ROANOKE TIMES
Copyright (c) 1996, Roanoke Times
DATE: Tuesday, July 16, 1996 TAG: 9607160022
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
DATELINE: SALTVILLE
SOURCE: CATHRYN MCCUE STAFF WRITER
Across from the Salina Restaurant sits a half-shingled, part turquoise, cube-shaped building. A plastic banner reading Visitor Information Center is strung across the front, but everyone here calls it "the computer building."
Olin Corp. built it in the '60s to house its computer mainframes, which by then were automating some operations at the chemical plant. When Olin began withdrawing from Saltville, it turned the vacant computer building over to the town. In early 1971, with backing from Olin and the town, Virginia Highlands Community College set up a learning center to re-train, educate and counsel the jobless men and their families.
Martha Turnage was assigned to oversee the project. She met with town officials and civic boosters, read the newspaper classifieds to get a feel for the town's blue-collar workers and toured the soon-to-be closed soda ash plant.
Fifteen stories high, wooden beams a foot-and-a-half square, bolts as thick as her wrist, pipes five feet in diameter criss-crossing overhead, 14 lime kilns burning constantly and so furiously she had to wear dark glasses, an overpowering smell of ammonia - Turnage felt swallowed up by an industrial whale.
Re-training these men, middle-aged and lacking a high school diploma, would be a challenge. They were "scared to death," former mayor William Totten says. "You took a man who worked there all his life, couldn't write his name, well, what could you teach them?"
Charles Mitchell was one of the few who weren't scared. In 1941, Mitchell had lied about his age - he was 15 - to join the Army. He returned to Saltville after the war, "messed around a couple of years," married, got on at the plant, and settled down, happy enough.
But he was always bothered that he never got his high school diploma. When the shutdown was announced in July 1970, Mitchell was 45, "a bad age to be when you're looking for a job." Hoping to find more than minimum-wage work, Mitchell signed up with the Learning Center. He recalls spending every night for two months studying algebra, physics, English composition and other subjects.
On Feb. 28, 1972, he received his high school equivalency degree. A year later, he had a good-paying job in Bristol.
But Mitchell and the 60 others who received their diplomas were in the minority. Almost overnight, Saltville's mood had changed. Tempers flared, in church, on the street, at home. Alcohol consumption rose, and at least one and possibly more suicides were attributed to the impending shutdown.
"The whole town was sad. It was just an uneasy feeling, you didn't know what tomorrow would bring," recalls Patsy Jones, who graduated from Saltville's high school in 1955 and went to work as a personnel secretary at the plant. Jones, one of three people in Saltville still employed by Olin, takes care of the paper work for the company's 300 retirees in town.
It was sad, too, to watch family and friends leave for jobs at other Olin factories in such far-away places as New York, Michigan and Louisiana - about 100 workers in all - or to take jobs at other companies. Jones remembers the day the tallest smokestack was demolished. Folks lined up along the ridge to watch it come down - maybe to see with their own eyes that Olin was truly gone.
But the people of Saltville resolved to pull through. They had too much time and blood invested in this patch of Appalachia to abandon it now.
And so the town leaders announced a grand endeavor, dubbed Pan-O-Rama, to re-invent Saltville as a major tourist attraction. They gathered some of the Civil War-era salt kettles, moved an old log cabin from out of town, got a couple of picnic tables and built Salt Park. They started Salt Theatre for local talent (``People really needed entertainment,'' Totten says) and used hay bales for seats until the county donated old courthouse benches. Merchants set up sidewalk sales to revive the downtown, and the Salina Restaurant started a Friday night fish fry that continues still.
During the shutdown, Charles Norris kept busy helping Olin sell its holdings. He'd left his post as chief of police in 1963 to manage the company's real estate, including 12,000 acres leased to local farmers.
When Olin left in 1972, it deeded 3,500 acres to the town as a gift - except for the two muck ponds and the hydrazine plant, where Olin made rocket fuel for the government. (Later, when the few acres where the mercury-tainted chlorine plant stood landed on the government's Superfund list, the town gave them back to Olin.) Olin gave another 4,000 acres to the state for a wildlife area. The rest of the land was sold.
Olin also gave the town $600,000 over the next four years to make up for the tax loss.
