Our Road to Walk: Then and Now

In this episode, Ken and Deborah take off their gloves as the chemical war of words rages and is playing out in Warren County as a winner-takes-all battle for the PCB environmental justice narrative.

Currently, the Warren County Environmental Action Team — which includes local, state, federal, EPA and academic-affiliated members, seeks to partner with county commissioners to secure EPA Justice40 community grant monies in o...

The above photo of T. Mitchell Langdon, a Johnston County, North Carolina  farmer, was published in Newsweek magazine on September 6, 1982, with an article titled "Toxic Time Bomb." The photo was taken in 1979 by Fayetteville Observer reporter
James L. Pate, Jr.

In this episode, Deborah and Ken are focusing more closely on what could have been behind the 1978 North Carolina PCB roadside crime, what Governor ...

Photo: At his parent’s home in New Hampshire, Ken works on his manuscript titled: Toxic Aggression, Fighting on the Front Lines: The North Carolina PCB Story
 (October, 1980).
 

In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to share with their listeners the events of 1980 as they relate to their PCB situation in particular and as the events relate to the larger hazardous waste issue in North Carolina and across the cou...

In this late December, 2023, Podcast Episode 30, Deborah and Ken break from their chronological narrative in order to recognize and celebrate the 45th anniversary of the actual birth of the Warren County environmental justice movement. They follow the extraordinary events that take place in Warren County in late December, 1978, and early 1979, after citizens learn the Hunt Administration plans to bury the roadsides PCBs in Warren C...

In this episode, the Warrenton Rotary Club invites Ken to speak about the PCB problem. Citizens are really concerned about Warren County becoming a PCB and toxic waste dumping grounds. Ken presents his analysis titled: “PCBs: Issues Without Answers,” and Attorney Frank Banzet suggests that Ken shares his PCB analysis with the candidates running for governor.

Ken then sends his analysis to the three 1980 gubernatorial cand...

Photo: William Sanjour, Former Branch Chief of EPA's Division of Hazardous Waste Disposal, warned in the late 1970s that reducing the scope of Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) industrial hazardous waste disposal regulations would be devastating.  He became an EPA whistleblower, speaking out about the dangers of weak and non-existent regulations of chemicals and predicting the horrific chemical age in which we now ...

This episode continues to follow the first year of the Warren County, North Carolina PCB landfill opposition and the making of the environmental justice movement that is taking place in 1979. The local narrative is very much a national EPA narrative. PCBs in North Carolina, and EPA regulations in Washington, D.C. are the battle grounds.

EPA is turning hazardous waste regulations into a license to pollute, and the battle i...

Photo: Screenshot of EPA Whistleblower William Sanjour, 
“They Blew the Whistle at Work Then Paid the Price,” Phil Donahue Television Show,
February 28, 1996. Video Archives, YouTube.

In this episode, Ken and Deborah ask their listeners why they should care about the seeming web of toxic waste relationships taking place back in the summer and fall of 1979 in a backwoods part of the rural South.

This epi...

In this episode, Ken and Deborah receive alarming information from two reliable inside sources about a connection in the planning stages between Soul City and the proposed Afton PCB landfill site. Ken shares the information concerning the connection with Concerned Citizens committee members who advise him that he needs to share the information with the public through the news media.

In addition to waste generated by indus...

Photo: Secretary of Crime Control and Public Safety Herbert Hyde:
                Was he "in good faith?"

On the heels of threats to Ken’s life and the break-in at the Ferruccio cabin,
Ken examines his contradictory leadership position as a proponent of non-violent civil disobedience who felt it necessary to protect himself and Deborah with arms. 

In the aftermath of the statewide publicity about...

For once, the EPA uses the precautionary principle — something the Agency seldom applies to its decisions. Since January, 1979, the Hunt Administration has been looking to delay the EPA’s decision on the PCB landfill in Warren County and has been pretending to seriously consider the in-place carbon treatment of the roadside PCBs. Then the Agency decides to require a 50-year study of PCBs treated in-place with carbon.

It co...

What should have been a slam dunk by the Hunt Administration to bury the roadside PCBs in Warren County by March or April of 1979, weather permitting, has been anything but that. Apparently, Governor Hunt had been so confident that he would bury the PCBs in Warren County, that he warned citizens there that public sentiment would not deter the state from burying the PCBs in Warren County.

His strong-armed warning only serv...

In this episode, Ken goes to Johnston County with Wallace Neal in the PCB truck to protest the state’s testing of the Weber plan to see if carbon can be used to treat the roadside PCBs in place. However, it is highly unlikely that the EPA will approve the carbon treatment plan which has only been studied in the lab and that will require perpetually monitoring 270 miles of highway shoulders.

Ken decides to have a little fun...

In this episode, the meeting with Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs delegates  and  EPA Office of Toxic Substances officials continues.  Delegates discuss EPA’s hazardous waste disposal regulations and express their skepticism.

They have every reason to believe that Warren County’s future is in peril. Their groundwater is at best about seven feet deep, and now the EPA is going to permit hazardous landfills t...

In this episode, a delegation of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs meets with EPA officials to find out if the rumor is true that the EPA is going to drop the 50 foot required distance between the bottom of a toxic waste landfill to only 5 feet. They learn that the agency does plan to drop this regulation, and they learn much more.

Throughout the meeting, delegates express their skepticism and distrust of th...

In this episode we are returning to our Warren County PCB landfill narrative as the history is unfolding in January and February, 1979. Why should our listeners care about what happened forty-four years ago? Because the Warren County PCB landfill history is actually a history of the EPA’s war of toxic aggression, and to know this history is to understand (as EPA whistleblower William Sanjour put it) “how the EPA was captured by the...

Nearly two-thousand years ago, the Emperor Nero played music and partied as he watched 70% of Rome burn to the ground. Today, we are metaphorically watching Rome burn as our environment and health are assaulted again and again by pollution from loosely-regulated petrochemical and related industries, causing communities to be poisoned, global temperatures to rise, and climate disasters to worsen.

Three times in recent month...

In this episode, we’re pausing our historical narrative of the Warren County PCB history to focus on the horrific February 3, 2023 Norfolk Southern Railroad train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.  Eleven train cars spilled 115,580 gallons of toxic vinyl chloride and other chemicals, including benzene, on the ground, and the chemicals were then deliberately burned off in order to avoid an explosion.

Described as an ...

On January 18, 1979, we recorded and later transcribed our meeting with Governor Hunt. This episode is based on the transcript of that recording.

In this Part 2 of the Warren County delegation to Governor Hunt, Warren representatives continue to make their case against the PCB landfill perfectly clear to Governor Hunt.

Larry Limer queries the Governor hard on the PCB landfill site selection criteria, and 
Henr...