ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Monday, July 15, 1996 TAG: 9607150009
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SALTVILLE
SOURCE: CATHRYN MCCUE STAFF WRITER
A single traffic light hangs over Main Street, lined mostly with square, red brick buildings, none taller than two stories. All the basic shops and services are found within a few blocks - the Big M and Family Dollar discount stores, the Salina Restaurant and Motel, an insurance office, a pizza shop, beauty store, flower shop, a Piggly Wiggly and the new Food Country across the street, a garage, the bank, post office and library.
Four police officers watch over the town. No alcohol is sold by the drink. The meat loaf special goes fast at TJ's Restaurant, where coffee is cheap and talk is plentiful. Young and old hang out at the public parking lot, adorned with skinny maples, picnic tables and old Civil War salt kettles planted with vincas.
It's a healthy downtown, if not a thriving one.
Town hall sits at the center, a squat brick building with a World War I cannon and memorial stone out front. A weather vane and clock - temporarily missing its hands - on the white cupola add a classic, provincial touch.
Mathieson Chemical Corp. built the town hall in 1949, and later the high school, a nine-hole golf course, swimming pool (which at one time had salt water), the hospital, a grand hotel, homes, stores, roads and utilities.
As Mathieson expanded its chemical operations, Saltville grew also. From 1900 to 1950, the town's population tripled to 3,000. Ten years later, after the company merged with Olin Corp., employment peaked at 1,500 people - almost entirely men. Women were confined to medical and clerical positions.
"It was quite a booming little town," says Charles Norris, who came to Saltville in 1952 as chief of police. Friday was pay day at the plant, and by nightfall the town's three beer joints were crowded, the streets full of town folk and people from neighboring communities who came to party, Norris remembers. "Saturday night was worse than that."
Because of Olin, Norris's small police department never lacked for anything. The company also subsidized the town's budget and teacher salaries, and pitched in to pay for school jackets and class rings. The athletics and chemistry departments at R.B. Worthy High School were the envy of the region.
"In 1966 we had a football team that looked like the NFL. Called the `Shakers.' Get it?" says Fred Dye, who grew up in the Olin days. "We had bowling alleys, movie theaters, a skating rink."
"It was like a fantasy land. Everything we wanted, we got," recalls another resident, Christine Helton. Upper management, mostly out-of-towners accustomed to big city life, brought Broadway plays, world-class pianists and big-name orchestras to town - giving its ladies, Helton notes, an excuse to dress in evening gowns and long gloves.
The company's influence extended beyond the largesse of a wealthy corporation. Plant supervisors served on the local bank board, the school board and church boards, town council and the community chest. The company knew who needed loans, and why, who was skipping workdays because they were drunk, who was overdrawn at the company store, who was going to church, and who wasn't. A notice posted at the plant in the '60s laid out the rules for workers: No smoking, horseplay or sleeping on the job, nor could workers be a "member of the Communist Party or any other subversive organization."
But the company provided for its workers and their families. Dave Collins was 13 when he "got on" at the plant in 1906, carrying staves to the barrelmakers for 50 cents a day. Through the years, he often put in 10-hour days, moving up in the ranks to foreman until he retired in 1957.
Dave's wife, Mag, who canned lye, was one of the few women to work in production. All of the couple's 13 babies were delivered by company doctors free of charge. Only five survived to adulthood.
"They's good to you, had a good bunch of people to work with," Collins said in an interview shortly before he died in May at 103, the oldest man in town.
Collins raised his family in a company house on Perryville Road. His rent was $12 a month. When plumbing was installed, rent went up $25 a month. In the 1960s, he bought the house for $4,800.
"We were lucky, but Olin made it that way," says Collins' youngest daughter, Evelyn Rector, 70. "They was there when you needed 'em. Nothin' bad about a company town."
The Collins clan spans the company's history. Dave Collins' father helped build the bucket line, an aerial tramway that ran through downtown, carrying limestone to the factory from the quarries nine miles away. Collins' three sons also had jobs with the company.