"It was a little empire. I hated to see it go," Norris said.
Ex-Olin workers began finding jobs in neighboring communities: Marion, Abingdon, Pulaski and Bristol - an hour's drive. They organized buses to take workers to the Radford Army Ammunition Plant, staying the week and coming home on weekends. Even with double rent and transportation costs, some workers were making more than they had at Olin, Totten says.
With no local industry, and no desire among its people to leave, Saltville became a bedroom community. It still is.
"Last summer I was trying to get a job and I had to go all the way to Marion," says 17-year-old Dennis Collins, whose family worked for Olin for generations. Collins tried again for a local job this summer, but will wind up back at Food City in Marion, a 45-minute commute.
His classmate, Denise Hayden, also tried to find a summer job in Saltville, but couldn't - not even at the new Subway.
Northwood High School's graduating class averages about 90 students each year. One-third go to Virginia Highlands Community College in Abingdon, 10 go to a four-year college, often to Radford University or Tech, a few join the military, and the rest look for jobs, usually outside Saltville.
According to the 1990 census, 72 percent of Saltvillians commute to jobs outside the town, one-third driving a half-hour or more. Unemployment ran close to 11 percent.
Despite the shutdown, the town's population has barely budged since Olin left - about 2,500 then compared to 2,300 today. Folks just don't want to leave.
"I want to stay as close to home as possible," Hayden says. Everyone is friendly and there's not much crime, but the town needs more fast-food restaurants, she says.
"But not too many," adds Jed Arnold, a rising senior at Northwood. "You'd lose the scenic beauty." Arnold will probably go to community college, then transfer to Radford. But he'll be back home to raise a family. "I want to get a place in the Blue Ridge mountains, that's for sure."
The struggle to survive
In the months and years after the shutdown, Saltville tried hard to draw new business. It formed its own industrial development authority - unusual for a town its size - that exists to this day.
It had Olin's fully operational power plant, another gift, as a trump card for economic development. But few industries needed such massive amounts of energy, and the power plant fell into disrepair. This year, under orders from the the Environmental Protection Agency, Olin will remove asbestos from the structure and dismantle it.
In 1975, a Tazewell mining supply company came in with promises of employing 2,000. It peaked at about 60 before folding a few years later. Another blow, but Saltville struggled on. "They do what they have to do in order to survive, and most people don't complain about it," says Loretta Hodgson, the editor of The Saltville Progress.
"White gravy and pinto beans have saved more people in this valley than anything else," is how Totten puts it.
A few smaller companies came and stayed put. TexasGulf, now PCS Phosphate, moved into Olin's hydrazine plant to make chicken feed additive. T.D. Wheel and then Long-Airdox moved in. And through it all, U.S. Gypsum, just outside the town limits, remained a stabilizing force, employing hundreds to mine gypsum and make wall board.
The latest economic development coup was a deal with Virginia Gas Co. In 1993, the Abingdon company leased 11,000 acres of mineral rights to explore for natural gas. The company also plans to store the equivalent of 100 boxcars full of natural gas in the huge underground cavities in Olin's former high-pressure wellfields.
Some people are concerned about these plans, especially since the Saltville Fault runs near here, although it has long been considered inactive. One young woman whose parents live across from the storage site worries about gas leaks or, worse, explosions. "Sometimes I just feel Saltville's a disaster waiting to happen," she says.
`A permanent solution'
In the northwest corner of Saltville, a chain link fence with barbed wire runs 21/2 miles along the edge of a field, surprisingly flat for these parts. On the other side, the field gives way to a 100-foot drop to the river below. Except for some squat cedars and skinny trees, nothing grows here.
Since 1982, Olin's waste Ponds 5 and 6 have been on the federal government's list of the worst hazardous waste sites in the country.
"There it is. As far as you can see," says Jim Brown, Olin's manager of environmental technology.
The Superfund site covers about 130 acres - bigger than downtown Saltville. The settling ponds are solid enough to drive and walk on, although that's not allowed. During operation, though, the ponds were full of thick ooze. Olin piped about 1,000 tons of muck every day into the ponds, where the liquid would drain into the river and the solids settle to the bottom.
