Industry, lack of accountability permanently poison North Birmingham neighborhoods

To live in North Birmingham is to live surrounded by pollution.

From her home in Harriman Park, Keisha Brown can see it hanging as a haze in the air. In Collegeville, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has found it in the soil the very neighborhood was built on. On the waters of Five Mile Creek, Black Warrior Riverkeeper Nelson Brooke finds it seeping into the river from nearby industrial plants.

Despite cleanup efforts by the EPA, some residents believe the neighborhoods are too deeply polluted to ever recover their health or economic opportunities.

“Give my people some relief,” said former Collegeville resident Charlie Powell.

`THE HEALTH OF A NEIGHBORHOOD

North Birmingham has been dotted with industrial facilities for decades, producing cement, coke, steel, iron and other materials. The activity in these facilities produces toxic pollutants, which can escape into the air, soil and water, whether by accident or through negligence.

Some of those pollutants — including lead, arsenic and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (a group of chemicals, also known as PAHs, found in coal, crude oil and gasoline) — seeped into soil that was later used to fill and level the ground under buildings in the North Birmingham neighborhoods of Collegeville, Harriman Park and Fairmont.

Unknowingly, residents carried these toxic chemicals into their homes on the soles of their shoes or through the vegetables they grew in their backyards.

“That to me is a sad way to live,” Brown said.

Those who have lived in these communities for many years have long lists of friends and family who have gotten sick or died of cancer, respiratory problems and other diseases. Powell has buried three family members due to cancer in the last year. His wife and his sister are both battling cancer now.

“The people in the neighborhood are dying,” he said.

Powell created People Against Neighborhood Industrial Contamination (PANIC) in 2012 to spread awareness.

Because of the contaminated soil underneath North Birmingham’s communities, the EPA declared the area a Superfund. Since then, the EPA has been sampling properties and cleaning and replacing contaminated soil.

EPA on-site coordinator Subash Patel said the agency has sampled around 2,030 properties out of the 2,100 within the boundaries of the 35th Avenue Superfund site. Of those, around 669 required cleanup. As of July, Patel said the EPA had cleaned up 643 of them.

Last year, the EPA extended the boundaries of the Superfund site twice, based on sampling of contaminated sites in Fairmont, adding 130 more homes to the area.

Patel said the plan is to finish the majority of the property cleanups by the end of 2022.

“THEY ALL KNEW”

Despite this progress, the history of North Birmingham’s industrial contamination has been a rough road.

Brooke said health and environmental officials at the local, state and federal levels were all aware of the health hazards of the 35th Avenue area long before it became an official Superfund site.

“They all knew how bad this coke plant was, they knew how contaminated the area was for decades, and they didn’t do anything about it. And not only did they not do anything about it, they didn’t tell anybody,” Brooke said.

When the EPA first began testing properties for contamination in 2011, there was a concerted effort by Drummond Company, one of the companies considered potentially liable for the site’s cleanup, to prevent the area from becoming listed on the Superfund National Priorities List (NPL).

According to 2018 reporting by AL.com, Drummond paid more than $1 million a year in legal fees to fight the EPA’s testing efforts in Birmingham. The company also bribed a state representative, Oliver Robinson, to oppose the NPL listing.

Brooke said listing the site on the NPL would have put more responsibility on the companies that originally contaminated the soil to pay for the cleanup. The EPA dropped its efforts to put 35th Avenue on the NPL in 2015.

In 2018, a Drummond executive, the state representative and an attorney from the Balch & Bingham law firm were all convicted on bribery charges. The damage, however, was already done.

The 35th Avenue site is a “master class in studying why Superfund is important and why Superfund is flawed,” Brooke said.

Even today, Patel said many property owners continue to deny the EPA access to test their soil, either because they don’t want the federal government on their land or because they don’t see the need.

Without that access, the EPA can’t clean up contaminated soil.

Patel said the EPA continues to call those property owners monthly, in hopes of convincing them to see the need for testing. After a pause due to the COVID-19 pandemic, he said the EPA has restarted its regular neighborhood meetings as well, and met with community leaders in July to give a progress update.

Shauntice Allen, an environmental sciences professor and health behaviorist at University of Alabama - Birmingham, said those community meetings are important, and it’s critical for people to feel that what they’re saying is being heard.

“People need to have a space where they can honestly and authentically talk about what they think are barriers and challenges to the community,” Allen said.

She said that the corporations that own these facilities haven’t felt enough of the financial burden of pollution to push them to change.

