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Our Road: Then -- E4: The Midnight PCB Dumpings – The Making of a Public Health Crisis
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In early August, 1978, with high hopes, Ken and Deborah leave for a weekend camping trip to Bear Island, NC, but find the broiling temperature, windless air, and nearly invisible teeny carnivorous sand fleas too much. On their ride home, they encounter, mile after mile, large, yellow warning signs that read: “CAUTION PCB CHEMICAL SPILL ALONG HIGHWAY SHOULDERS.” Their tense ride home is a foreboding introduction to PCBs that will dominate the next forty-four years of their lives.
As knowledge of the PCB crime begins to spread from person to person and in the news, and the midnight dumping continues for two weeks, the state responds in ways that even health experts describe as “slow and standoffish.” The Department of Public Health tells roadside residents not to worry too much, that the PCBs are stable. But then State Department of Agriculture officials issue warnings not to eat food or graze cattle within 100 yards of the spills. People are confused and angry at the contradictory messages.
As people in fourteen counties awaken to noxious PCB oil deliberately spilled in three-foot-wide swaths along more than about 240 miles of highway shoulders in fourteen counties and earlier in the summer at Ft. Bragg; a public health crisis begins. Two weeks later the State’s Health Director of Public Health Dr. Jacob Koomen resigns.
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