{"id":49096,"date":"2022-09-04T14:06:24","date_gmt":"2022-09-04T21:06:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/?p=49096"},"modified":"2022-09-04T14:06:24","modified_gmt":"2022-09-04T21:06:24","slug":"everyday-erinyes-334","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.politicsplus.org\/blog\/2022\/09\/04\/everyday-erinyes-334\/","title":{"rendered":"Everyday Erinyes #334"},"content":{"rendered":"

Experts in autocracies have pointed out that it is, unfortunately, easy to slip into normalizing the tyrant, hence it is important to hang on to outrage. These incidents which seem to call for the efforts of the Greek Furies (Erinyes) to come and deal with them will, I hope, help with that. As a reminder, though no one really knows how many there were supposed to be, the three names we have are Alecto<\/span><\/strong>, Megaera<\/strong><\/span>, and Tisiphone<\/span><\/strong>. These roughly translate as “unceasing,” “grudging,” and “vengeful destruction.”<\/p>\n

Environmental pollution is something that affects everyone. And, of course, so is racism. But neither affects everyone equally, or on exactly the same way. Birmingham, AL, is a city which has way too much of both. Racism, of course, is a form of folly – but some racist decisions at all levels are designed to protect racists. That at least makes a little sense, even though it is privileged and uncaring sense. But why do racist citizens of Birmingham choose to tolerate dangerous air pollution when it is clear that it hurts them too?<\/p>\n

\"\"

Not exactly how reality works.<\/p><\/div>\n

I have seen memes which suggest that racists and other bigots do not care if they are suffering – provided that those people<\/strong><\/em> are suffering worse. And that may well be what it comes down to. And how sad is that!<\/p>\n

I’m truly sorry not to be able to use any images from ProPublica,which include stunning photos of residents and even more stunning satellite images at different levels of enlargement merging into each other.\u00a0 But Pro Publica specifically excludes its graphics from Creative Commons use.\u00a0 So feel more than free to click through, and, if you’re sharing, share the original.\u00a0 It may make more of an impact.<\/p>\n

==============================================================<\/p>\n

The Tragedy of North Birmingham<\/h1>\n

by Max Blau, graphics by Shane Loeffler<\/p>\n

ProPublica is a Pulitzer Prize-winning investigative newsroom. Sign up for The Big Story newsletter<\/a> to receive stories like this one in your inbox<\/em>.<\/p>\n

\n

By the spring of 2020, the century-old industrial plant on Birmingham\u2019s 35th Avenue was literally falling apart. Chunks of the metal doors fronting several of the 1,800-degree ovens \u2014 which heat coal to produce a fuel called coke \u2014 had broken off and tumbled to the ground.<\/p>\n

With the doors damaged, the toxic chemicals they were supposed to contain within the ovens leaked out at an accelerated rate. The fumes should still have been captured by a giant ventilation hood that had been put in place to suck up emissions. But that system was broken, too, causing plumes of noxious smoke to drift across the city\u2019s historically Black north side, as they had done so many times before.<\/p>\n

Months earlier, a regulator with the Jefferson County Department of Health had sent a letter warning the plant\u2019s owners that they could soon be cited for failing to prevent pollution from escaping from the ovens in different ways.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt seems inevitable,\u201d the letter said.<\/p>\n

But in the months that followed, the company that had recently bought the plant told regulators it was unable to make millions of dollars worth of necessary repairs to the oven doors and ventilation hood, records and interviews show. The delays carried a tremendous cost: Nearby residents were once again being exposed to dangerous levels of cancer-causing chemicals.<\/p>\n

No Southern city has experienced a longer and more damaging legacy of environmental injustice than Birmingham. As coke production fueled the city\u2019s rise \u2014 powering plants that made everything from cast-iron pipes to steel beams \u2014 white leaders enacted housing policies that forced Black people to live in the most hazardous communities. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once called Birmingham America\u2019s \u201cmost thoroughly segregated city,\u201d and the evidence of oppressive pollution was blatant. The air in north Birmingham residents\u2019 lungs and the soil beneath their feet became more contaminated than in nearly any other corner of America.<\/p>\n

Generations of business leaders amassed fortunes by cooking coke without regard to the pollution raining down on neighboring communities. With few exceptions, each plant owner left the facility in worse shape than they found it, passing off costly upgrades to the subsequent owner, who then passed them on to the next. This pattern was able to continue, in part, because powerful industry lobbyists fended off the kind of proposals and policies that better protected communities in other states. Nowhere was that more apparent than at one of the country\u2019s worst-polluting plants, on 35th Avenue in Birmingham.<\/p>\n