"A lot of people say bad things about company towns, but I don't think it was all bad," says Ann Boardwine, the high school librarian. She remembers company workmen coming to paint her house. "Mother would tell them what color she wanted it painted, and they'd paint it white anyhow," she laughs, but the company-owned house got a fresh coat every five years.
Getting the runaround
When Olin Corp. quit Saltville, it left behind more than memories and a few buildings. Pollution in the river - and buried at the muck ponds, at the former plant site, the old town dump, the medical center, the elementary school playground and Perryville - lingers to this day.
One day two years ago - half a century after the company built the town hall - several former employees sat in the main room telling federal officials of their health problems, and what they remember of the company's operations. It was the first comprehensive study of whether the residue of Olin's industrial might posed a health threat to people in Saltville today.
Diana Dye was 6 when she moved with her parents and seven siblings to a two-room house in Perryville, built over the first muck pond. She remembers her father telling them to wash the white goo off after playing outside. "Daddy'd say it'd eat the meat off your bones." Her mother grew vegetables out back.
In recent years, several people in Dye's family, herself included, have developed cancer and kidney problems. She thinks Olin's waste is to blame, she told the federal health officials.
Oscar Kelly worked for 21 years on odd jobs that took him to all corners of the complex. For a time, he cleaned "sody ash" out of boxcars before they were loaded again. "We'd just get in there and clean it out. We didn't have sense enough to know then if what we was breathing could kill," said Kelly, who recently died after years of suffering from emphysema and acute bronchitis.
Fred Dye, Diana's brother-in-law, was at town hall that day, too. He nodded to Kelly and the others as they came in one by one, and smiled. "I'm glad to see these older people coming out, because they lived here all their life. They know about it."
The federal government looked into health risks largely due to efforts by Dye and other citizens. After gaining a reputation as an environmentalist, Dye got a call from someone telling him that the old town dump - where Olin had disposed debris after tearing the plant down - was leaking. Dye went to look.
"It was black, had a real strong odor about it. It was quite a bit of it coming out." The gunk emptied into a stream that fed the North Fork of the Holston, where folks swam and fished. But Dye was more concerned that children from the adjacent elementary school might be getting down in the ravine, which was not fenced off.
He sent videos of the leaking dump to state officials, including Gov. George Allen. Soon after, state scientists came to Saltville and, based on the stew of chemicals they found, asked the federal government for a full-blown health risk assessment.
This year, the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry found that the school yard, golf course and medical center were clean and posed no threat to human health. Similarly, Diana Dye and other residents of Perryville have nothing to worry about, according to the agency.
As for the old town dump, the agency said the site has elevated levels of contaminants, and noted its concern that mercury was going to the river. But, the report went on, it's safe for children to play on the school grounds, the capped area of the dump and the ravine.
Dye read over the report in the town library recently and shook his head. Last summer, the Environmental Protection Agency had ranked the town dump as a potential Superfund site, yet here was a federal report saying it was safe for kids. In the meantime, a new federal law allowed the Allen administration to reject the EPA designation, and no further cleanup will take place.
Dye and his partner, Rusty Cahill, feel they've gotten the runaround. Again.
"We're poor Appalachians with very little political influence. We're expendable," Cahill says.
`Tons of it went in the river'
Starting near Burkes Garden, the North Fork of the Holston zigzags southwest for about 40 miles, curving around farms, hugging the back roads and tumbling down falls before arriving in Saltville. Blue herons and kingfishers occasionally fly over the river, which is 40 yards wide at places.
In 1950, Mathieson expanded its Saltville operations and built a plant on the riverbank to make chlorine gas. The process required large amounts of mercury to create an electrical current that split the chlorine and sodium atoms in the brine. Those who worked at the plant recall that efforts to contain the "liquid silver" were slack.
