Monsanto Hid PCB Pollution for Decades

[MORTARDUDE]

Question : Do you want a company like this to have a monopoly on genetically engineered food and seeds ?


http://www.organicconsumers.org/monsanto/pcbs010702.cfm

( rest of the article is on the website )

Monsanto Hid PCB Pollution for
Decades

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn...2001Dec31.html
Monsanto Hid Decades Of Pollution
PCBs Drenched Ala. Town, But No One Was Ever Told

By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, January 1, 2002; Page A01

The Model City
The Company Committee
The Reluctant Regulators
The Dredged-Up Past


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.

Lastmonth, 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
doublenegative 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."