It was here, in an area with one of America\u2019s highest poverty rates, that the ultrawealthy owners of a coal company named Bluestone Coke spotted a financial opportunity. Bluestone belongs to the family of Jim Justice, the coal baron who became West Virginia governor in 2017. The Justices had racked up tens of millions of dollars in unpaid bills with smaller companies it did business with, according to a ProPublica investigation<\/a> in 2020. (Forbes dubbed Gov. Justice the \u201cdeadbeat billionaire<\/a>\u201d because of these debts.) After a close business associate suddenly had to offload his Birmingham coke plant in 2019, the Justices bought the decrepit facility, which would prove to be a ready-made customer for the coal their company mined in several Appalachian states.<\/p>\n

The Justices, like the owners of other remaining coke plants, sought to preserve the plant\u2019s last years of revenues at a time when steel mill owners around the country were replacing coke-fueled furnaces with cleaner electric ones. To do so, they would cut corners on maintenance on creaky ovens, even though that would dramatically heighten the odds of increased pollution.<\/p>\n

In July 2020, after the 35th Avenue plant was found to have released excessive levels of toxic emissions on most days that year, Jefferson County inspectors cited Bluestone for a series of violations. The health department was considering a fine of nearly $600,000, a penalty that\u2019s small compared to fines that regulators in other states have issued for similar infractions but large by Jefferson County\u2019s standards. In fact, it would have exceeded the fines issued to all<\/em> Birmingham-area industrial sources over the previous decade. Instead of finalizing a settlement that would\u2019ve fined Bluestone, though, Jefferson County scrapped it.<\/p>\n

Over the course of the next year, Bluestone committed so many more infractions that it could have owed maximum penalties exceeding $60 million, according to legal filings. The violations got so bad that in August 2021, nearly two years after Jefferson County had warned that citations would be \u201cinevitable,\u201d the health department denied Bluestone\u2019s request to renew the site\u2019s permit. The Jefferson County Board of Health sued the company for damages, alleging that its operations were \u201ca menace to the public health.\u201d<\/p>\n

Bluestone appealed the decision to deny its permit renewal and was initially able to stay open, releasing toxic chemicals into the surrounding communities well into the fall. But repeated problems with its equipment forced Bluestone to idle its coke ovens last October. Only then did it promise to make the major repairs needed to renew its permit.<\/p>\n

ProPublica has learned that the Jefferson County Board of Health and Bluestone recently entered talks to settle the lawsuit. If Bluestone makes overdue repairs to its pollution control equipment and pays a penalty of $850,000 \u2014 less than 2% of the maximum possible fine \u2014 the company will be able to apply to renew its permit, according to sources who did not want to be named because the settlement is still being negotiated. If the head of the Jefferson County Department of Health approves the permit, Bluestone can resume its production of tens of thousands of pounds of coke each year.<\/p>\n

Jordan Damron, a press secretary for Gov. Justice, did not respond to ProPublica\u2019s request for comment. Bluestone attorney Robert Fowler, who declined to answer ProPublica\u2019s questions, wrote in an email that the company is committed to \u201cachieving compliance with all local, state, and federal environmental laws.\u201d Bluestone said it has spent millions of dollars to improve the plant and told regulators that it has the funding to make additional repairs. Wanda Heard, a spokesperson for the health department and the health board, declined to answer most questions for this story. Jason Howanitz, a senior air pollution control engineer for the department, said in a statement that he and his colleagues \u201cwork with residents and industry to ensure violations are handled swiftly and effectively to prevent violations from escalating.\u201d<\/p>\n

The chronic problems with the plant have spurred Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin to draft an unprecedented and as-yet-unfunded plan to buy out and relocate hundreds of neighboring residents. But launching the effort could take years \u2014 unless industrial companies like Bluestone, and the agencies tasked with regulating such plants, help to right the historic wrongs that plague the city\u2019s north side.<\/p>\n

\u201cBluestone hasn\u2019t been a responsible operator,\u201d Woodfin told ProPublica. \u201cThey\u2019ve been blatant. They\u2019ve been disrespectful. Bluestone doesn\u2019t give a damn about people.\u201d<\/p>\n

On a recent summer afternoon, Lamar Mabry stepped past colorful toys strewn across the living room floor and went into his backyard. He pointed toward the far end of the nearly 1-acre lot containing several homes belonging to his family, at the five-bedroom brick house where he had grown up, just 600 feet from Bluestone\u2019s front gates. From the front yard there, he could see the plant\u2019s smokestack. As the years passed, pollution from the plant stained the house\u2019s white facade a dark charcoal.<\/p>\n