"Turn a gold wedding ring silver," Oscar Kelly used to say. "We didn't have sense, and they sure didn't warn us." Like many others, Kelly kept a slug of it in his pocket to shine coins with. Fathers carried it home in lunch pails for the kids to play with.
"Little beads of it flew everywhere," says Hugh Helton, who worked in the chlorine plant. "Tons of it went in the river. They'll never get rid of it."
Once considered a "play pretty," mercury is now known to be one of the most toxic compounds to human health. Mild exposure causes impaired hearing and sight, tremors and memory loss. - conditions known as the "mad hatters disease" in the 19th century when mercury was used to tan felt hats.In more drastic cases, long-term mercury poisoning leads to kidney failure, permanent brain damage, deformed fetuses and death.
Naomi Swartz knows well what the risks are. Her husband, Charles, died three years ago from kidney disease that his doctors attributed to mercury exposure.
Charles worked at the chlorine plant for years; Naomi can't recall exactly how long. In the late '60s, he got sick and wound up in a Richmond hospital for six months. He returned home, but not to the plant.
"They tried to explain to me down here at the plant that he did not have mercury poisoning," Swartz says. But the doctors had told her otherwise, and she saw it written on her husband's chart. "I had words with them," she says, and the company agreed to pay medical expenses.
Another chlorine plant worker, Reece Smith, remembers the company checking employees for mercury and sending men whose levels were high to other parts of the plant on temporary assignments.
There has never been a formal study of mercury poisoning in Saltville, nor is there talk of one now. Mercury in workers who were exposed on the job would have dissipated by now, federal health officials say. The only other way people here could be poisoned is by eating fish from the river.
Scientists were alerted to the potential harm of ingesting mercury by the 1960s disaster at Minamata Bay, Japan. Dozens of people died, and many more became severely sick after eating fish caught in the bay where a local industry discharged its waste.
At the time, though, the incident caused little concern in Saltville, says Jim Brown, Olin's manager of environmental technology. The discharges in Japan were methylmercury, he explains, whereas Olin was discharging straight mercury - between 50 and 100 pounds a day - in a form that is not immediately harmful. They didn't realize it would eventually react with river bacteria to form the same deadly poison that killed people in Japan.
Since 1970, the Virginia Department of Health has banned eating fish from the river from Saltville all the way to the Tennessee line, about 70 miles away. Yearly tissue samples of rock bass, catfish and other species have shown elevated levels of mercury.
Olin has never denied responsibility for the contamination, but its research indicates that levels are decreasing, Brown says. In 1985, fish samples contained an average of 1.3 parts per million of mercury. That's dropped to 1.1 ppm - still just a fraction above the federal limit, Brown says."Considering the levels of mercury in the fish, I wouldn't have any problem eating them, even down below the plant," Brown says.
Nor would he have a problem, he says, if the state changed the ban to an advisory, as was recommended by an ad hoc group in 1994. The Allen administration has not made a decision, and the North Fork remains the sole Virginia stream where it is illegal to eat fish, even though officials concede the law is virtually unenforceable.
Willis Cook and Easter Boyd like to fish a half a mile downstream of the old plant. Blue gills and sun perch they keep, the rest they toss back. They've heard the river is polluted, but were unaware of the ban on eating the fish. Says Boyd: "Ain't killed us yet." Several times a month, they travel 20 miles to this spot because the fishing is good.
Barry Loupe, a native Saltvillian, agrees. Determined to overcome the river's wounded image, Loupe has opened shop as a part-time fishing guide on the North Fork.
"Everybody pictures us as a toxic waste dump, with `XXX' and skull and crossbones. But that's not the way it really is." Yes, the fishing was bad during the Olin years, he says, recalling how the banks and riverbed were barren of vegetation.
But Loupe thinks the river is coming back. "I guess Mother Nature and the Lord done a good job replenishing." He goes after smallmouth bass, which grow as large as 41/2 pounds. Loupe and his clients release their catch - not because of the pollution, he says, but to maintain the fishery.
