It was yesterday. It was the early 1980s. The Southern Appalachian Labor School was conducting OSHA classes for chemical workers in Kanawha County’s Chemical Valley.
Health issues among workers and residents were major concerns. One day, Larry Rose, a West Virginia Tech graduate and board chair at SALS, and I were driving near Oak Hill when we decided to explore what was happening in Minden. We set up a community meeting and a home repair project with the vocational construction program at Fayette County Schools.
One of the first people we met was Dorothy Buckland, whose 5-year-old son had recently died from leukemia. She lived next to Shaffer Equipment, a dealer in used electrical equipment for coal mines, and Arbuckle Creek, which flowed past Shaffer.
When Shaffer rebuilt equipment, it dumped polychlorinated biphenyl-laden oil on the ground, in Arbuckle Creek and in mines used by West Virginia American Water to supply drinking water to the area including Oak Hill. Shaffer also burned PCB-laden oils in furnaces to heat its facility, thereby emitting breathable dust particles throughout the community. PCBs were a lethal contaminant that caused many health problems including cancer.
In January 1985, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a cleanup. When the clean-up crew arrived wearing special masks and what looked like spacesuits, residents became alarmed. Led by SALS -- with key local residents including Martha Yoder, Lucian Randall, Edith Dempsey, Sharon Rose, Thelma Baldry and Sue Workman -- Concerned Citizens to Save Fayette County was founded.
When initial requests for a community health survey were turned down by the Fayette County Health Department, Concerned Citizens to Save Fayette County conducted its own survey. They found alarming rates of leukemia, liver cancer, kidney cancer and skin lesions, all of which are listed as effects of PCB contamination. People also reported hair loss, the kind in which hair comes out in clumps, another known effect of PCB contamination. PCBs went into a person’s fat tissue and were often latent until other complications occurred.
News traveled quickly. The Rev Jesse Jackson came. Sen. Jay Rockefeller came. National media outlets, like CNN, The Washington Post and Mother Jones magazine, arrived. Marches for Minden occurred in 1989 and again in 2019. The situation was clearly newsworthy.
Initial EPA warnings were alarming. Because of frequent creek flooding, residents were initially warned not to eat locally grown vegetables or eat fish either from the creek or the New River, into which the creek flowed. However, the EPA eventually said the problem had been contained and there was no evidence that the PCBs had migrated off-site. Concerned Citizens for Fayette County was not convinced and used the Freedom of Information Act to get access to what the EPA knew about the contamination in the community.
The file they obtained contained frank statements from experts that the area was one of the top PCB contaminated sites in the country, a disaster area worthy of immediate Superfund cleanup money. Pictures in the file showed children's toys on the site, an adjacent basketball court, community pathways through the site, houses close by and leaking transformers.
Other documents, maps and diagrams revealed that the contamination had been occurring since the 1970s, that the area’s main water line went through the site and that barrels of unknown substances were buried all over the site.
The bombshell in the file was the result of soil tests which revealed that PCB had migrated a mile from the site as a result of flooding, which meant that the yards and homes of almost everyone in the community had been contaminated to some extent. In addition, the file revealed that the then-West Virginia Department of Natural Resources had dredged the creek and used the dredgings as fill for the recently reclaimed slag pile overhanging the community, making it likely that the runoff was bringing additional contamination into Minden.
On July 2, 1985, Bob Caron from the EPA called a community meeting. He turned down a request from Concerned Citizens for an independent scientific board of inquiry to investigate the overall situation. Instead, he claimed the cleanup was successful and that all contaminated soil had been taken to a special landfill in Alabama. I immediately took members of the community to Alabama’s Sumter County to confirm the disposal, which ended up being a great concern to the African-American community surrounding the site. Several then came to Minden and the EPA to protest the dumping of contaminated dirt in their community area. A few months later, Caron was convicted of falsifying his credentials and was fired by the EPA.
It is now today, 40 years later. In a May 19 news release, the state announced $2 million in funding to combine with federal funds for the environmental cleanup of the Arbuckle Creek Superfund site in Minden. Since this is “Almost Heaven,†we all need to look up and thank Larry, Lucian, Edith, Martha, Thelma and Dorothy. They are now all dead, along with their deceased family members.
While they are among the many who died, they are now smiling. Their initial disbelief and quest for healthy and safe living have been justified. Let’s hope that this story finally will come to an end and that Minden will come to life again.
