The Daily Egyptian - January 12, 2022

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“Environmental racism is typically the institutional intersection of economics and racially biased outcomes, which often involves environmental contamination.”

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 12, 2022

“The predominantly Black population of the neighborhood still feels the effects of creosote contamination due to environmental pollution from the nearby now-defunct Koppers wood treatment facility.”

“These men worked in this stuff. Their clothes would be so saturated with creosote that they would bury them in the ground to try to get the ground soak up some of the creosote from it,” Holder said. “They carried these cross ties, however much they weighed, you know 100 pounds 200 pounds, and creosote soaked on their shoulders.”

VOL. 104, ISSUE 34

“We can teach people how to grow and sell the food which means they are their own boss, they’re being entrepreneurs,” Mays said. “Growing that fresh food, giving it to the kitchen and then cooking it and giving it back to the community …”

“The Koppers wood treatment plant has been around since 1897, and was used to cure wood, telephone poles, and railroad ties … Members of the Carbondale community have voiced their concerns with the negative impact the plant has had on the health and living conditions of the people in the communities near it.”

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Wednesday, January 12, 2022

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The Daily Egyptian is published by the students of Southern Illinois University Carbondale on a weekly basis. Fall and spring semester editions run every Wednesday. Free copies are distributed in the Carbondale, Carterville, and Springfield communities. The Daily Egyptian can be found at www. dailyegyptian.com or on the Daily Egyptian app!

Foreword: The environment and racialized development

Jason Flynn | jflynn@dailyegyptian.com

After nearly two years of societal upheaval due, in large part, to the COVID-19 pandemic, it can be easy to push anything not of the most immediate importance to the back of the mind.

When a school closes for lack of staff and parents have to scramble to find someone to supervise their kids, or a job site shuts down leaving employees at a loss to find money for bills, or, god forbid, a tornado wreaks destruction on a town, as DE Editor Sophie Whitten recorded in Kentucky, the first thought isn’t ‘let’s analyze the decisions and structures that led us here.’

Generally it’s to act, and survive.

At some point, we do need to step back and figure out just how things got this bad.

This special edition of the paper is focused on environmental issues, with a focus on environmental racism, and the anticlimactic, slow-moving catastrophes that rarely become a priority.

Environmental racism is defined, broadly, as the disproportionate impact of human-originated environmental hazards on communities of color.

The Daily Egyptian, the student-run news organization of Southern Illinois University Carbondale, is committed to being a trusted source of news, information, commentary and public discourse, while helping readers understand the issues affecting their lives.

Publishing Information The Daily Egyptian is published by the students of Southern Illinois University Carbondale and functions as a laboratory for the School of Journalism in exchange for the room and utilities in the Communications Building. The Daily Egyptian is a non-profit organization that survives primarily off of its advertising revenue. Offices are in the Communications Building, room 1259, at Southern Illinois University

Copyright Information @2021 The Daily Egyptian. All rights reserved. All content is property of the Daily Egyptian and may not be reproduced or transmitted without consent. The Daily Egyptian is a member of the Illinois College Press Association, Associated Collegiate Press, College Media Advisers Inc. and the College Business and Advertising Managers Inc.

Submissions Letters and guest columns must be submitted with author’s contact information, preferably via email. Phone numbers are required to verify authorship, but will not be published.

Students must include their year and major. Faculty must include rank and department. Others include hometown.

Submissions should be sent to editor@dailyegyptian.com

acknowledgements The design and artwork provided in this publication are supported by a Windgate Scholarship Charitable Foundation scholarship awarded by the School of Art and Design, Southern Illinois University Carbondale.

Managing Editor Jason Flynn can be reached at jflynn@ dailyegyptian.com

Latino Environmental Town Hall pushing for cleaner communities

Jamilah Lewis | jlewis@dailyegyptian.com

Mission Statement

We can see those impacts across the world, as industrial production has altered and intensified global weather patterns, and in our own backyards, where nutritious food is often inaccessible, divestment from social services breeds desperation and violence, and toxic runoff infiltrates our water and soil.

