‘Good riddance’
Although Velsicol plant is being torn down, troubling legacy will persist
Beyond the faded signs and encroaching weeds that hint at jobs long gone, demolition crews are busy in the bowels of Velsicol Chemical Corp. plant dismantling a manufacturing facility whose environmental legacy will persist long after its rows of storage tanks, pipes and World War II-era buildings have been leveled.
Over the next 14 months or so, a Velsicol contractor will be tearing down the plant at 1199 Warford in North Memphis, where as many as 350 people once worked, to make way for a warehouse and distribution operation. Although actual production ceased two years ago, the demolition formally closes a chapter on more than 60 years of chemical manufacturing that caused far-flung contamination problems while yielding some of the most toxic and widely used pesticides of the 20th century.
“From an environmental standpoint, it’s sort of good riddance,” said Don Berryhill, 72, who inspected Velsicol during the mid-1960s as a junior engineer with the Health Department.
Although the plant in its later years made other products, the pesticides manufactured there
from the 1950s into the ’90s — primarily endrin, chlordane and heptachlor — come from the same family of long-lasting chlorinated hydrocarbons as DDT. Like DDT, the chemicals have been banned because they can cause a host of health and environmental problems and have been classified as “persistent organic pollutants.”
Even as the plant comes down, the problems and concerns associated with its wastes and its products remain.
At a site in Toone, Tenn., some 80 miles east of Memphis, where Velsicol buried thousands of tons of chemical wastes from the plant during the 1960s and ’70s, toxic compounds still seep into the groundwater and the air, prompting plans by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency to spend another $50 million on further cleanup work.
In Memphis, Velsicol continues to monitor lingering contamination issues along Cypress Creek, which drains the Warford property. It also is conducting long-term “correctiveaction” measures at the plant site, which sits atop more than 40 “solid-waste management units” and a plume of contaminated groundwater caused by past chemical releases.
Although Velsicol is converting the site into a distribution facility, the company will be pumping and treating tainted water there “for the foreseeable future,” said Gary Hermann, senior environmental projects manager for the firm.
The Velsicol plant’s legacy also extends across the nation and even around the globe. According to EPA, nearly 54,000 miles of streams and rivers nationwide — including 101 miles in the Memphis area — still are posted with fish-contamination advisories due to contamination from chlordane.
Attesting to the longlasting and pervasive nature of chemicals made exclusively by Velsicol, researchers during the past three years have reported on the presence of chlordane in human breast milk in Hong Kong, in the soil of Yosemite National Park and in the tissue of endangered Hawaiian monk seals. Previous studies detected the chemical in places as remote as penguin eggs in the South Atlantic.
“We’re dealing with continuing residues that will decrease over time,” said Jay Feldman, executive director of the group Beyond Pesticides.
Referring to DDT, chlordane, heptachlor and similar pesticides, Feldman asked, “How could we have unleashed a technology like this, with chemicals whose effects are not widely defined?”
The answers, to the extent there are any, date back more than a half-century. Velsicol, an 82-year-old firm based in suburban Chicago, bought the plant site at Warford in 1952 from Hayden Chemical Co. Velsicol had facilities in other cities, as well, including a plant in St. Louis, Mich., that made DDT; a Chattanooga factory that made ingredients for herbicides and food preservatives, and a plant in Marshall, Ill., that until closing in 1988 made raw chlordane and heptachlor that was shipped to Memphis for processing. After the Marshall plant closed, all chlordane and heptachlor production was consolidated in Memphis.
Of the pesticides made at the Memphis plant, endrin was used primarily against boll weevils in cotton fields, while chlordane and heptachlor, after some initial agricultural usage, mostly were applied to home foundations to repel termites.
Nearly 30 million American homes were treated with chlordane and heptachlor. The amount of chlordane alone applied across the U. S. has been estimated at 70,000 tons.
The chemicals, however, had begun generating controversy back in the early 1960s. As Rachel Carson prepared to publish “Silent Spring,” her landmark 1962 book calling attention to the dangers of pesticides, Velsicol threatened to sue her publisher, citing what it said were “inaccurate and disparaging” comments about chlordane and heptachlor. The book was published, anyway, with no legal action taken by the firm.
A year later, dying fish began surfacing on the Mississippi River below Memphis, bleeding from the mouth. Federal health officials identified endrin as the likely cause of the massive 1963 fish kill and cited the Velsicol Memphis plant as a primary source of the river pollution.
In the years when pollution laws were almost nonexistent, Velsicol dumped wastes into Cypress Creek and, later, into a sewer that connected to a larger municipal sewer pipe extended next to the Wolf River. From there, the wastes flowed into the Mississippi.
Berryhill, the former Health Department inspector now living in Tallahassee, Fla., said he and a colleague donned rubber suits and air tanks and walked inside the Wolf River sewer to investigate Velsicol’s discharges. They found that sludge containing nearly a ton of “pure chlorinated hydrocarbons” had accumulated in areas where the pipe had sagged, he said.
Although it denied being the source of the pollution, Velsicol agreed to clean up the sewer line sludge. But the disposal method the firm chose for much of the sludge — burial in a waste site known as the North Hollywood Dump — would later create other problems.
In the aftermath of the sewer cleanup, Velsicol turned more and more to landfill disposal. It shipped process wastes to the North Hollywood site, which later was cited as one of the nation’s worst hazardous waste dumps.