“They’re not proximate to the problem, so it’s kind of an out of sight, out of mind thing,” Allen said.

Although the site isn’t on the NPL, Patel emphasized that it is still being cleaned up to the same standards, and that he has never had any issues with receiving additional funding when needed.

“We’re here to clean up and we’re trying to get it back to where it was before the contamination,” Patel said.

WHEN CLEANUP ISN’T ENOUGH

The EPA’s Superfund cleanup focuses on past contamination. But Michael Hansen, the executive director of the Greater-Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP), says not enough attention is being paid to the current, ongoing pollution of the neighborhoods of North Birmingham.

“People have been exposed to that during the entire time EPA has done this cleanup. So our contention has been and continues to be that soil removal isn’t enough,” Hansen said.

Bluestone Coke and the Drummond Company’s ABC Coke plant, for instance, have both violated the Clean Air Act in recent years. The Bluestone Coke facility was forced to close last fall due to its violations, and Drummond Company agreed to a consent decree in 2019 that included a penalty of $387,500 and two years of monitoring for leaked emissions.

That penalty was given to the Community Foundation of Greater Birmingham as a grant fund for projects benefiting Tarrant, North Birmingham and Inglenook. Eleven local organizations received grants from this fund.

According to Jefferson County Department of Health records, the ABC Coke plant violated clean-air standards again in August 2021 and April 2022, for which Drummond Company paid more fines.

“Putting some more dirt ain’t making me happy, because I still can’t grow a garden, I still can’t go and have a get-together,” Brown said.

When Brooke patrols Five Mile Creek to sample the water quality, he usually sees black-brown water running into the creek from the coke plants that operate nearby.

“They discharge really disgusting wastewater in large quantities and on a regular basis,” Brooke said.

Hansen said recovery from decades of industrial contamination requires a “more holistic approach.” It’s not just about replacing the soil; living in a contaminated neighborhood has also depressed property values and driven out businesses at the same time as it has sickened neighbors.

“I know one of the biggest complaints that residents have is they feel like there’s a stigma to living in an area that’s called a Superfund,” he said.

Grants and other opportunities for revitalization are a major part of the picture when it comes to rebuilding North Birmingham, Hansen said. And he believes the city of Birmingham, since its history of redlining property put majority-Black and low-income communities near heavy industry in the first place, bears some of the greatest responsibility.

Allen said that’s a pattern that is repeated all across the country: zoning has pushed minority and impoverished communities next door to pollution. According to the EPA, about a quarter of families below the poverty line, including the residents of Collegeville Center and 9,000 other federally subsidized housing developments across the nation, are located close to Superfund sites.

While some people want to stay in their neighborhood, either because they want to revitalize it or because it’s simply been their home for so long, others feel the only way to go is out.

“North Birmingham is dead. It’ll never be another thriving community now,” Powell said.

Brown agrees: “The long-term is over. … The neighborhood is over. It’s just barely existing.”

That’s why Powell and Brown, among others, want the EPA, state or local sources to provide funding to relocate residents out of the Superfund site, or compensate them for the value their homes would have if they weren’t sitting on contaminated land.

“Those of us who want to leave should be able to leave and choose where we want to live… and that’s more than fair,” Brown said.

The Superfund properties, in Powell’s view, are only fit for industrial purposes anymore.

“Would you live in that area?” he asked.

Patel said EPA-funded relocations are rare, used for situations when there is an immediate health threat with no other feasible solutions, or when buildings are preventing an effective cleanup. He said the 35th Avenue site doesn’t meet that criteria.

James Pinkney, the EPA’s senior public affairs officer for Region 4, said that relocation compensation likely wouldn’t be the silver bullet those residents are wanting.

“If that was even an option on the table, they wouldn’t receive fair-market value for their properties. … I think it would put them in a worse economic position than they are now,” Pinkney said.

Mayor Randall Woodfin has reportedly drafted a $37 million plan to fund relocations and revitalization in North Birmingham. The mayor’s office didn’t respond to requests for comment.

Though the path to rejuvenating North Birmingham isn’t totally clear, Hansen said he has seen more engagement from the EPA and the city recently.

“I’m pretty optimistic that they’ve got the memo,” he said.

There are more conversations, but are the concerns of North Birmingham being listened to? “Yes and no,” Allen said.

“I don’t know if they are feeling heard. They are definitely speaking up,” she said. “... I think we’re getting there, but these problems certainly did not emerge overnight and so they’re not going to be solved overnight. It’s going to take a lot of trust-building and people showing up.”

A version of this article was originally published at southern-science.com.