Thread by @AliAdair22

Part 5. In November 2005, Koch Industries agree to buy Georgia-Pacific, located in Atlanta, a building products and paper maker company, for $13 billion dollars. Employees were given no choice and had to sell their stock in the company.
nytimes.com/2005/11/15/bus…

Georgia-Pacific owns a paper mill, pulp mill, plywood mill and a chemical plant in Crossett, Arkansas, a working town of approximately 5,200 residents. The mill is located in a small neighborhood where many working class African Americans live.

Over 1,000 people from the town are employed by Georgia-Pacific. They are all probably related to or know someone who works there.

According to the EPA, it is estimated that the paper mill plant puts out 1.5 million pounds of toxic chemicals each year.

Some people say that the town smells like rotten eggs, Hydrogen sulfide which is "poisonous, corrosive, and flammable" has been found in the air near the plant.
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_…

Chemicals in found in the water include: methyl ethyl ketone, methyl isobutyl ketone, phenol, para-isopropyl acetophenone, and methyl chloride. Jane Mayer, the author of Dark Money, about the Koch Brothers, penned this @NewYorker article.
newyorker.com/news/news-desk…

“Company Town,” (2016) a brilliant documentary, directed, written and produced by Natalie Kottke, co-directed, written and produced by Erica Sardarian explores the issues with pollution in the small town of Crossett, Arkansas.
imdb.com/title/tt561933…

Crossett resident Leroy Patton, who says he lives within a quarter mile of the plant, “Everybody in my neighborhood that I know of in the last 40 years has died from cancer. I’m the only one left on that street.”

In Jane Mayer’s book “Dark Money” she reported that eleven of the 15 houses on a short street called South Penn Road, 11 of 15 houses had been stricken with fatal cases of cancer.

How did this happen? The Georgia-Pacific paper mill uses approximately 45 million gallons of water per day. Some of these are treated in a sewage treatment plant, but the rest of the liquid flows out into natural settling basins—which are unlined.

“An archaic system,” according to Anthony Samsel, a Research Scientist the "Company Town" filmmakers interviewed.

“All these people should have been relocated. They shouldn’t be living there,” Research Scientist Anthony Samsel continued.

From these unlined settling basins, the water flows out to Coffee Creek, Mossy Lake and the Oachita River.

The Ouachita River is a 605-mile-long river that runs south and east through Arkansas and Louisiana, joining the Tensas River to form the Black River near Jonesville, LAa. It is the 25th-longest river in the United States.

In April of 2016, Newsweek published an article titled, “How a Paper Plant in Arkansas Is Allegedly Poisoning the People of Crossett.” newsweek.com/2016/04/29/cro…

In the film “Company Town,” whistleblower Dickie Guice, who had worked as a safety coordinator at the Koch-owned paper plant, was interviewed. His job description included making sure the other employees were following the rules while doing their jobs.

Dickie Guice said he thought the Koch-owned paper plant was “poisoning the people” in the adjacent Crossett neighborhood.

Guice explained that all of the waste products that were sent away from Georgia Pacific would come down open trenches, through neighborhoods and go first to the clarifier area.

Guice further explained the clarifier area was where the water and ash was supposed to be separated from the fiber. The fiber products were then sent via piping to a sludge press where the water was squeezed out of them.

The fiber piled up outside of the sludge press where it was loaded into dump trucks and taken to the “back 400 acres,” according to whistleblower Dickie Guice. Once there, it was spread out “like leveling a yard” and packed into layers. "Farming it so to speak."

The “back 400 acres” Dickie Guice called the “dump site” or more accurately the “hiding site.”

From there, trenches were built which Guice said carried the fiber—which according to him was laden with hydrogen sulfide gasses, chemicals, all kinds of petroleum products, different smells, black liquor (a waste product from paper pulp)—in water.

Then Guice said they would stack it in layers: a layer of fiber products and a layer of ash, a layer of fiber products and a layer of ash, etc. “Like a stack of pancakes” he continued.

Whistleblower Guice continued, “they eventually covered it with grass" when Georgia-Pacific decided that the elevation was high enough and start in another area. He also said they put a fence around the area to hide it, but did "nothing to fix it.”

Ouachita Riverkeeper Patrol Cheryl Slavant also described the fence: “they put a 10’ fence with barbed wire on the top and took the ends off the bridges to “hide what they’re doing from people.” Yes, she said county maintained bridges would be sabotaged by Georgia Pacific.

Whisleblower Guice said the ash that he dumped was no more than a ¼ mile away from Pastor David Bouie’s house. (Bouie formed a group called the Crossettt Concerned Citizens for Environmental Justice to help clean up the chemicals in the neighborhood.)

