Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, November 30, 1994 TAG: 9411300086
SECTION: VIRGINIA PAGE: A-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: CATHRYN McCUE STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: SALTVILLE LENGTH: Long
Diana Dye remembers that when she was a little girl in this small mountain town, the sun didn't come out until noon.
Her mother wouldn't bother to hang the laundry out in the morning, when the haze of black soda ash from the nearby chemical plant hung thick in the air.
Sometimes, the sharp grains of ash would hurt her eyes when the wind blew. And sometimes her feet would bleed when she played barefoot in her yard on Perryville Road.
"My daddy took me to the doctor, the company doctor - that's all we had back then," says Dye, now 47 and still living in the Smyth County community. "He just said, `Don't go barefoot.'''
Back in the 1950s and '60s, Saltville was a true company town, and the company was Olin Chemical Corp. Olin ran a sprawling plant that used mined salt to make soda ash, chlorine and many other products. It built the hospital, school and bank. It owned the power plant, phones and waterworks - even the houses where Dye and her neighbors lived, and the old dump on which they were built.
In 1972, Olin shut down its entire operation, saying it couldn't afford to comply with new environmental regulations. Ten years later, the factory site landed on the federal Superfund list as one of the worst hazardous-waste sites in the country.
Now Saltville is beginning to suspect that Olin dumped waste in other parts of town, and used contaminated debris and ash as construction fill.
"We've had a lot of health problems," Dye said Tuesday. "Bronchitis, cancer, from living on top of the muck."
She was among a dozen or more residents who met with federal health officials who are conducting perhaps the first official health study of the community.
On Monday, four specialists from the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, an arm of the U.S. Public Health Service in Atlanta, toured the suspected areas of contamination. They spoke in private consultations with residents in the Saltville Town Hall on Tuesday and will again today.
"We're trying to figure out what's out there, where is it, if people are coming into contact with it, and if it's going to harm them," said Chris Brandt of the agency.
The list of sites includes the elementary schoolyard, town ball fields, the golf course, the medical center, an abandoned power plant, the old town dump next to the elementary school and an old Olin dump called "the graveyard."
Also on the list is the Perryville residential area, where Dye grew up. She says the company hauled in topsoil, and put down 6 inches over "the muck." The houses, she says, were built right on top of the waste.
Company and environmental officials have few answers about the extent of possible contamination throughout the town.
"The only way to be sure is EPA sampling," said Keith Roberts, who works in Olin's environmental-affairs division in Tennessee. "There are very few, if any, records about waste disposal."
He said Olin would address any problems that are identified as a threat to either human health or the environment.
These sites are being handled separately from the Superfund site, which contains the now-dismantled chlorine plant and two waste "ponds." Olin has spent about 20 years and $20 million to clean up the Superfund site, Roberts said.
Mercury from the plant and ponds has contaminated the North Fork of the Holston River. A ban on eating fish from the river remains in effect after 20 years.
This summer, Olin built a waste-water treatment plant to begin cleaning leachate from the dumps. A second phase of the Superfund project to clean ground water, which likely will take several more years, is to start next year, said EPA spokesman Patrick Gaughan. A cleanup of the river will follow, he said.
The townspeople have known for years that the north side of the river was in trouble. When things started showing up on the south side, where much of the town is located, some began to really worry.
Fred Dye, Diana's brother-in-law, is one. For many months, he's been taking pictures and videos of black and rust-colored water oozing out of the ground, and flowing like small waterfalls down the steep hills around town. He suspects it's polluted leachate from the half-dozen waste ponds the company had in town.
"It's head-spinning to get a feel for what was here, and what all is still here," he told a reporter and photographer Tuesday after taking them on a two-hour tour of different spots. One was the elementary schoolyard, built partly over the old town dump where Dye said Olin dumped industrial waste and debris from the chlorine-plant demolition.
Jack Downie, an EPA official who is investigating the non-Superfund sites, was in town Tuesday and said that initial tests on the schoolyard done this year showed trace levels of mercury.
But Dye isn't convinced that it's safe, especially when children have easy access to the area, which is not fenced in. He took pictures of "monstrous holes" in the yard and sent them to the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality.
"I reckon it's the first time anybody said anything," said Dye, who is president of the community's Mountain Empire Environmental Team.
The state agency issued a draft report in April that said the old dump had significant levels of cyanide, arsenic, mercury and cadmium in the water and soil. The department then requested the federal health survey.
The health officials said they would issue a report with their recommendations next year. Possible recommendations would be to clean up some or all of the sites, conduct further health investigations including blood samples from residents or do an epidemiological study. State and federal environmental officials will make the final determination about what to do.
"What we're trying to do is to clean up Saltville, to make Saltville a better place to live," Dye said.
by CNB