, Monsanto's landfills have leached PCBs,
lead and mercury into Anniston's streams and soil. One of the
landfills is on a hillside, gravity helping the factory's
contaminants to drain toward the area's modest homes whenever it rains.
Anniston's rising cancer rate, although never studied
scientifically, is often measured by the growing number of tombstones
and abandoned houses.
The story could be a sequel to the Academy
Award-winning movie Erin Brockovich, except it's missing the
people's-advocate title character.
Instead, small groups of town residents are getting
together to seek compensation on a piecemeal basis through the
courts, while little is being done to effect a comprehensive cleanup
of Anniston's toxic swamp.
The federal Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)
joined the fray just three years ago, at the urging of local
residents. It took more than 2,500 water and soil samples from 800
locations in west Anniston and lab results showed there were
"elevated levels of PCBs, lead and other hazardous substances."
In many cases, the PCB levels were hundreds of times
higher than the federal limit.
The EPA concluded that its tests, along with those
conducted by Alabama agencies, "have determined that the PCB
contamination is attributable to the operations of the former
Monsanto plant."
Scientists confirm that PCBs can cause cancer,
neurological disorders, reproductive problems, immune-system
depression, developmental problems in children, liver damage and skin irritation.
Critics of the genetically modified food industry see
the Anniston story as a cautionary tale, since Monsanto is one of the
multinational corporations now asking the world to accept its word
that GM food crops are safe.
In Anniston, records show, Monsanto had some crucial
information about food safety but hid it.
"I've done my talking," says Ruth Mims,
opening the door of her frame house on McDanial St., one of the most
contaminated streets in one of America's most contaminated towns.
"Y'all are welcome to come in, but it's time for someone else to talk."
After Mims testified at a jury trial last spring on
behalf of a group of 1,600 plaintiffs, Monsanto's lawyers had heard
enough. Rather than leave compensation in the hands of the jury, they
sought a recess and immediately settled out of court.
Back in 1970, the jury was told, Monsanto suddenly
wanted to purchase Mims' hogs, which sometimes strayed from her
backyard on to company property.
What Mims didn't know then was that her hogs had
tested 90,000 times the legal limit for PCBs. No one ever told her.
"I used to eat them hogs!" Mims told the court.
Many of her neighbours in this dirt-poor community
also fished for dinner from the area's two creeks, which were
horribly contaminated with PCBs, lead and mercury.
Monsanto had known this since 1966, when a scientist
hired by the company dropped 25 perfectly healthy fish into Snow
Creek and observed their behaviour.
Within 10 seconds, none of the fish could swim and in
less than four minutes they were all dead, many having shed their skins.
In Anniston's larger Choccolocco Creek, one fish, a
blacktail shiner, was found to have 37,800 parts per million of PCBs,
when the legal limit was 5 parts per million.
Even worse, while Monsanto hid what it knew for
decades, Anniston residents believed the rich, red-clay soil of their
hometown contained nutrients. They would form the clay into patties,
bake them and eat them.
"I think most everyone in that neighbourhood ate
clay dirt. Once you'd start eating it, you came to crave it,"
Mims testified in that first jury trial.
And almost everyone in west Anniston spent the long,
hot summer months growing tomatoes, vegetables and greens in their
backyards, hundreds of which are now known to have highly dangerous
levels of PCBs and lead.
Last spring, Mims and her fellow plaintiffs settled
for about $40 million (U.S.) — a pittance, considering the
billions it would cost the company to clean up its damage to Anniston.
After lawyers' fees, the settlement meant about
$18,000 for Mims, less than the amount her now-unsaleable house has
devalued. And no amount of money could help ease the memory of two
sisters dead from cancer, a third sister who lost both breasts to
cancer and six of her 13 siblings who died during their childhoods.
In the modern courthouse 30 minutes up the highway in
Gadsen, another 3,500 plaintiffs are now in court with Monsanto in a
new attempt for compensation.
Monsanto may have settled with Mims' group, but with
this new case in court and another 15,000 plaintiffs having filed
suit in a case to be heard next year, the company is fighting against
having to pay millions more in damages.
In Gadsen, the eight women and seven men of the jury
listen to harrowing testimony from plaintiffs.
When her doctor informed her that her blood was rife
with PCBs, 81-year-old Annie Bea Brown told the court, it "made
me think what in the world happened to me with all this stuff going
around in my body."
Testified 70-year-old Hassie Taylor: "We do not
know what it will do to us. I worry about my life savings. Sometimes,
I wake up at 3 o'clock in the morning and just lay there."
A woman slumped on a mahogany bench in the court's
visitors' gallery, a plaintiff who can't be identified here because
she was speaking outside the courtroom, said she'd just been to
hospital for a biopsy because her doctor suspects she has cancer.
Monsanto lawyer Jere White told the jury that,
regarding these 3,500 plaintiffs, the company sees "no reason
for them to worry about getting sick."
Donald Stewart, lawyer for the plaintiffs, told the
jury it's clear Monsanto knew for decades about the problem it was
causing — Harvard scientists linked PCBs to health hazards in
the late 1930s — but did virtually nothing. Instead, he said,
the company put "profits before safety."
White countered that Monsanto had taken
"responsible action" and that there'd been "no harm done."
To take the Erin Brockovich analogy one step further,
White accused the plaintiffs' lawyer of giving a "movie
version" of what took place in Anniston over the years.
But Stewart had just begun.
He told of a hog found dead by Monsanto decades ago
atop the hillside landfill dump and of company tests that showed the
animal was off-the-charts high for PCB levels.
The hog's owner, now one of the plaintiffs in the
Gadsen case, has sworn a statement that someone from Monsanto came to
his house and offered him a bottle of whisky and $25 a head for his
remaining hogs, which the company allegedly killed and buried without
telling anyone about the test results.