Since the late 1970s, Mabry has been complaining about the pollution from the coke plant and other sites clustered around his historic Black community of Collegeville. The 71-year-old contractor built his current house on the family land, and he and his late wife raised their younger children there. He now helps out with his grandchildren, who visit him often.<\/p>\n

The neighborhood where Mabry once played in the streets and where his family gardened vegetables is now filled with abandoned homes and vacant lots. When the plant was running, the smell of pungent chemicals often killed his appetite and at times made him feel dizzy. In a legal filing before the Bluestone plant idled, Mabry said that the toxic emissions from the coke ovens left him \u201cdepressed\u201d because his grandkids couldn\u2019t \u201cgo outdoors during the summer months because of the pollution.\u201d<\/p>\n

He also worries his yard is too contaminated for his grandchildren to safely dig in the dirt. The EPA believes dirt that was given away by local industrial companies in the mid-20th century was spread by residents throughout their neighborhoods \u2014 and often contained toxic chemicals. Mabry\u2019s older brother, Charles, who had worked at the 35th Avenue coke plant, brought truckloads of that dirt home to level their yard. Mabry said that in the early 2010s, the EPA sampled his soil but only tested the edges of his yard and didn\u2019t find enough pollutants there to excavate it and replace it with clean soil. (The EPA excavated the yards of both of his neighbors, as well as hundreds of other nearby properties.)<\/p>\n

Still, no matter how much pollution fell from the sky or lay beneath his feet, Collegeville had always been home<\/em>. So for a long time, Mabry clung to the idea that he would die in the only community where he\u2019s ever lived, even after he heard more neighbors\u2019 stories of children with asthma and seniors with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. As the years passed, though, seven of his 14 siblings were diagnosed with cancer. \u201cI\u2019ve got a lot of death certificates,\u201d he said. Enough, in fact, that he recently and reluctantly began to weigh the idea of moving, in hopes of finding a safer place for his grandchildren, all under the age of 14.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy five grandkids, that\u2019s my whole pride and joy,\u201d Mabry said. But it\u2019s still not an easy decision. \u201cIt will hurt me. All my memories are here.\u201d<\/p>\n

Mabry and other residents of Birmingham\u2019s north side are worried that if Bluestone is allowed to resume operations at the plant, the government officials who had promised to protect them before will fail to do so again. It is a pattern they knew all too well, a pattern as old as the city itself.<\/p>\n

The decade after the Civil War ended, a Confederate colonel named James Withers Sloss created a business empire in Birmingham on his belief that nearby coal deposits were vast enough to revive the region. Like many of his contemporaries, he built his companies on a system of racist labor practices. He invested in mines that shipped coal to Sloss Furnaces downtown, where freed Black people worked the city\u2019s most dangerous ironworking jobs for the lowest pay. In 1883, Sloss told lawmakers that he relegated Black people to those positions because they had more of \u201ca fondness for\u201d that kind of work than white people did. Historian W. David Lewis later wrote that Sloss and other post-Civil War industrialists had turned Birmingham into \u201can iron plantation in an urban setting.”<\/p>\n

When Sloss cashed out by selling his flagship iron furnace for $2 million \u2014 more than $60 million in today\u2019s dollars \u2014 the investors who bought it relied on forced labor. They paid sheriffs to lease prisoners \u2014 many of them descendants of formerly enslaved Black people who were facing trumped-up charges by white people \u2014 to mine coal to pay off their fines.<\/p>\n

The investors boosted production so much that by the early 20th century the amount of iron forged in Alabama surpassed that of Pennsylvania. To honor Birmingham\u2019s rise, civic boosters paid the Sloss-Sheffield Steel & Iron Company to supply iron for a 56-foot-tall statue of Vulcan, the Roman god of fire and forge, that would stand atop nearby Red Mountain. But in the valley below, Birmingham was heavily obscured by smoke from the growing number of iron and steel mills.<\/p>\n

In 1913, city commissioners banned companies from firing up their plants more than three minutes an hour. But after a Sloss-Sheffield executive was arrested for defying the ordinance, local industrialists pressured the commissioners into weakening the restriction and convinced state lawmakers to strip the city of its power to limit industrial pollution. Sloss-Sheffield\u2019s lobbying later helped the company land a military contract so large that it decided to build a new coke plant on 35th Avenue.<\/p>\n

