With the doors damaged, the toxic chemicals they were supposed to contain within the ovens leaked out at an accelerated rate. - environment environmentalimpact
After a close business associate suddenly had to offload his Birmingham coke plant in 2019, the Justices bought the decrepit facility, which would prove to be a ready-made customer for the coal their company mined in several Appalachian states.
The health department was considering a fine of nearly $600,000, a penalty that’s small compared to fines that regulators in other states have issued for similar infractions but large by Jefferson County’s standards.Birmingham-area industrial sources over the previous decade. Instead of finalizing a settlement that would’ve fined Bluestone, though, Jefferson County scrapped it.
Bluestone appealed the decision to deny its permit renewal and was initially able to stay open, releasing toxic chemicals into the surrounding communities well into the fall. But repeated problems with its equipment forced Bluestone to idle its coke ovens last October.ProPublica has learned that the Jefferson County Board of Health and Bluestone recently entered talks to settle the lawsuit.
Bluestone attorney Robert Fowler, who declined to answer ProPublica’s questions, wrote in an email that the company is committed to “achieving compliance with all local, state, and federal environmental laws.” The chronic problems with the plant have spurred Birmingham Mayor Randall Woodfin to draft an unprecedented and as-yet-unfunded plan to buy out and relocate hundreds of neighboring residents.
He pointed toward the far end of the nearly 1-acre lot containing several homes belonging to his family, at the five-bedroom brick house where he had grown up, just 600 feet from Bluestone’s front gates. The neighborhood where Mabry once played in the streets and where his family gardened vegetables is now filled with abandoned homes and vacant lots.
Mabry’s older brother, Charles, who had worked at the 35th Avenue coke plant, brought truckloads of that dirt home to level their yard. “My five grandkids, that’s my whole pride and joy,” Mabry said. But it’s still not an easy decision. “It will hurt me. All my memories are here.” In 1883, Sloss told lawmakers that he relegated Black people to those positions because they had more of “a fondness for” that kind of work than white people did.
The investors boosted production so much that by the early 20th century the amount of iron forged in Alabama surpassed that of Pennsylvania. But after a Sloss-Sheffield executive was arrested for defying the ordinance, local industrialists pressured the commissioners into weakening the restriction and convinced state lawmakers to strip the city of its power to limit industrial pollution.
The year after World War II ended, a 22-year-old dockworker named John Powe came home from overseas and headed to Birmingham to find a job that would support his growing family. In response, Sloss-Sheffield vowed to lower emissions. But those voluntary efforts failed to protect workers, who were found to have “high disease and death rates,” according to a 1946 report published by health officials in Jefferson County.
The particles also landed on neighbors’ cars, leaving a fine layer of soot that covered the hoods like pollen in the spring. While Black residents fought to desegregate the city, many white families moved “over the mountain,” to suburbs with safer air. As Marvin Gaye’s environmental anthem “Mercy Mercy Me ” was broadcast over radios nationwide , editors at the Birmingham Post-Herald printed a front-page “pollution count” tracker that told families like the Powes and the Mabrys how much toxic air they would breathe.
Over the next five years, the quality of Birmingham’s air dramatically improved. But a pocket of toxic emissions stubbornly remained along the city's north side, in part because of the coke ovens so close to Mabry’s and Powe’s homes. In 1990, President George H. W. Bush signed into law an overhaul of the Clean Air Act that mandated stronger emissions controls but granted coke plants three decades to meet the full requirements of the tougher law. And in the final week of President Bill Clinton’s term in 2001, the EPA loosened controls on pollution from coke plants.
The exhaust hood typically minimizes toxic emissions. Below it, a rail car, which carries hot coke away from ovens, has two broken panels — letting emissions bypass the hood directly above.By the early 2000s, the EPA acknowledged in a report to Congress that federal regulations alone wouldn’t stop toxic air pollution in Birmingham and other cities considered America’s worst hot spots.
“The businesses moved out, then the people moved out,” said John Henry Powe, who relocated 10 miles northeast to the suburb of Center Point. “People wanted better.” That testing found concerning levels of toxic contaminants, including arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, at roughly two dozen of those sites.
Given the legacy of the industrial corridor, he urged EPA officials in 2011 to get other companies “to the table to discuss any cleanup.” A lawyer working with Drummond’s vice president used information collected by Robinson to draft talking points, which Republican officials used to publicly oppose the NPL designation.
That winter, EPA contractors excavated the soil around a red brick house owned by lifelong Collegeville resident Jimmy Smith. The 82-year-old had worked for U.S. Pipe, which had once owned the 35th Avenue coke plant, for more than four decades. Six months after EPA contractors excavated Smith’s yard, Walter Coke's parent company filed for bankruptcy.
However, as Hansen drove through Collegeville in the ensuing months, he could smell the scent of burning rubber and mothballs, telltale signs of coke oven emissions. The sight of plumes of smoke became so common that GASP staffers sent complaints to the health department. Yet once COVID-19 swept the nation, the company applied for PPP loans, claiming that it would protect the jobs of more than 150 people. ProPublica’sshows that federal officials approved $4.6 million in loans and eventually forgave the full amount.The plant’s purchasing manager, meanwhile, said in a deposition that he was told to ask 50 contractors if they would accept reduced payments for services they had already performed.
“When essential services started disappearing, like toilet paper in the bathrooms, I prepared for the worst.” Shortly after Bluestone arrived in Birmingham, Hansen’s group found evidence of two chemicals often released by coke plants, benzene and naphthalene, at levels that elevated cancer risk. Following Jefferson County’s denial of Bluestone’s permit in August 2021, a leader with the economic development nonprofit Birmingham Business Alliance emailed health department regulators on Bluestone’s behalf to find a way to “resolve their problems regarding air quality.”
He pleaded for the judge to act in a way that would avoid the “permanent loss” of jobs for hard-working Alabamans. Plaintiffs including miners and the U.S. Department of Justice have won judgments or forced settlements worth more than $128 million against the family’s companies, according to a 2020Mounting debts slowed the company’s progress to reopen the Birmingham plant. In the three years since the Justices bought the plant, vendors have sued Bluestone for more than $8 million over unpaid bills for equipment, utilities and services provided.
Stan Meiburg, a former EPA Acting Deputy Administrator who now runs Wake Forest University’s Center for Energy, Environment, and Sustainability, said the proposed $850,000 settlement is a “steep discount” from a maximum penalty that exceeds $60 million. “Bluestone should never be given another permit,” said one coke plant expert familiar with the plant’s operations, who did not want to be named out of fear of retribution. “It’s bad for residents. It’s bad for workers. Nobody would win except for Bluestone.”
That house, along with his childhood home and several other structures on the property, would cost about $350,000 to replace, according to his homeowners insurance policy. But when he recently got an appraisal on his property, it was valued at around $75,000. After seeing the neighborhood remain in that condition for that long, Woodfin wanted to do more as mayor. He said his staff has since crafted a $37 million blueprint known as “The 60-page document, which has not yet been released to the public, calls for more than $19 million to pay for property buyouts within the Superfund site.
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