And in 1964, a year after the fish kill, Velsicol purchased 242 acres at Toone, in Hardeman County, and opened the waste site there. Over the next nine years, the company buried the equivalent of 300,000 drums of waste in 12- to 15-foot-deep trenches, says an EPA report, citing company records.
By 1978, state and federal officials had confirmed that numerous private wells were contaminated with chemicals that included carbon tetrachloride and chloroform, both known to cause cancer and damage to nerves and reproductive health. Municipal water service was extended to the residents who had been using wells.
In a class-action suit against Velsicol, more than 100 plaintiffs blamed the waste site for health problems ranging from cancer to liver and kidney damage. They shared in a $12 million settlement from Velsicol in the late 1980s.
At the direction of EPA, Velsicol also funded an $11 million cleanup in the early 1990s that included a cap over the waste site and a pump-and-treat system to remove the groundwater contaminants. But by 2006, EPA had concluded that those measures weren’t working as intended, and the site was still leaking wastes. Levels of carbon tetrachloride thousands of times the allowable limit remain in the groundwater, and trace amounts of the substance can be detected in the air, said John Nolen, EPA’s remedial project manager for the site.
“As far as health risks and things, they’re under control,” he said. But of the carbon tetrachloride, he added, “It’s still there — not above any ambient health standards, but it’s still there.”
EPA wants to improve the cap and install vacuum pumps to extract chemical vapors so they can be treated. But the cost — $50 million — will have to be borne by federal taxpayers because responsibility for the site had been assumed by Fruit of the Loom, which purchased Velsicol during the 1990s and went into bankruptcy in 1999.
“They’re considered a bankrupt company, and they settled in court and gave us some money,” Nolen said.
Some of the residents living near the waste say they’re no longer worried about the contamination.
“It would’ve been nice if they could’ve explained it better,” said Judy Sterling, who has lived near the waste site more than 40 years. “They had a lot of people up here upset.”
At the North Hollywood Dump, EPA removed some of the most dangerous wastes during an emergency cleanup in 1980. In the years that followed, Velsicol helped fund the longterm cleanup work, which resulted in the dump being taken off the national priority list of Superfund sites in 1997.
Meantime, as evidence grew of health and environmental dangers associated with Velsicol’s chemicals, EPA imposed further restrictions on their sale.
In 1980, the agency canceled most of the registered uses of endrin, and Velsicol halted production five years later. In 1987, EPA classified chlordane, heptachlor and related chemicals as probable human carcinogens and said chronic exposure to them can lead to liver problems and damage to endocrine and nervous systems. That same year, it announced an agreement with Velsicol to suspend sales of the two chemicals in 1988.
The suspension of domestic uses, however, didn’t prevent Velsicol from exporting chlordane and heptachlor. Well into the 1990s, the Memphis plant continued to produce more than 2.5 million pounds of the two products annually for export to countries such as South Africa and Thailand.
But in 1997 the company announced it would quit making chlordane and heptachlor because of declining foreign markets. They since have been banned in most countries and are covered by international agreements restricting the trade of dangerous chemicals.
The substances, however, will remain in the general environment and in human and wildlife populations around the world for several more years, researchers say. One reason is the continued seepage of residues from treated homes and fields into streams, where the chemicals can be taken up in the food chain. Another is a process known as atmospheric transport, in which residues in the soil evaporate, and their vapors are transported by winds until they condense and fall back to Earth in rain or snow.
EPA in the mid-1970s cited tests showing that 97-98 percent of Americans had decomposition products of chlordane and heptachlor in their fat tissue, where it probably is innocuous except when fat is mobilized during stress or dieting, scientists say. There is little conclusive data on the prevalence of the chemicals’ presence in breast milk, and the implications for infants.
Throughout the controversies over products, Velsicol officials often pointed out that no abnormal health problems were ever found among the plant’s workforce, which peaked at 300-350 in the late-1960s and early ’70s.
Some former employees agree that the plant was a safe place to work. “I think the company made a good effort to control that (chemical risk),” said Benny Billingsley, 77, who worked in the plant from 1958 to 1998.
But Ron Ridings, a former health and safety manager who lost his job after 28 years at the plant, can recite the names of coworkers who died of cancers that he said may have been related to exposure to such known carcinogens as vinyl chloride. “None of us knew the long-term effects, the side effects, of that stuff,” said Ridings, 63.
In recent years, Velsicol has been focused on rectifying contamination issues along Cypress Creek, which flows through residential areas northwest of the plant. In 2007, the company finished cleaning up 18 of the most heavily contaminated properties. Although a Health Department study found no health problems attributable to the creek contamination, Velsicol in 2008 agreed to pay a $2.1 million settlement to be shared by residents whose properties were affected.
At the plant site, the company’s efforts to contain and reduce contamination have been working well, said Hermann, the environmental projects manager. “There isn’t any buried waste out there like there used to be,” Hermann said. “We’ve taken care of the problematic areas.”
Roger Donovan, environmental specialist with the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation, said Velsicol has put up the required “financial assurance” to guarantee that funds will be available to clean up the plant site. He said contaminations levels have “really decreased over time.”
The conversion of the site to a distribution facility reflects Velsicol’s shift from being a manufacturer to more of a broker for chemicals, company officials say.
Berryhill, for his part, offers a straightforward response to the coming demise of the plant.
“I’m happy to see it go,” he said.