The Site That Failed the Test: How North Carolina chose Warren County for its PCB landfill

Governor James B. Hunt Jr. militated for its disposal in predominately African American Warren County as the “best available site.”4 However, scientific criteria, such as the distance from groundwater or likelihood of leaching, did not support his administration’s description of Warren County as the “best” site.
Harriet A. Washington, A Terrible Thing to Waste, 1198

My reflection Every landfill for PCBs in America had to pass a test. The federal rules written under the Toxic Substances Control Act, the 1976 law that gave the EPA power over dangerous chemicals, said the bottom of a PCB landfill had to sit at least fifty feet above the water table, the level underground where the soil is soaked with water (40 CFR 761.75). The idea is simple. If the pit leaks, there should be a lot of dirt between the poison and the water people drink.

The site North Carolina picked in Warren County didn't come close. By the state's own design, the bottom of the pit would sit about seven feet above the groundwater (Warren County v. North Carolina, 1981).
So how did it get picked?

Last issue told the story of the protests. This one is about the decision behind them, and it's quieter and more revealing. After the 1978 roadside dumping, the state looked at more than ninety possible sites in twenty counties. Its own screen was practical: the site had to be near the counties where the oil was spilled, at least sixteen acres, away from crowded areas, and reachable by road. After soil tests, two sites were left, one in Chatham County and one in Warren. The state judged them "essentially equivalent" (U.S. General Accounting Office, 1983, p. 9).

Then the tie was broken. The Chatham site was public land. Residents there objected at a hearing in December 1978, the county withdrew its offer, and the state's attorney general said it couldn't seize the land (GAO, p. 9; UNC Exchange Project). The Warren site was a private farm near Afton, and state historians say the farmer who owned it was in financial distress (NC Department of Natural and Cultural Resources). The federal auditors put it in one line: Warren County was chosen "because it met the evaluative criteria and was available" (GAO, p. 9).

Available. It sounds like a technical word. It isn't. It means the place where nobody with enough power said no.

The state announced the plan on December 20, 1978, days before Christmas. Ken Ferruccio, a college teacher who had recently moved with his wife, Deborah, to a cabin at the end of a dirt road in Warren County, was furious at the timing. "How could anyone form an intelligent judgment," he asked, "based on facts which he couldn't possibly get in a two-week period of time?" (Labalme). On December 26, a hundred people formed Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCB. Ken became its spokesman.

They fought on the state's own ground: science and procedure. At a federal hearing in January 1979, more than seven hundred residents packed the local National Guard armory until 2:30 in the morning (Labalme). They brought in a University of Maryland soil scientist, Charles Mulchi, who concluded that the kaolinite clay at the site, a fine white clay common in the Southeast, couldn't be packed tightly enough to meet the rules for a PCB landfill. His evidence was serious enough that the EPA halted its review and ordered more soil sampling (Warren County v. North Carolina; Labalme).

It didn't matter. The rules contained an escape hatch. The EPA could waive a requirement if it decided the landfill posed no "unreasonable risk" (40 CFR 761.75). On June 4, 1979, it waived the fifty-foot rule and approved the site (Labalme). When residents sued, a federal judge found the agency's decision was not "arbitrary, capricious or otherwise not in accordance with law," the forgiving standard courts use to review agency judgment (Warren County v. North Carolina). The site had failed the test. Then the test was moved.

The state defended its work. The final design included a clay liner, a thick plastic liner, and pipes to collect leachate, the contaminated liquid that seeps out of buried waste (Warren County v. North Carolina). Officials called it the "Cadillac of landfills" (Labalme). The medical historian Harriet A. Washington argues that the scientific criteria never supported the state's description of Warren as the "best" site (A Terrible Thing to Waste, 2019). That's close to right, but the record is subtler. On the state's own checklist, Warren passed. On the federal safety standard, it failed and was excused. And between two sites the state considered equal, the deciding factor wasn't soil at all.

The water came anyway. Before the landfill was capped in late 1982, about 500,000 gallons of rainwater had collected inside it (Labalme). In March 1983, Ken Ferruccio was arrested protesting the state's plan to dispose of that liquid. He refused bail and fasted in jail for nineteen days (UNC Exchange Project). A decade later, the state found about thirteen feet of water, roughly 1.5 million gallons, trapped in the landfill (UNC Exchange Project). I found no source documenting PCBs escaping into groundwater beyond the site, and that matters. But the critics' central worry, water, is exactly what haunted the pit.

In 1998, the same governor who had chosen the site, Jim Hunt, back in office for a second stretch, put $15 million in the state budget to dig it up and destroy the PCBs (UNC Exchange Project). The cleanup finished in 2003.

That is the lesson I take from the test Warren County failed. A standard protects people only as long as nobody can waive it quietly. Once "no unreasonable risk" is a judgment call, the question stops being whether a place is safe. It becomes whose objections count.