Though Alabama would end convict leasing in 1928 \u2014 abolishing the practice once exploited by Sloss-Sheffield \u2014 Black employees worked in fear of white foremen. \u201cThey called you a n—– and you did what they told you to do,\u201d a Sloss-Sheffield worker from the 1920s to the 1940s later said in an oral history interview. \u201cIt would make you angry and you\u2019d fret over it but you did it anyway because you didn\u2019t have a choice.\u201d<\/p>\n

The year after World War II ended, a 22-year-old dockworker named John Powe came home from overseas and headed to Birmingham to find a job that would support his growing family. Like many rural Black southerners, Powe\u2019s search for opportunity beyond tenant farming \u2014 the work his father had done in rural central Alabama \u2014 drew him to the industrial mecca, which had grown sevenfold since the turn of the century to more than 260,000 people. After briefly working for another company, he followed his older brother to Sloss-Sheffield.<\/p>\n

Working as a laborer at Sloss was \u201crough,\u201d Powe recounted in his own oral history interview, conducted in 1984. \u201cWhen I first came out there I stayed on the job for 36 hours.\u201d He added: \u201cI feel lucky to be able to walk around.\u201d Each shift presented potential dangers, from the risk of explosions to toxic chemicals. After a decade on the job, Powe lost a portion of his foot in a workplace accident.<\/p>\n

By the 1940s, pollution from Sloss-Sheffield facilities and dozens of other plants across Birmingham was becoming hard for some city officials to ignore. Federal aviation officials blocked funding to expand the city\u2019s airport because of excess smoke and dust, and medical leaders refused to build a tuberculosis hospital in Birmingham. In response, Sloss-Sheffield vowed to lower emissions. But those voluntary efforts failed to protect workers, who were found to have \u201chigh disease and death rates,\u201d according to a 1946 report published by health officials in Jefferson County.<\/p>\n

Redlining and the city\u2019s racial zoning law prohibited Black people from moving into white neighborhoods. Powe \u2014 along with three of his brothers, who each worked for Sloss-Sheffield \u2014 moved to one of the few places he could: a short walk from the coke plant, in the tightknit neighborhood of Collegeville. His oldest son, John Henry Powe, remembers his dad coming home from work in the 1950s covered in soot from head to toe and handing his dirty work clothes to his wife, Ruby, who washed out the chemical stains by hand. The particles also landed on neighbors\u2019 cars, leaving a fine layer of soot that covered the hoods like pollen in the spring.<\/p>\n

Julia Powe, one of Powe\u2019s nieces, remembers other, more direct threats to her family, beyond those posed by the coke plants. She felt her house rattle after terrorists bombed the nearby home of Bethel Baptist Church Pastor Fred Shuttlesworth, who organized civil rights demonstrations at his sanctuary. Theophilus Eugene \u201cBull\u201d Connor \u2014 a notorious public safety commissioner with close ties to the Ku Klux Klan \u2014 ordered the arrest of hundreds of Black children, including Powe\u2019s daughter, Queen, during a protest to end segregation.<\/p>\n

While Black residents fought to desegregate the city, many white families moved \u201cover the mountain,\u201d to suburbs with safer air. Researchers found that remaining Birmingham residents were exposed to so many pollutants \u2014 such as cancer-causing polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons \u2014 that breathing the air was equivalent to smoking two and a half packs of cigarettes a day. From the early 1960s to the early 1970s, the Birmingham area saw emphysema death rates spike by 200 percent, so bad that one federal official declared Birmingham\u2019s air quality to be the worst in the South.<\/p>\n

For years, Julia Powe said, her mother wanted to move away from the city\u2019s north side because of its toxic air. But there was nowhere they could afford to go.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe made do with what we had,\u201d Powe said. \u201cWe had to go along to get along.\u201d<\/p>\n

By the fall of 1971, Birmingham\u2019s pollution had triggered a full-blown public health crisis. Skyscrapers disappeared behind a hazy blanket of smog. As Marvin Gaye\u2019s environmental anthem \u201cMercy Mercy Me (The Ecology)\u201d was broadcast over radios nationwide (\u201cWhere did all the blue skies go? \/ Poison is the wind that blows\u201d), editors at the Birmingham Post-Herald printed a front-page \u201cpollution count\u201d tracker that told families like the Powes and the Mabrys how much toxic air they would breathe.<\/p>\n

Jefferson County officials, stripped of their powers by the state, could only request that plant owners slash emissions. Alabama Gov. George Wallace \u2014 best known for proclaiming \u201csegregation now, segregation tomorrow, segregation forever\u201d in response to public school desegregation \u2014 delayed naming anyone to a state commission that was supposed to decide how to meet standards set by the Clean Air Act of 1970. That federal law empowered the newly created EPA to improve air quality nationwide.<\/p>\n

