
DATE: Wednesday, June 4, 1997               TAG: 9706040450

SECTION: FRONT                   PAGE: A1   EDITION: FINAL  

SOURCE: BY ANGELITA PLEMMER, STAFF WRITER 

DATELINE: PORTSMOUTH                        LENGTH:  119 lines

CORRECTION/CLARIFICATION: The Southeastern Public Service Authority trash-to-energy plant is on Victory Boulevard in Portsmouth. A front-page story Wednesday about SPSA had a wrong street name. Correction published, Thursday, June 5, 1997. p.A2 *********** NO ONE KNOWS WHY BODIES KEEP TURNING UP AT SPSA SEVEN SINCE 1991, AND THE EXPERTS ARE STYMIED: OTHER TRASH PLANTS DON'T SEE THIS.

The workers were sorting through garbage traveling along a conveyor belt at a trash-to-energy plant on Airline Boulevard when they made a gruesome discovery: a woman's partially nude, battered and bruised body.

It was about 7:30 a.m. May 12. Officials called police and summoned Durwood Curling, executive director of the Southeastern Public Service Authority, which operates the plant.

It was not the first time Curling has gotten such a call.

Since 1991, there have been seven bodies - four adults and three infants.

For Curling, the sight is still unnerving. ``I will never get over seeing that lady on top of that conveyor,'' he said of the most recent victim, Tonya Renee Brooks.

The SPSA statistics puzzle industry experts, who know of no other incinerator plant where so many bodies have shown up. In fact, it is rare for bodies to turn up at all at the other 16 plants in North America where refuse is sorted manually.

``I've never heard of a plant having that kind of a record,'' said Stephen Yianakopolos, director of policy and communication for Ogden Martin, an industry leader in waste-to-energy technology.

``That's an amazing number,'' he said. ``If you think about how many thousands of waste disposal sites there are, it doesn't happen every month or every year.''

The bodies have also confounded local authorities, who have yet to determine how most of the bodies got to the plant. No arrests have been made in any of the cases, and the three babies have never been identified.

``We certainly want to solve all of the cases,'' said Amber Whittaker, a spokeswoman for the Portsmouth Police Department. ``We're just working with every clue that we can.''

But for at least one of the victims' survivors, bringing the killer to justice will never be enough to erase the pain of finding a loved one's body in a trash pile.

``It's very degrading,'' said Saundra Mayo, a close family friend of Brooks. ``Nobody deserved anything like that - to be thought of as trash.''

Officials at the plant say are powerless to stop the trend.

``There's not a thing we can do,'' said Curling, president of the Solid Waste Association of North America. ``We're at the mercy of what you put in your garbage.''

The SPSA plant is one of 17 refuse-derived fuel plants operating throughout the United States, Canada and Mexico that convert garbage into energy. It receives waste produced by more than 1 million people in in Hampton Roads, surrounding counties and the Eastern Shore. The plant processes between 900,000 and 1 million tons of garbage a year, Curling said. Energy produced by the incinerated garbage is used to power Norfolk Naval Shipyard in Portsmouth.

``By national standards, we are a relatively large agency,'' Curling said. ``We're one of the top two or three regional authorities in the country.''

Other facilities acknowledge that bodies occasionally show up, but not as often as in Portsmouth.

At Ogden Martin Systems of Fairfax, a privately owned facility, officials suspect that a body went through the incinerator after a murder suspect confessed to dumping a body in the trash.

``It's strongly suspected that a body has gone through the plant because of a murder trial and conviction,'' said Fairfax County spokeswoman Joyce Doughtie. ``We never did find the body, although someone confessed.''

Officials at the Solid Waste Authority in West Palm Beach, Fla., which operates a plant similar in size and operation to SPSA, say they have never recovered a body since the plant opened in 1989, the year after the SPSA plant began operating.

``That's very odd to have bodies showing up like that,'' said Linda Hodgkins, a spokeswoman for the plant. ``The only way they're going to be able to figure out where the waste is coming from . . . is to inspect every load that is coming in on those trucks, and they're not going to be able to do that.''

Curling said he has no explanation for why the SPSA plant has become a dumping ground for dead bodies. He said that because SPSA is committed to reclaiming recyclables, workers are extremely thorough in sorting the trash.

Such thorough inspection is necessary at refuse-derived fuel plant like SPSA, Curling said, because all recyclable garbage must be sorted out to produce fuel from the nonrecyclable garbage.

At mass burn plants, like the 28 run by Ogden Martin Corp. across the country, the garbage is taken directly to a plant, where it is burned in an incinerator.

``We do not handle the garbage as much as a refuse-derived fuel plant handles their garbage,'' Yianakopolos said, ``but we look through our garbage to see things that are unacceptable to our burners.

``But what can you do to stop somebody from disposing of themselves or their victims in a dumpster or a garbage truck? I guess a dumpster is just a convenient place.'' ILLUSTRATION: Graphic

THE TOLL SO FAR

Seven bodies have been discovered at the Southeastern Public Service

Authority plant on Victory Boulevard in Portsmouth since 1991. June

1991: Janice Lee. The Chesapeake woman's dismembered torso was found

amid the trash. It had no head, only one hand, no fingers and no

legs. The body was identified using X-rays.

March 1993: John Lewis, 51, of Suffolk. His body was discovered at

the plant. Police said he had been crushed inside a trash-compacting

truck in Norfolk.

December 1994: James A. Brown. The body of the 37-year-old Virginia

Beach man was found among trash moving along a conveyor belt.

February 1995: ``Baby Angel Valentine.'' Police believe she was