"Our production practices and management practices in the '30s and '40s and '50s, they look pretty barbaric compared to today's standards," Brown says. "Waste was something to be gotten rid of."
Pond 5 operated from 1925 until the shutdown. Some of the mercury-tainted wastewater from the chlorine plant was sent here, although most was dumped in the river. Pond 6 was built in 1963.
In 1970, environmental regulators found mercury pollution at the chlorine plant and in the North Fork of the Holston River, and Virginia and Tennessee outlawed the consumption of fish from the river. Within months, the company announced it would close its Saltville plant.
Mercury was soon discovered in the outfall from the muck ponds, and in 1980, after negotiations with half a dozen government agencies, Olin agreed to dig ditches to control erosion and divert rain water around the ponds.
The company also cleaned the 1,000-foot stretch of river directly below the former chlorine plant, which had been demolished and buried in Pond 6. The river was temporarily diverted, and a backhoe scooped up the contaminated sediment, which was put in a giant plastic bag and buried where the chlorine plant once stood. Brown remembers workers washing the rocks in the riverbed by hand before the river was put back in the channel.
After more EPA studies, Olin agreed in 1986 to cap the four-acre chlorine plant site, dig more drainage ditches around the ponds, and build a special wastewater plant to clean the discharge from Pond 5, which was going directly into the river as recently as 1994 - two decades after the river was declared all but dead due to mercury pollution.
Brown explains that Olin at first did not believe the small amount of mercury in the discharge - 30 parts per billion - was harmful. But years of data showing that the discharge was continuing to poison fish convinced Olin otherwise, he says. Now, the discharge from Pond 5 is piped to the nearby treatment plant, completed last year, and cleaned up to concentrations of just 7 parts per billion or less.
So far, the company has spent $25 million cleaning up in Saltville. It's a lot of money, but only a fraction of the corporation's total budget. Today, Olin Corp.'s factories and subsidiaries span the globe. Annual sales last year topped $3 billion, and employment stands at 13,000 people. Olin's products touch the lives of virtually every American, from the chemical that helps "put the blue in blue jeans," to the chlorine in swimming pools, and materials used in computers and automobiles.
Saltville is one of 34 Superfund sites where Olin has accepted responsibility, not including more than three dozen other polluted sites not on the Superfund list. It has spent at least $245 million in the past three years for clean-up and has budgeted $100 million annually for the next several years.
So, when the EPA told Olin last year that it would cost at least $45 million more to finish the job in Saltville, the company balked. "Olin is committed to an appropriate cleanup at Saltville, but we don't want to spend money that doesn't have any benefit," Olin's Brown says.
After intense negotiation, the EPA okayed Olin's less expensive plan to improve the caps over Ponds 5 and 6. But there's no agreement about what to do at the former chlorine plant site. The EPA wants Olin to dig up the contaminated dirt, truck it to an incinerator to be built on Pond 5, burn the mercury off, and re-bury the dirt. Estimated cost: $14 million.
"I think it's important to keep in mind that we're talking about a permanent solution," says Russell Fish, EPA's project engineer for Saltville. The purpose behind Superfund is not to fence off hazardous sites, but to clean them so they can be used by future generations, even for residential development.
Soil tests in the mid-1970s showed mercury at the site up to 4 parts per million. And groundwater monitoring wells dug in the early '80s have consistently shown contamination, Fish says. In 1990, five of the six wells busted the state limit of 12 parts per trillion for mercury in surface water. "With the numbers we're seeing in the wells, it's not such a stretch of the imagination that it's getting into the river," he says.
After EPA released its plan in January 1995, Olin wrote an open letter to Saltvillians. The incineration idea would be much riskier, the company said, given the truck traffic and vaporized mercury. Instead, Olin proposed adding another cap to the former chlorine plant site, which already had a layer of clay, topsoil and grass. Olin urged residents to write protest letters to the EPA, and even offered to mail the letters.
Several months later, the EPA held an informal meeting to explain its plan and hear from citizens. The feds got an earful.
"That stuff's been under there for some 15, 20 years. It's not bothering anything. Nobody's complaining. The company said if any problems arise, they'll take care of it," said Harry Dunham, a former Olin employee now in his late 80s.
Town Council opposed the plan, as did the editorial page of The Saltville Progress, the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality and hundreds of residents who signed a petition.