After Birmingham companies continued to ignore requests that they voluntarily reduce emissions, Jefferson County officials persuaded the EPA to ask a federal judge to shut down 23 industrial sites. The judge agreed, lifting the hazy blanket from the skyline. In the weeks ahead, Wallace\u2019s appointees finally met, and they soon created new pollution regulations.<\/p>\n

Over the next five years, the quality of Birmingham\u2019s air dramatically improved. But a pocket of toxic emissions stubbornly remained along the city’s north side, in part because of the coke ovens so close to Mabry\u2019s and Powe\u2019s homes.<\/p>\n

The thick black smoke that drifted into communities not only contained particulate matter that made it harder to breathe, but also carcinogenic pollutants invisible to the human eye. By the late 1970s, the EPA concluded that \u201clittle doubt is left\u201d regarding the cancer risk of emissions from the 60 coke plants then operating in the U.S. Yet each successive presidential administration, facing pressure from steel execs concerned about rising costs, refrained from using its power to protect communities against those emissions. In the mid-1980s, President Ronald Reagan withheld funding for regulators to curb coke plant emissions. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed into law an overhaul of the Clean Air Act that mandated stronger emissions controls but granted coke plants three decades to meet the full requirements of the tougher law. And in the final week of President Bill Clinton\u2019s term in 2001, the EPA loosened controls on pollution from coke plants.<\/p>\n

\u201cCoke ovens became a classic example of a very old technology that was never forced to modernize,\u201d said Jane Williams, chair of the Sierra Club\u2019s National Clear Air Team, who advises communities impacted by coke oven emissions.<\/p>\n

By the early 2000s, the EPA acknowledged in a report to Congress that federal regulations alone wouldn\u2019t stop toxic air pollution in Birmingham and other cities considered America\u2019s worst hot spots. A top EPA official informed Jefferson County regulators that their department had lax coke ovens emission standards that fell short of those in other states. But nothing happened. (Howanitz, a Jefferson County regulator, said in a statement that the EPA\u2019s summary of the county\u2019s standards was an \u201coversimplification\u201d that \u201cdoes not accurately reflect the rules of Jefferson County.\u201d)<\/p>\n

Birmingham\u2019s northern cluster of aging industrial plants, along with the disinvestment and blight accelerated by the pollution they emitted, had spurred an exodus. From the 1970s to the 1990s, Collegeville\u2019s population shrank from 7,000 to under 4,200 residents. Though Powe and his brothers would spend their golden years in Collegeville, most of their children, including John Henry and Julia, moved elsewhere.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe businesses moved out, then the people moved out,\u201d said John Henry Powe, who relocated 10 miles northeast to the suburb of Center Point. \u201cPeople wanted better.\u201d<\/p>\n

Residents like Mabry who chose to stay soon learned of another pollution threat. In 2005, the company that then operated the 35th Avenue plant, Sloss Industries Corporation, discovered the presence of cancer-causing contaminants in soil sampled in adjacent neighborhoods. The discovery came on the heels of a 16-year EPA-mandated investigation to determine the extent to which dozens of contaminants had leached out of disposal pits on the roughly 400-acre coke plant site.<\/p>\n

It took another four years for the EPA to ask Sloss Industries\u2019 successor, Walter Coke, to sample soil near additional homes and schools. That testing found concerning levels of toxic contaminants, including arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, at roughly two dozen of those sites. The EPA quickly informed school officials that contaminants had elevated cancer risk above what the environmental agency deems acceptable.<\/p>\n

Walter Coke voluntarily dispatched bulldozers to several schools to remove the toxic dirt and replaced it with clean soil. But company execs hoped to limit their additional cleanup costs. Chuck Stewart, Walter Coke\u2019s president, told the EPA that assigning blame to his plant alone was \u201cprofoundly misleading.\u201d He argued that contamination came from \u201cmultiple sources\u201d in a part of town where more than 75 plants had operated since the late 19th century. Given the legacy of the industrial corridor, he urged EPA officials in 2011 to get other companies \u201cto the table to discuss any cleanup.\u201d<\/p>\n

Around that time, the EPA declared portions of neighborhoods around the 35th Avenue plant a Superfund site, which allowed the agency to spend millions of dollars to clean up the hazardous pollution. In 2013, the EPA named four more companies \u2014 including Walter\u2019s top rival, Drummond \u2014 as \u201cpotentially responsible\u201d for the remediation costs. Soon after, EPA officials sought to add the area to its National Priorities List, a designation that allows the agency to pool more resources that can accelerate such cleanups.<\/p>\n