These problems are the result of a line of decisions in the US and other countries that can be traced back centuries.

Theft of land from indigenous people, chattel slavery, and a capital-driven economy concentrated immense wealth in the hands of very few people, and, despite numerous reforms, inequalities in land distribution, political access, and well-paid work persist to this day.

Despite many obstacles, numerous groups are making an effort to foster cooperation over competition in their communities in an effort to restore health and stability.

Just a few of those struggles are highlighted in this edition.

On Monday evening, Jan. 10, several Illinois Latin government officials and legislators hosted a Latin Environmental racism townhall to give an overview of initiatives and future to fight the environmental issues in Latin communities.

The Q&A panel included State Representative Delia Ramirez, Chicago Alderman of the 35th ward Carlos Rosa, State Senator Omar Aquino, Chicago Energy Coordinator Dany Robles, and Metropolitan Water Reclamation (MWRD) District Commissioner Eira Corral-Sepulveda.

Each panelist has been working towards changes in Chicago and Illinois as a whole to provide things such as clean water and help people grow their own food.

Senator Aquino said he’s proud of the work being done and in progress like the Clean Energy Jobs Act passed in 2021 by Governor J.B Pritzker to expand green jobs and energy infrastructure.

“The state of Illinois has passed the Clean Energy Jobs Act that was really at the forefront of energy policy in the last year,” Senator Aquino said. “Something that is transformative for years to come to really put the state of Illinois, I think, as a trendsetter as one of the greenest states.”

Something Senator Aquino finds a lot of promise in is the future of electric vehicles and their part in helping with pollution from gas cars, he said.

“I think the consumer base has spoken up, people really don’t want to be driving gas powered vehicles for a number of reasons,” Senator Aquino said. “One is the cost of gasoline and also the impact on our environment.”

District Commissioner Eira Corral-Sepulveda spoke on the efforts made by MWRD to keep the Chicago metropolitan area clean by pushing the cleaning of waterways.

“Our first mission is to protect our waterways by cleaning Cook County’s water waste,” Sepulveda said.

“This includes everything… your tap so after you take a shower after you wash dishes. It also includes industrial wastes. So we meet rigorous standards set by the Illinois [Environmental Protection Agency] EPA.” Sepulveda said cleaning the waterways has also led to a better aquatic environment.

“In 2021, we achieved a really impressive milestone through our water weight protection test,” Sepulveda said. “A number of aquatic species in the Chicago area

waterway system which is also known as cause increased by nearly 800%.”

With the success of certain initiatives there’s still work to be done to make sure all initiatives are being implemented looking into future progress.

Senator Aquino mentioned the importance of a clean environment especially while living during the COVID-19 pandemic.

“What we’ve been going through in the last few years with COVID-19 [is] how a clean environment is really important for our health,” Aquino said. “For our physical health, for emotional health [and] for mental health.”

Making sure Latinos in these communities are getting their benefits from this Act is something being taken very seriously, Aquino said.

“While you need to make sure people have healthy environments, and keeping them healthy, they also need employment,” Aquino said. “As we move to greener jobs and all so forth, we need to make sure, though, those opportunities aren’t leaving our communities behind.”

Representative Delia Ramirez spoke on the long-term results of the Clean Energy Act legislation and what it promises for years to come.

“It established a goal of 100% clean energy by 2050. It also shuts down the state’s largest polluter and the seventh largest polluter in the entire country,” Ramirez said. “I think we’re gonna see the immediate impact of what that’s gonna look like.”

Ramirez pointed out the importance of having a balanced strategy and monitorization to make sure implementation is working.

“There’s no other state that has passed legislation like this,” Ramirez said. “What we’re going to be doing, house monitoring… that is this reporting is happening, that we’re really monitoring closely.”