Even Fred Dye and Rusty Cahill - the community's self-styled environmentalists and founders of the Mountain Empire Environmental Team - sided with Olin on this one. On the day of the public hearing, the two Saltvillians met for the first time with the two main Olin contacts on the Superfund cleanup, Brown and Keith Roberts, an environmental specialist with Olin.
The four men crowded into an upstairs meeting room at Olin's rented office downtown. Dye and Cahill, both large men, wore jeans and ball caps. Brown and Roberts, both slender, wore striped oxford shirts and glasses. They exchanged a few football pleasantries, then sat down across from each other.
They began with a sort of mutual absolution, acknowledging they were trying to solve problems that had been created well before their time. The tone was friendly. Olin didn't soft-pedal its position or talk down to the MEET members. MEET didn't attack Olin. Instead, they discovered a common foe.
Both sides felt ambushed by the EPA and opposed the incineration plant. MEET said it would pose more danger than leaving the mercury in the ground. Olin said the agency was overzealous.
After the hourlong meeting, the men shook hands.
In September, the EPA deferred a decision on the chlorine plant site. And Olin agreed to dig more groundwater monitoring wells to determine if mercury is seeping into the river, and how much.
As for the muck ponds, Brown figures it'll be at least three years before actual work begins on capping off the ponds. Meanwhile, Saltville lives with the stigma of being a Superfund town.
"They labelled Saltville a pollution dump," Harry Dunham says. "It was bad. What are people going to think? We've had a tough time since the plant went down, as you know."
Mayor Frank "T-Bone" Lewis says his relatives used to ask him, ```Why don't you get out of there?' It devastates you. And the town. You have to tell them, `Hey, it's not that bad.'''
Charlie Bill Totten, the town's tourism director, says that after he's shown visitors the wellfields, the dig site, the Civil War battlefield, Salt Park, the Madam Russell Methodist Church, and talked about how Saltville once had the world's longest aerial tramway and the tallest wooden structure, and how Saltville workers made the hydrazine fuel for the Apollo mission that put the first man on the moon - then, if there's time, he'll show them the muck ponds.
"It's hard to fit it all in," he says, but the typical tourist is curious about this aspect of the town. And Totten obliges. "That's part of our history, and I'll deal with it."
Indeed, outsiders seem a lot more interested in the Superfund clean-up than most of the townfolk do. The day after EPA's public hearing, the talk at TJ's Restaurant touched briefly on the controversy over how to best protect the health of the town's citizens. But soon, the handful of regulars returned to discussing the O.J. Simpson trial.
The town's young people seem even less interested. Dennis Collins, who grew up in Perryville and played on the muck ponds, Jed Arnold and Denise Hayden don't know what a Superfund dump is, or that their hometown has one. They know the EPA has been here, but they're not exactly sure why, and they make jokes about mutant, three-eyed fish in the North Fork of the Holston River.
LENGTH: Long : 317 lines ILLUSTRATION: PHOTO: ERIC BRADY Staff 1. Patsy Jones (left) is one of threeby CNBpeople in Saltville still employed by Olin Corp. She recalls the
exodus of friends and family when the plant closed. 2. Mayor Frank
"T-Bone" Lewis (right photo) says he has to defend Saltville to
relatives who have told him he ought to leave town.
3. The Environmental Protection Agency and Olin Corp. have not
come to an agreement about what to do about the mercury-tainted soil
at the former chlorine site, which is within the green field of the
lower center portion of this photograph.
4. Olin Corp.'s power plant building will be the last of the
Saltville factory buildings to be torn down. Workers are removing
asbestos before the building is demolished.|
5. Salt Park, with Civil War-era salt kettles and an old log
cabin, was part of Saltville's civic plan to re-invent the town as a
major tourist attraction.
6. Charles Mitchell was 45 years old when Olin Corp. announced
its shutdown. He earned his high school equivalency degree by taking
classes in Olin's old computer building (in the background) and
found a good-paying job in Bristol the next year.
7. Northwood High School students and graduates have to look for
jobs outside Saltville. Pictured are (from left) Dennis Collins and
Denise Hayden, from the class of 1996, and Jed Arnold, a rising
senior. color.