Fearing a $100 million cleanup bill, Drummond\u2019s vice president convinced Democratic state representative Oliver Robinson<\/a> to fight the NPL designation. After thousands of dollars were secretly funneled to his foundation by a nonprofit run by the Drummond vice president, Robinson hired a friend to get northside residents to sign a petition expressing concern that being placed on the NPL would lower their property values. A lawyer working with Drummond\u2019s vice president used information collected by Robinson to draft talking points, which Republican officials used to publicly oppose the NPL designation.<\/p>\n

The tidal wave of backlash they fomented was successful. The EPA dropped the NPL effort in 2015. EPA spokesperson Brandi Jenkins said in a statement that the agency\u2019s \u201cdecisions regarding cleanups are not influenced by lobbying interests.\u201d<\/p>\n

Robinson later pleaded guilty to federal corruption charges related to his campaign against the NPL effort. The Drummond vice president was convicted for his role. Hank Asbill, a lawyer representing the Drummond vice president, said in an email that his client \u201cdid not get a fair trial and was wrongly convicted.\u201d A lawyer for Robinson did not respond to a request for comment. Drummond representatives also did not respond to a request for comment.<\/p>\n

That winter, EPA contractors excavated the soil around a red brick house owned by lifelong Collegeville resident Jimmy Smith. The 82-year-old had worked for U.S. Pipe, which had once owned the 35th Avenue coke plant, for more than four decades. The EPA\u2019s excavation followed its discovery of unsafe levels of arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in Smith\u2019s front yard. After that, he became convinced that the polluted air and soil had caused the cancer that afflicted his family. His mother died from lung cancer, and he lost his oldest daughter to multiple cancers.<\/p>\n

It was all but impossible for Smith to know the extent to which the cancer-causing chemicals had contributed to his family members\u2019 illnesses, though federal health officials say that long-term exposure to such chemicals increases cancer risk. By the time a backhoe arrived to dig up the toxic soil, Smith thought, it was time to go.<\/p>\n

\u201cOnce we realized the severity of the pollution, what it was doing to us, what it had been doing to us, we moved out of there,\u201d Smith said.<\/p>\n

Six months after EPA contractors excavated Smith\u2019s yard, Walter Coke’s parent company filed for bankruptcy. When a company called ERP Compliant Coke acquired the 35th Avenue plant the following winter, 33-year-old environmentalist Michael Hansen felt what he called a \u201ctwinkle of hope.\u201d Hansen, whose nonprofit the Greater-Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution had urged the health department to address residents\u2019 concerns about pollution, believed the plant\u2019s change in ownership could signal a new era. ERP\u2019s owner, Tom Clarke, had vowed to plant millions of trees on old industrial sites he\u2019d bought elsewhere to offset their carbon footprints. Hansen had also heard a rumor that Clarke might decommission the plant and convert the property into a land trust to restore it.<\/p>\n

However, as Hansen drove through Collegeville in the ensuing months, he could smell the scent of burning rubber and mothballs, telltale signs of coke oven emissions. The sight of plumes of smoke became so common that GASP staffers sent complaints to the health department. But Jefferson County regulators said they never found enough evidence of violations to fine ERP. The plant kept polluting under ERP\u2019s ownership until Clarke ran into financial trouble. In 2018, he missed a loan payment for another of his properties. Following that, his bankers called the full note due immediately. Clarke, who once volunteered to help the Justices confront their long list of mining violations, sold the Birmingham plant to Bluestone. (Clarke and his attorney did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)<\/p>\n

As the Justices folded the Birmingham plant into their business empire\u2019s future plans, they slashed the costs of running the site. In January 2020, Bluestone laid off dozens of employees, leaving the plant with fewer than 100 workers, according to their union president. Yet once COVID-19 swept the nation, the company applied for PPP loans, claiming that it would protect the jobs of more than 150 people. ProPublica\u2019s PPP loan database<\/a> shows that federal officials approved $4.6 million in loans and eventually forgave the full amount. Fowler, the Bluestone attorney, declined to comment.<\/p>\n

The plant\u2019s purchasing manager, meanwhile, said in a deposition that he was told to ask 50 contractors if they would accept reduced payments for services they had already performed. Everyone from coke oven part makers to fire extinguisher distributors sued Bluestone to get their full payments. (As of July, ProPublica had found that judges had ordered Bluestone to pay in nine lawsuits and had dismissed nine others. It\u2019s unclear how many of the dismissals occurred due to settlements. Eight cases were still ongoing.) Bluestone even delayed payments to contract inspectors who compiled emissions data for the Jefferson County Department of Health.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt takes an incredible amount of maintenance to keep one of these plants running,\u201d said Erik Groth, an environmental specialist who said Bluestone owes him more than $10,000 for emissions monitoring. \u201cWhen essential services started disappearing, like toilet paper in the bathrooms, I prepared for the worst.\u201d<\/p>\n

