Something in the Water
For 14 years, Diamont Boart illegally dumped industrial waste out the plant's back door, right into the Royal Pines neighborhood. Now residents there want to know why 33 of their wells are contaminated, and why so many of their family members are dying.
BY ALEX TODOROVIC
George Shaw was the first Royal Pines resident to raise questions
about the neighborhood's water in the late 1980s. Shaw complained of
rashes and viruses, said he could no longer use his swimming pool, and
took showers as quickly as possible.
Shaw's complaints started people talking, and he eventually gained the
status of community spokesperson in the Royal Pines subdivision, a
community of about 300 residences, mostly mobile homes, located off U.S.
1 near Spring Valley High School in Columbia.
Mosell Nunery, a resident retired from the State Printing Company,
started buying her drinking water by the gallon from Winn Dixie.
"I knew there was something wrong with my water because it smelled and
it turned the sink and bathtub green," she said. "When I bathed in it, I
broke out in a rash. I bet I spent hundreds and hundreds of dollars at a
Columbia skin clinic trying to find out what caused it and they never
could pinpoint it."
William Hall, 37, moved to Royal Pines in 1989, and it changed his
life. "I started getting skin rashes after I moved in and then I started
spitting up blood," he said. "I went to two or three doctors and they
couldn't figure out what was wrong with me. My stomach was sick all the
time."
Neighborhood resident Pauline Driver remembered: "My skin broke out
and itched. My daughter-in-law who lives next door, she'd take a bath and
itch so bad she couldn't stand it."
Joyce Martin's two young, healthy dogs, one a Rotweiler and the other
a Doberman, died inexplicably about a year apart. "They just got sick real
suddenly," she said. "I took them to Clemson Experimental Station. Their
intestines just exploded. The guy at the experimental station said he had
never seen anything like it."
Shaw and others called the Department of Health and Environmental
Control (DHEC) to complain and to inquire about the activities of local
industries that could contaminate the groundwater.
In the fall of 1990, DHEC began a two-year process of water testing,
which led to the discovery of an elongated plume of contamination,
primarily along two streets in Royal Pines Fore Ave. and Wynette Way.
The final results of the investigation: 33 wells had detectable levels
of either tetrachloroethylene (PCE) or trichloroethylene (TCE), both
considered probable carcinogens. Thirteen wells had levels of those
chemicals that exceeded the maximum level established by the Environmental
Protection Agency.
Other goodies found in the water included a wicked brew of
dichlorobenzene, methylene chloride, trichloro-fluoromethane,
dichloroethene, dichloro-fluoromethane and chloroform, some of which are
suspected carcinogens.
Residents of the area began receiving letters from DHEC informing them
of the levels of contamination found in their wells and advising some that
"this department recommends that you not use your well water for drinking
or cooking."
DHEC also promised to look into the matter. "This investigation will
include an effort to determine the responsible party or parties."
Five years later, DHEC has yet to solve this puzzle.
For some people in the neighborhood, the contamination wasn't a big
mystery. Diamant Boart America Inc., located only 360 feet from a Royal
Pines home, was the closest manufacturing plant in the area.
Shaw had snooped around Diamant Boart's property in the '80s and had
seen things that didn't look right. He took his neighbor and friend, Harry
Martin, to show him the barrels of waste sitting out back.
Then Shaw and Martin learned from a Diamant Boart employee that dozens
of barrels of hazardous waste were buried on the property and that other
waste had been dumped on the property of a Diamant Boart employee in
Elgin. They called DHEC with this information more than once, but couldn't
get the state agency to act. In fact, the hazardous waste drums buried
behind Diamant Boart would not be unearthed for years.
"Then people started dying," recalled Joyce Martin. "We just noticed
all of a sudden that there were a lot more deaths and illnesses in this
small community than was the norm."
The Koon family lost a member in 1990 to stomach cancer, as did the
McElveen household. Lee King died of a brain tumor. And the Nunery's
household lost two family members.
"My brother passed on in 1991," Nunery said. "He died of cancer. It
went all through him. Then in 1992, my husband accidentally shot himself.
He had chronic diarrhea for three years. They never could find out what
had caused it. He had been to every stomach specialist that we could think
of."
The Martins, Shaw, Hall and others started campaigning to bring city
water into the neighborhood, but this was a difficult task for a community
with sparse resources.