"There was a ditch with poison that ran right behind his house, but they put up a cover fence so that no one could see it. Nothing kept the chemicals from getting into the groundwater.” Guice explained.

Former Georgia-Pacific Safety Coordinator Guice estimated that these dump trucks took 100s and 100s of loads—maybe 150,000 cubic yards of “fiber” to the “back 400 acres” of land.

Ouachita Riverkeeper Patrol Cheryl Slavant tested some of the residents’ water, including Roberts Road resident Leona Edwards. They found benzene—along with 60 other chemicals.

Benzene is a known cancer-causing agent, particularly leukemia—and children are especially vulnerable, according to Wilma Subra, a chemist for the Louisiana Environmental Action Network.
cancer.org/cancer/cancer-…

Subra also tested the air for formaldehyde (another known human cancer causing agent) and hydrogen sulfide. Although Georgia-Pacific knew she was coming to do the tests, they continued to pump out hydrogen sulfide into the air and the water.

However, but she said she thought they stopped the processes that used formaldehyde while she was there so she wasn’t able to detect it in the air. But the air was positive for hydrogen sulfide which Subra noted causes acute impact on the human body.

Sabra noted Hydrogen sulfide can cause issues such as respiratory problems, headaches, nausea, coughing, shortness of breath, breathing difficulties, neurological effects, cardiovascular impacts, and destruction of lung tissue which does not regenerate.

Sabra detected and recorded 74 different chemicals that were released into the air in the area of Crossett from the Georgia-Pacific facility. #KochBrothers

The same chemicals were released into the wastewater, and some making their way into the groundwater, the individual water wells and the nearby Ouachita River.

In 1997, a representative from Georgia-Pacific came into the neighborhood & offered money to the residents to pay for damage to their property and which also included a contract to sign away your health rights (a “Health contract”).

According to Ouachita Riverkeeper Patrol Cheryl Slavant, the amount of money differed, depending on your race. They offered minority residents $7-10,000 & white people up to $210,000. Many residents signed the contract because Georgia-Pac also promised to clean up the chemicals.

But they didn't.

The EPA is only supposed to get involved if the state & local agencies have abandoned or neglected their duties in enforcing the Clean Air Act. Other agencies involved included: the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, Crossett Water Commission, the Arkansas Health Dept.

The film showed EPA officials from Region 6 helping the residents and setting up public meetings, but many residents claimed that Georgia-Pacific "owned the county." One state official refused to drink a glass of water from the town's drinking source.

Another whistleblower from the film, contractor Ken Atkins, helped EPA investigators get water samples and showed them where he had been hired to unknowingly dump waste on his own land (up to 16 acres) when he worked as a Georgia-Pacific contractor.

Atkins claims in the film that Georgia Pacific made his property a landfill and they had assured him the ash that he was dumping on his property was “environmentally friendly.”

In retaliation, Georgia–Pacific pursued four federal indictment charges against Ken Atkins. He went to prison and is serving time in a federal prison camp in Montgomery, Alabama.

He was sentenced to 68 months in prison and was ordered to pay $456,000 in restitution for one count of wire fraud and 3 counts of money laundering.
southernloggintimesmagazine.com/arkansas-man-d…

Ouachita Riverkeeper Patrol Cheryl Slavant summed it up best when she said the townspeople were "Breathing hydrogen sulfide out of the smoke stacks and they're drinking benzene. I can't get anybody's attention."

In April 2018, the Tulane Environmental Law Clinic, on behalf of Quachita Riverkeeper and L.E.A.N., filed a complaint against Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ) for discrimination under the Civil Rights Act.

The EPA in Washington D.C. is investigating. She continues to fight for Crossett and other communities affected by pollution and abuse of power.

The EPA is now headed by Scott Pruitt, who sued the EPA 14 times as Attorney General of Oklahoma to prevent their efforts to regulate pollution. The @Nytimes revealed connections between Pruitt and the Koch Brothers in January of 2017.
nytimes.com/2017/01/14/us/…

Last week Scott Pruitt was questioned by Senate #Democrats about his deep ties to the #KochBrothers.
thenation.com/article/senate…

Will Pruitt be able to keep his job? Will the #KochBrothers connections be fully revealed? We'll see. What I don't understand is why this story has not gotten more attention. SO I AM STARTING TO SCREAM ABOUT IT. HOW IS THIS ALLOWED TO HAPPEN IN OUR COUNTRY?

HOW MANY MORE PEOPLE HAVE TO DIE IN CROSSETT, AR BEFORE THE EPA DOES SOMETHING? BEFORE THE ARKANSAS GOVERNMENT DOES SOMETHING? AND WHY ISN'T SOME JUDGE AWARDING THE KOCH FORTUNE TO THESE INNOCENT VICTIMS? #KochBrothers

Part 6 next.