Hansen, for his part, was alarmed that Bluestone had not paid the taxes needed to get a business license. If the family wouldn\u2019t take care of the most basic of operational obligations, Hansen reasoned, the company was unlikely to invest in fixing the problems that led to the health department violations.<\/p>\n

Since Jefferson County was not regularly conducting toxic air monitoring, GASP collected samples of its own. Shortly after Bluestone arrived in Birmingham, Hansen\u2019s group found evidence of two chemicals often released by coke plants, benzene and naphthalene, at levels that elevated cancer risk. In late 2020, GASP partnered with an expert to place air monitoring devices on church windows and at schools less than half a mile from the coke ovens. After three months collecting samples, Wilma Subra, a Louisiana-based environmental health expert who advises the EPA on community concerns, reviewed the results for GASP. She concluded benzene, naphthalene and other toxic chemicals were present at levels high enough to have an \u201cextensive and severe\u201d impact on the health of nearby residents.<\/p>\n

Following Jefferson County\u2019s denial of Bluestone\u2019s permit in August 2021, a leader with the economic development nonprofit Birmingham Business Alliance emailed health department regulators on Bluestone\u2019s behalf to find a way to \u201cresolve their problems regarding air quality.\u201d The following month, Jay Justice \u2014 Gov. Justice\u2019s son, who is the head of Bluestone \u2014 reached out to one of Jefferson County\u2019s top air pollution regulators to schedule an in-person meeting. He wrote that he was looking \u201cto develop a pathway forward that can allow the plant to continue to operate, provide jobs, pay taxes, and be a great environmental steward while doing so,\u201d according to an email obtained by ProPublica. (The health department\u2019s Howanitz said that he and other air pollution regulators never met with BBA employees or Jay Justice because of the pending litigation. Neither the BBA nor Justice responded to multiple requests for comment.)<\/p>\n

One week later, a Bluestone attorney named Alan Truitt stepped inside a courtroom in downtown Birmingham. Truitt, a seasoned defender of corporate polluters, urged the judge assigned to Bluestone\u2019s appeal to give the company more time to repair the plant. Truitt had warned in an emergency filing that if the plant shuttered \u2014 even temporarily \u2014 it would be damaged beyond the point of repair. He pleaded for the judge to act in a way that would avoid the \u201cpermanent loss\u201d of jobs for hard-working Alabamans.<\/p>\n

The judge decided to let Bluestone stay open until the appeal was finished. Less than a month later, however, the company suspended production after most of the plant\u2019s coke ovens had broken down.<\/p>\n

When asked by a West Virginia TV reporter at a press conference last November about the violations leading up to the shutdown, Gov. Justice shifted blame to previous owners, noting that the \u201cplant had been bankrupt, for all practical purposes, bankrupt two different times prior to us getting it.\u201d<\/p>\n

Despite Gov. Justice\u2019s vow at the press conference \u201cto do the right stuff,\u201d his family was notorious for amassing huge debts that often went unpaid, according to lawsuits. Plaintiffs including miners and the U.S. Department of Justice have won judgments or forced settlements worth more than $128 million against the family\u2019s companies, according to a 2020 ProPublica investigation<\/a>. Mounting debts slowed the company\u2019s progress to reopen the Birmingham plant. In the three years since the Justices bought the plant, vendors have sued Bluestone for more than $8 million over unpaid bills for equipment, utilities and services provided.<\/p>\n

This past May, at a hearing that concerned nearly $900,000 owed to the city for unpaid business license taxes and fees, Bluestone lawyer James Vercell Seal told the judge that the company is \u201cdoing a lot of infrastructure improvements\u201d to get the plant running again. That same day, Seal told another judge that Bluestone was \u201cunable to pay\u201d its $1.8 million water bill because the plant was \u201cnot producing\u201d any coke. This double standard frustrated vendors. \u201cI feel like a bill collector,\u201d a water utility attorney told the judge.<\/p>\n