As the only household in Royal Pines with city water, the Martins were
fortunate. They lived closest to U.S. 1, and Harry Martin had run pipes to
tap into the city water main in 1978. Four years later, he had a well
built for his wife as a birthday present. They preferred the well water,
and stopped using city water altogether until DHEC's advisory letters
arrived.
After the contamination was discovered, the Martin's city water was
the only source of safe drinking water in the area. The Martins had two
hoses in their front yard for people to fill their jugs. Eventually, the
county installed a water spigot on the adjacent lot.
In the spring of 1992, things took a tragic turn in the Martin
household. Harry Martin was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer. A short time
later, their neighbor from across the street, Smiley Burnette, was
diagnosed with the same disease.
"Smiley came over and visited my husband and saw my husband's tubes
and he knew that he had the same thing," Joyce Martin said. "They were
going to put tubes in him and he didn't want that."
Burnette killed himself before his illness progressed to Martin's
level of suffering. Harry Martin died in December 1992, several weeks
after Burnette's suicide.
Before he died, Martin filed a civil suit against Diamant Boart
America. "Harry knew they had killed him just as sure as if they had
walked in the back door and shot him," his wife said. "They're owned by a
company in Belgium. That is a clean country over there. You go over there
and throw anything on the ground, you're in trouble. So they come over
here and mess up ours. Harry made me promise, Honey, whatever you do, you
follow through with this lawsuit'."
Joyce Martin's civil suit against Diamant Boart America Inc.
concluded last month, with a jury finding Diamant Boart guilty of
trespass.
The jury awarded Joyce Martin $35,000 in property damages and $1
million in punitive damages, although it could not determine that Harry
Martin's cancer was a direct result of the chemicals found in his well.
It is difficult to prove a direct causal relationship in these cases
because of the difficulty in answering basic questions: how much will a
person's risk of cancer increase from exposure to a certain amount of a
chemical that is classified as a probable carcinogen, and how long must
this exposure occur? Scientists themselves don't have definitive answers
to these questions, although all agree that ingesting carcinogens on a
regular basis increases the risk of cancer.
What is clear, however, is that Diamant Boart lied through its teeth.
During the trial, Diamant Boart officials denied ever using TCE, one of
the chemicals found in Royal Pines, except in spray cans.
But attorneys for the plaintiffs Fedor, Massey, Whitlark and
Ballou presented witness Frederick W. Nash who, as a sales representative
from Ashland Chemical, sold the company 15,000 pounds of TCE in 1978 alone
and had the sales records to prove it.
And a Diamant Boart employee admitted lying on a DHEC document stating
that the company did not generate hazardous waste. So went much of the
trial.
The main point of contention during the trial was the direction the
groundwater flowed and the possibility of water "mounding." Everyone
agreed that the groundwater flowed in a south to southeasterly direction,
while the Royal Pines subdivision was directly to the east. Diamant Boart
argued that it could not have possibly contaminated the well water in
Royal Pines because it wasn't directly in the path of the groundwater
flow.
Attorneys for the plaintiffs presented a hydrogeologist who explained
the scientifically accepted phenomenon of "mounding," when large
quantities of water are dumped in an area that changes the direction of
groundwater flow.
Diamant Boart's million-dollar expert hydrogeologist witness agreed
that this was possible, as did Judy Canova, a DHEC hydrogeologist. The
assertion could not be conclusively proven, however, because Diamant Boart
stopped dumping massive amounts of water in 1989, and water flow tests
were conducted years later, after any potential mounding had disappeared.
The testimony of current and former Diamant Boart employees, along
with the company's own environmental records, or lack thereof, paints a
picture of a company that came to South Carolina's "business-friendly
environment" to hold a pollution orgy. Diamant Boart saved more than $50
million in hazardous disposal fees by dancing figure eights over
environmental laws.
More disturbing still was DHEC's comatose response towards an
egregious violator of the law. From the day Diamant Boart opened its doors
in 1976 as Wheel Trueing, the company left a trail of illness and deceit.
Diamant Boart, owned by a Belgian company, relocated its Cincinnati
plant in 1976 to Two Notch Road. The company manufactured industrial
diamond-edged mining equipment, employing about 240 people.
In March of 1976 the company submitted to DHEC a preliminary
engineering report, referred to as the Gilbert Report, which proposed
three alternate methods for disposal of industrial waste water. DHEC
approved two of those methods.
