The tiny community of Afton in Warren County was at the center of a big environmental mess in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s, when the state bought up some land to build a landfill to store hazardous waste.
That hazardous waste was a PCB-laced oil, a product that had been used for decades to help cool electric transformers. When the chemical was declared illegal because of health implications, the companies that used it had to have somewhere for it to go, said local historian Mark Pace.
Under the cover of darkness, trucks drove along rural roads in out-of-the-way counties like Warren and dumped the oily substance along the roadsides. More than 200 miles of roads in Warren County had that familiar brown grass – dead grass – where the PCB-laced oil had been sprayed.
There were some spots in Franklin County, too, that were affected. WIZS’s Bill Harris said he remembers riding the school bus as a teenager and seeing the brown grass along the side of the road.
Harris and Pace talked about the protests that ensued, as the state went head-to-head with community activists in opposition to the dump in Thursday’s TownTalk feature, Around Old Granville.
Pace said the state got involved in the disposal of PCBs – polychlorinated biphenyls –
in the summer of 1978, and it was in 1982 that civil rights leader the Rev. Ben Chavis, is credited with coining the term “environmental racism” to describe the placement of the landfill.
In 1980, Warren County was among the state’s poorest counties, majority African American and lagged behind in most areas, including income. Close to half of the workforce commuted out of Warren County to work, Pace said.
It didn’t take long for leaders to select Warren County – a county once known for producing prominent politicians – as the site of a toxic dump. And trucks beginning to haul the tainted soil to the landfill sparked protests that lasted for weeks.
The protests made national headlines, especially when notables like the Rev. Joseph Lowery of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, Floyd McKissick, the Rev. Leon White and Golden Frinks showed up in support of protesters.
More than 500 people were arrested over the course of six weeks or so, Pace said, as the non-violent protests continued.
“These people literally laid down in front of these dump trucks,” Pace said. More than 7,000 truckloads of tainted soil was brought to the landfill, scraped up from those rural roadsides where the PCB-laced oil had been sprayed.
A company in Raleigh, Ward Transfer Co., disposed of materials like PCBs, but there was so much of it – and it was going to cost a lot of money to send it to an incinerator for proper disposal, Pace said.
“So they just loaded up a truck in the middle of the night and rode up and down roads,” he said, choosing rural, remote places. Like Warren County.
The owner ultimately was caught, fined and sent to prison.
But that still left the problem of what to do with the tainted soil. It had to be removed and put somewhere.
That “somewhere” ended up being a 20-acre landfill site in Warren County.
It was fraught with problems, Pace said, including inadequate liners to keep the landfill contents from seeping out into the groundwater.
Gov. James B. Hunt, Jr. promised to “detoxify” the landfill when the money was available and the technology was developed to do it.
In 1993, with $13 million from the EPA, 60 tons of the toxic contents of the landfill were declared detoxified by conducting a complex process that separates the moisture from the soil and then chemically removes the toxins.
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