Richard Neves, a Virginia Tech biologist who has studied the river for years, says pollution wiped out the diverse population of freshwater mussels - species that indicate a river's overall health. But Neves agrees with Loupe that the North Fork is coming back. He has transplanted thousands of mussel species from nearby rivers to the North Fork in hopes of re-establishing a habitat for these federally endangered animals. Success so far has been nominal.
The company shuts down
As early as 1946, the state of Virginia began urging the company to cut discharges of chlorides, or salt waste from the production of soda ash, into the river. The requests continued over the years, but company officials always replied that the cost was prohibitive, hinting even then at a shutdown.
Through the 1960s, the state and federal government kept tightening environmental rules, forcing the Olin - renamed Olin after a merger in 1954 - to spend at least $2 million improving its wastewater treatment facility. Then the rules tightened again, and Olin's chloride discharge was suddenly 10 times the new legal limit.
In 1970, company officials stopped hinting.
At a meeting of the Virginia State Water Control Board, Olin announced plans to close the soda ash plant within two years, putting 700 men out of work. Most folks back in Saltville learned of the plans through news reports.
To many, it came less as a surprise and more a confirmation of rumors that had been circulating for several years.
"Olin made money on that plant," ex-mayor William Totten says. "It was just about worn out...They were never going to refurbish ...and they weren't really reinvesting in humanity."
There were other omens, too. The company had begun loosening its hold on the town, tearing down the hotel, selling its stores and company houses to workers, and turning the waterworks over to the town. Management and labor relations were never the same after a bitter strike in 1968.
Then, at about the same time, deposits of pure sodium carbonate deposits were discovered in Wyoming, says Keith Roberts, an environmental specialist with Olin. "So what we were spending money to make, they found naturally."
Soon after the initial announcement, Olin said it was shutting down all its operations, and one by one they closed - the bicarbonate of soda plant, the carbon dioxide plant, the chlorine plant. Several hundred more people were out of work.
In March 1971, LIFE magazine came to Saltville to chronicle the struggle, anxiety and despair it predicted for other company towns as the environmental movement took hold in America.
Ten months later, The Washington Post's Carl Bernstein, in the days before Watergate, wrote a long piece on Saltville. He found that some townfolk were empathetic toward Olin, some bitter, and many blamed the government. Some hoped the company could beat the rap from Richmond, or that another company would step in and take over. Some spoke with civic pluck, others grew physically sick with dismay. Some left town, but most stayed, and everyone seemed incredulous that, after all those years, all those paychecks, the company would just up and quit.
On July 13, 1972, the last of Olin's Saltville operations - at one time the mother plant of the corporation's international, multibillion dollar chemical division - closed its doors.
It was Charles Mitchell's 45th birthday. He'd worked at Olin for a quarter century, mostly in the power plant. After years of round-the-clock operation, the steam plant was "eerie, quiet" when the turbines were shut down.
"We was the last ones to walk out. We didn't bother locking the door or shutting off the lights."
LENGTH: Long : 304 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY Staff 1. Olin may be long gone asby CNBSaltville's biggest employer, but commerce in downtown is still
going strong, and it's still a place to meet friends.|
2. Photographed on Perryville Road, where they grew up, are
brother and sisters (from left) Dottie Neal, 46, Reece Smith, 62,
and Diana Dye, 48. Their neighborhood was built over the first
industrial muck pond. In recent years, several people in their
family have developed health problems, which they attribute to
Olin's waste.
3. For years M.A.W. employees used company scrip instead of
cash.
4. Keith Roberts, an environmental specialist with Olin Corp.,
overlooks waste ponds 5 and 6.
5. Few factory buildings exist from the Olin/M.A.W. era, but
those that remain have fallen into disrepair.
6. Easter Boyd (left) and Willis Cook fish in the North Fork of
the Holston River downstream from the old Olin plant. They were
unaware of the ban on eating fish caught from the river. color.