The plant looked good on paper. It would use a double filtration
system on contaminated contact cooling water which would then be reused in
cooling systems.
The company submitted another engineering report in 1977 that
described a closed system for treating process effluent. Hazardous water
generated from the nickel plating process and metallurgical laboratory was
to be stored in a 5,000-gallon tank and reused in diamond reclaiming
operations.
The two engineering reports, unfortunately, bore no semblance to
reality. The company had no filtration system and simply dumped everything
on the ground. The company was required by law to have a National
Pollutant Discharge Elimination System permit (NPDES) to dump water that
would eventually enter the water table.
Former employees described the wanton disregard for health and
environmental regulations. By the company's own admission, 12,400 gallons
a day of unfiltered contact cooling water were discharged through a drain
at the bottom of a hill behind the plant, creating what employees referred
to as the "cesspool" or the "shithole."
Phyllis Ross, who worked at the plant from 1976 until 1984,
remembered, "It was like a swamp down in there. Nothing grew. It was
dead."
Sylvester Coaxum, 44, worked at the plant from its opening until 1983
as an electro-plater in the take-out department. Coaxum's department was
the location of temporary 60-gallon disposal vats where people came from
different departments to dump their waste. The vats ran into a 500 gallon
sump, a cement hole in the ground, which then fed a 5,000-gallon tank,
referred to as Tank A.
In reality, Tank A could not handle the volume of waste that was
generated, and overflowed on a regular basis, sending streams of waste
flowing down a grassy hill out back.
Coaxum was instructed to drain the entire 5,000-gallon tank containing
acids, solvents, and degreasers directly behind the plant where it would
flow into the ground.
"On three occasions, I was the waste truck'," he said. "On other
occasions I would come to work Monday morning and the waste truck' had
come and gone."
The hazardous material from Tank A should have been hauled off by a
waste disposal company, yet John Howard Allen, who was appointed
environmental manager at the plant in the mid-'80s, admitted that the
company had absolutely no records of hazardous waste disposal before the
end of 1986.
He also said that Diamant Boart did not have a required NPDES permit
to dump water because, "We didn't know we needed one." He acknowledged
that the company's files on environmental matters consisted of few pages.
Sandra Belton, who worked in take-out with Coaxum, said that she and
others frequently tossed buckets of waste directly outside the door.
Coaxum explained, "It was convenient to dump stuff out the back door.
None of us were chemists, none of us knew any better." Coaxum disposed of
rotting drums of waste by rolling them down the hill behind the plant
where they were left to disintegrate.
At one point during the Martin trial, a Diamant Boart attorney argued
that the water in the sump may have been rain water. Coaxum responded,
"Cats and dogs don't die from rain water."
He later explained, "I found the carcasses of cats, dogs and birds in
and around my sump. It was a standing joke at the plant, You find
anything dead this morning?'"
When the sump contained too much sludge, Coaxum was sent in to dredge
it up. "They put a rope around me and dressed me in a monkey suit. That's
when I said, Sylvester, enough is enough.' There's only so much I'll do
for a pay check." How much pay ? "I started there at $5 an hour and when
I left I was making $6 something," Coaxum said.
The plant showed a total disregard for employee safety. A former
manager who spoke on condition of anonymity said, "They were slack about
enforcing health and safety regulations for employees. People would not
wash their hands, nor wear gloves or glasses. There was no effort to
educate employees because it was not yet required by OSHA.
"When someone raised a concern, it was difficult to get a message
across. In retrospect, I think I should have been more vehement. Trying to
do the right thing can be difficult."
The company took advantage of employees' ignorance of hazardous
material. "I had no experience in working with any chemicals. I was
totally ignorant," Coaxum said.
"When I mixed nitric acid and calcium nitrate and put a piece of metal
in there, beautiful orange clouds would rise out of the vats. There were
times you could barely see me through the orange fumes. On days with a low
cloud cover when we had a lot of work, you could see orange halos around
the parking lot."
Coaxum did not first realize that his job was hazardous to his health,
but over time he realized what was happening.
"I was told by my immediate supervisor to get out while I still had a
chance," Coaxum said. "He told me that it wasn't worth it, that I had been
exposed long enough to the contamination, cut my losses and leave. I hit
the clock and left."