When word spread that the Jefferson County Board of Health might settle with Bluestone for less than $1 million, experts familiar with the coke plant\u2019s operations struggled to understand why the penalty was so low. Stan Meiburg, a former EPA Acting Deputy Administrator who now runs Wake Forest University\u2019s Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability, said the proposed $850,000 settlement is a \u201csteep discount\u201d from a maximum penalty that exceeds $60 million. (Howanitz said in a statement that the health department \u201cdoes not comment on specific penalty calculations.\u201d)<\/p>\n

If the settlement is finalized, only a few options will remain to protect the people of north Birmingham, according to experts. The head of the Jefferson County Department of Health could deny Bluestone a permit if the company doesn\u2019t fix enough of the problems with its pollution control equipment. If the department fails to do that, Meiburg said, the EPA could intervene by ordering the company to install toxic air monitoring and pay more fines to deter it from repeating its past violations.<\/p>\n

Bluestone publicly declared it had spent \u201ctens of millions of dollars\u201d<\/a> to make the plant \u201cmore compliant.\u201d But experts say that figure is far too low: Rebuilding the 35th Avenue plant\u2019s coke ovens, they say, could cost more than $150 million.<\/p>\n

\u201cBluestone should never be given another permit,\u201d said one coke plant expert familiar with the plant\u2019s operations, who did not want to be named out of fear of retribution. \u201cIt\u2019s bad for residents. It\u2019s bad for workers. Nobody would win except for Bluestone.\u201d<\/p>\n

With each day that passes, the idea of moving away from Collegeville becomes easier for Mabry \u2014 but the act itself becomes more difficult. Repeated failures to control emissions from high-polluting plants have contributed to the decimation of his neighborhood\u2019s property values. Homes in Collegeville have sold for as little as $1,000.<\/p>\n

Mabry said the four-bedroom house he built with his own hands is worth much less than it should be, effectively trapping him there. That house, along with his childhood home and several other structures on the property, would cost about $350,000 to replace, according to his homeowners insurance policy. But when he recently got an appraisal on his property, it was valued at around $75,000.<\/p>\n

Birmingham Mayor Woodfin, who has an ambitious plan to buy out property owners near the plant for a fair price, has seen signs of harm to these communities \u2014 Collegeville in particular \u2014 throughout his life. He attended elementary school less than a mile from the 35th Avenue plant and as a teenager lived at his aunt\u2019s house, a short walk from Carver High School.<\/p>\n

In 2018, during his first year as mayor, Woodfin toured part of the Superfund site near the old Carver High, where EPA officials in recent years have stored mounds of toxic dirt removed from people\u2019s yards. After seeing the neighborhood remain in that condition for that long, Woodfin wanted to do more as mayor. He said his staff has since crafted a $37 million blueprint known as \u201cThe Big Ask<\/a>\u201d to address some of the damage to north Birmingham. The 60-page document, which has not yet been released to the public, calls for more than $19 million to pay for property buyouts within the Superfund site. Another portion would help renters, including those in Collegeville\u2019s public housing complex, relocate. Millions of dollars more would be spent to revitalize the area for those who want to stay.<\/p>\n

While Woodfin supports Birmingham funding part of The Big Ask, he believes the city should not pay for the buyouts alone. But no other government agencies have come to the table. Heard, the spokesperson for the Jefferson County Board of Health, wouldn\u2019t say if it would devote the fines collected from a Bluestone settlement to help fund the proposal. The EPA said it doesn\u2019t plan to help fund the relocation of residents. The agency pointed out that it has so far spent $45 million on the Superfund cleanup efforts and intends to spend up to $100 million total, covering the full cost of reducing health risks from contaminated soil. President Joe Biden\u2019s bipartisan infrastructure bill is providing $3.5 billion to the EPA for accelerating cleanups at Superfund sites, but agency officials said much of the initial $1 billion installment is meant to clear the backlog of work at previously unfunded sites.<\/p>\n

Woodfin said plant owners in north Birmingham should pay their fair share of The Big Ask. Corporations across the country, from Juliette, Georgia<\/a>, to Murray Acres, New Mexico<\/a>, have bought out residents after dangerous chemicals leaked out of waste sites. But the odds of Bluestone contributing are slim, considering that the company has told the EPA that it doesn\u2019t even have the money to cover the cost of protecting residents from future harm by cleaning up the legacy waste of the 35th Avenue plant.<\/p>\n

But even if Woodfin finds funding for The Big Ask, it only covers buyout offers for a third of the more than 2,100 properties in the Superfund site. When ProPublica pointed out that the plan excludes most property owners in Collegeville, Woodfin acknowledged that everyone in the Superfund site should be eligible. Unless the plan changes, Mabry, whose property is closer to the 35th Avenue plant than almost every other resident, will be left out.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n