In fact, a closer look at Monsanto's own documents
tells the story of a company that tried at every turn to minimize the
release of public information on pollution dangers it knew about at
its Anniston plant.
They also show that Monsanto took shortcuts on
abatement measures and that company officials vowed not to lose
"one dollar" of profits.
Last month, Monsanto's St. Louis-based president,
Hendrik Verfaillie, told Associated Press that the company he leads
has nothing to do with the past.
"We want to be seen as a new company with new
management and new behaviour and we want to be disassociated as much
as possible with whatever happened in the past and the
chemicals," he said. "That's not where we are focused.
That's not what we are trying to accomplish."
Verfaillie said his company is more open these days
and has established a "Monsanto Pledge" committing it to
dialogue and transparency.
"Before, we would do all these studies and we
would keep them in a vault and we would not communicate anything
about it," he said.
Indeed. The Washington-based Environmental Working
Group has released 4,000 pages of internal Monsanto documents, many
of them marked, "HIGHLY CONFIDENTIAL." The pages were
obtained through trial exhibits, court pleadings and legal discovery
documents. They tell a stunning story.
One 1975 memo from a company employee to his superior
stated: "We have no information relating to the effects of PCBs
on the people in the areas surrounding our producing facility. We
have no programs underway at present to study these effects."
There's no doubt that Monsanto knew all about PCBs and
their risks. A 1971 memo between company executives stated: "I
can say that we have probably the world's best reference file on the
PCB situation. This includes reprints from the literature beginning
in 1936 to reports issued last week."
As early as 1951, Monsanto officials knew Aroclors,
the brand name for the company's PCBs, were not safe.
"As I am sure you know, Aroclors cannot be
considered non-toxic," one company official wrote in a memo.
By 1955, Monsanto had decided to try to protect its
workers, but not its Anniston neighbours.
"It is the opinion of the medical
department," a 1955 memo stated, "that the eating of
lunches should not be allowed in this department. Early literature
work claimed that chlorinated biphenyls were quite toxic. ... In any
case where a workman claimed physical harm from any contaminated
food, it would be extremely difficult on the basis of past literature
reports to counter such claims."
A 1958 memo showed the company's position on mandatory
labelling: The company would "comply with the minimum and not
give any unnecessary information which could very well damage our
sales position."
Six years later, responding to new labelling
requirements, a memo urged a "very minimum precautionary statement."
By 1970, Monsanto was bunkered down, trying to fight
off growing fears about PCBs and protect its profits of $22 million
(U.S.) in worldwide sales.
"We can't afford to lose one dollar of
business," a 1970 company memo stated. "Our attitude in
discussing this subject with our customers will be the deciding
factor in our success or failure in retaining all our present business."
A memo sent in 1976, four years after Monsanto ceased
producing PCBs and was worried about legal liability, shows the
company had turned to a strategy of denial. "Avoid any comments
that suggest liability; avoid any medical questions if possible; do
not offer information," the memo states. "If a question
comes up, say our development work was shelved."
Unlike the $500 million PCB-dredging operation that
the EPA ordered General Electric to provide for New York's Hudson
River — or even the true story of California's Pacific Gas and
Electric, on which the Brockovich movie was based — Monsanto
likely has evaded a large-scale cleanup order. And that's due, at
least in part, to Alabama's lax attitude on environmental matters.
In the last decade, while state environmental
agencies' budgets across the U.S. increased by an average of 140 per
cent, Alabama's environmental budget was cut back.
Meanwhile, city officials in Anniston have long
favoured a pro-business attitude in order to create much-needed jobs.
Even today, they continue to play down the area's toxic problems.
"To me, the real story here is that Alabama has
such weak environmental laws and they've always sacrificed them for
job creation," says west Anniston resident Keith Howland, a
Chicago native who came here 14 years ago with his Alabama bride.
"The local chamber of commerce and local
government have done a very good job of minimizing this because it's
bad for business. ... It's the `good old boys' syndrome that has
become so obvious to me living here since 1988.
"These guys just keep covering each other's butts
all the time. It's dirty government and bad business. We're 70 years
behind the times in terms of government and environmental policy."
Cheryl Smith just looks sad about it all as she stands
outside her mother's house, two doors down from Mims' on McDanial St.
and next to one of many abandoned, ransacked houses that have become
garbage dumps of tin cans and animal feces.
Smith agrees that the money her mother, and Mims,
accepted in last spring's settlement seemed like a lot at the time.
But now, she says, "I'm not satisfied at all.
Personally, I think Monsanto pulled a fast one on us. There was a lot
of double-talk done.
"Myself, I'm not familiar with how the legal
system works, but I think we could have gotten compensated more than
we did. Especially as seeing that we know more information now as far
as contamination goes."
Smith's family has a history of asthma, cancer,
arthritis, kidney and liver disease.
"I think personally there was a lot of stuff that
we weren't aware of," she says. "I feel we were shortchanged."
At the Kelley-Steadman American Legion hall, Post 312,
in west Anniston, one of the few enterprises still operating in the
neighbourhood, Harold and two of his buddies are sitting at the bar,
sipping on half-pint bottles of Jack Daniels bourbon and cans of malt liquor.
Harold, whose parents both died of cancer, has lived
in west Anniston his entire life, except for his stint in the U.S.
Marines, when he spent eight months fighting in Vietnam.
He doesn't want his last name used because he's
working with a lawyer on a future group lawsuit against Monsanto.
"Sometimes," Harold says, staring blankly
into his drink, "I think nothing has happened to solve all of
this, because what you have here is a poor black neighbourhood.
"You could call it politics. If this keeps
dragging on, most of the people in this neighbourhood will be dead
before anything happens to clean this mess up."
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