He was 33 years old when he quit, became sterile and went through a
period of impotency. "When I left there, I didn't go complaining to
anyone, or seeking restitution," he said. "I just took it like it was part
of the job and I was the loser. I can't undo what's been done. I've
accepted the fact that my health is ruined, but I don't go around laboring
the issue. I take it day by day."
City water records show that between 1976 and 1989 Diamant Boart
used, on average, 8.5 million gallons of water a year. The plant was not
connected to a sewer system, and had no permit aside from an approved
septic tank.
Twenty years later, after groundwater has been polluted and nearby
wells condemned, residents of adjacent communities are left wondering how
such a thing could happen.
The answers, or lack thereof, can be found in those four familiar
letters that have come to represent regulatory meltdown: DHEC.
For the first few years that Diamant Boart was in operation, there is
no evidence that DHEC bothered to visit the site.
On March 17, 1982, a DHEC official met with the company to discuss
cooling water discharges from the plant. The following day DHEC sent a
letter asking for an analysis to be taken of contact cooling water, along
with estimates of discharges, and that this information "should be
included in your NPDES permit application."
Diamant Boart ignored this correspondence and DHEC, inexplicably,
dropped the matter.
In February 1983, Bryce Haywood, a senior manufacturing engineer with
Diamant Boart, signed a legally binding DHEC document stating that the
company did not handle hazardous waste in 1981 or 1982.
After 1980, when the federal Resources Conservation and Recovery Act
was implemented, any company generating hazardous waste had to inform
DHEC.
On the witness stand at the Martin trial, Haywood admitted that the
document was an outright lie. As a matter of fact, 1982 was the year 54
drums of hazardous waste were secretly buried in Diamant Boart's backyard.
Nobody will ever know what, exactly, was in those drums because the
contents leeched into the ground. In 1994, when the drums were unearthed,
27 of them were found to contain cadmium, which affects brain development.
In April 1986, a DHEC air quality control official, Larry Boland,
investigated a complaint of a yellow noxious cloud at the plant. Boland
noted that Diamant Boart had no permits to discharge water and sent a
letter, dated April 15, 1986. As in the previous DHEC letter of 1982,
Boland's letter asked for specific information regarding the amount and
content of water discharges at the plant.
This second DHEC letter contained understatements like, "It was
determined that the previous engineering report does not address exactly
what is taking place at the facility."
Diamant Boart responded to this second letter by providing an analysis
of Tank A, but said nothing about water discharges.
DHEC did what any serious regulatory agency would do; it sent another
letter. This third letter, dated Sept. 2, 1986, asked for the same
information. The company never responded.
Boland handed the matter over to enforcement where it lay dormant for
a few more years.
In 1987, Diamant Boart hired an environmental consulting firm, G&E
Engineering, to address environmental problems at the plant and to solicit
suggestions as to how they might be remedied.
The report the firm issued found numerous sources of "potentially
significant soil and groundwater contamination" and strongly recommended
that the plant "go to a zero discharge system." In other words, stop
dumping waste water into the environment immediately.
The report also recommended a training program for employees, and
noted "solvents are within a few feet of heat sources waste containers are
not labeled there is no program for the management of waste."
The gist of the report was that the company was doing nearly nothing
in accordance with environmental law.
DHEC's somnambulent attitude toward Diamant Boart went on until late
1989. The company finally submitted an application for an NPDES permit in
May, 14 years after opening about the same time Royal Pines residents were
getting sick.
DHEC issued a Rule to Show Cause in September 1989, and the company
was reigned in. City water records show that the company's water usage
plummeted at the end of 1989.
In January 1990, DHEC fined Diamant Boart $4,000 (four thousand
dollars and zero cents) for operating without a permit for 14 years.
When DHEC finally issued Diamant Boart's NPDES permit, it granted the
company permission to discharge a limited amount of wastewater "to
receiving waters named unnamed tributary to Spears Creek.' " This so
called "unnamed tributary" was created by Diamant Boart's dumping of
massive amounts of water for 14 years. The "tributary" to Spear
"Harry knew they had killed him just as sure as if they had walked in the back door and shot him. Harry made me promise, 'Honey, whatever you do, you follow through with this lawsuit.'"
Joyce Martin
"I found the carcasses of cats, dogs and birds in and around my sump. It was a standing joke at the plant, 'You find anything dead this morning?'"
Sylvster Coaxum, former Diamont Boart worker