During the Q&A/closing segment Sepulveda spoke on the benefits of keeping water and the Chicagoland area clean and the benefits coming with it.

“The responsibility that we have in protecting Lake Michigan as a clean source of fresh water is incredibly important, and more so as we start thinking about development,” Sepulveda said. “What does development mean in the future for our Chicagoland area, and how can we keep it sustainable?”

Staff reporter Jamilah Lewis can be reached at jlewis@ dailyegyptian.com or on Twitter @jamilahlewis.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

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Organizations fight back against environmental racism

Janiyah Gaston | @janiyah_reports

The Sunrise Movement, Carbondale Spring, and The Sustainability Commission are finding ways to combat environmental racism in communities like northeast Carbondale.

The predominantly Black population of the neighborhood still feels the effects of creosote contamination due to environmental pollution from the nearby nowdefunct Koppers wood treatment facility.

Nick Smaligo, co-founder of Carbondale Spring, said the goal of his organization is to increase funding that will benefit different environmental projects by drawing awareness to the extensive funding that goes to the police department.

“The goal of the Carbondale Spring is to reduce the funding currently being directed toward an oversized police department, and redirect those funds into the kinds of community projects that we think will build a more ecological, socially and overall better city,” Smaligo said.

According to Smaligo, Carbondale Spring wants to get the city to reallocate most of the money that goes to the police department to programs that will help the community such as building chicken coops and setting up more community gardens.

Smaligo said Carbondale Spring’s main concern right now is to draw attention to the lack of action taken regarding the creosote contamination and mistreatment of the community that lives near the Koppers site. He

“Our goal is to make Carbondale and the neighborhoods down here, especially neighborhoods that aren’t really prioritized as much, usually low income BIPOC neighborhoods… safer, cleaner, build bonds with the people that live in Carbondale and stand up for the people’s rights to have better living situations.”

- Sarhana Mohanmad Ali Sunrise Movement event coordinator

said he was involved with helping to stop Brightfield, a solar energy company, from putting up solar panels near the site.

“Just putting up solar panels without acknowledging the deeper structural problems, in particular the issue of racism in terms of how environmental pollution has been distributed, was one of the major fronts in that struggle,” Smaligo said.

According to Smaligo, if the solar company was allowed to build those panels near the site they would have been profiting off of the neglect the community faced while living next to the contaminated site.

The Sunrise Movement is also helping the community by organizing clean up days to help keep minority communities clean and getting environmental bills passed to provide more opportunities for these communities.

Sarhana Mohanmad Ali, event coordinator of the Sunrise Movement, said most of the work they do is also working to make Carbondale more environmentally safe.

“Our goal is to make Carbondale and the neighborhoods down here, especially neighborhoods

that aren’t really prioritized as much, usually low income BIPOC neighborhoods… safer, cleaner, build bonds with the people that live in Carbondale and stand up for the people’s rights to have better living situations,” Mohanmad Ali said.

According to Mohanmad Ali, the Sunrise Movement’s main goal is to help minority communities through organizing cleanup days and forming protests, to draw attention to the lackluster condition the city has left the communities in.

Moss Shepherd, the logistics coordinator of the Sunrise Movement, said most of the places they clean up are on the east side of Carbondale.

“Our hub tries to do a lot of events where we kind of either protest against companies like Ameren and who are taking advantage of usually low income BIPOC folks by raising bills in neighborhoods when most people living there can’t afford to pay these raised electrical bills,” Shepherd said.

Shepherd said the city mainly focuses on the sides of town that have more money and in turn are neglecting parts of Carbondale such as northeast.

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Mohanmad Ali said the Sunrise Movement has not only organized clean up days to help lower income communities, they were also instrumental in helping pass the 2021 Illinois Climate and Equitable Jobs Act (CEJA).

“We played a big part in the passing of the CEJA. It’s a bill that combats environmental racism by bringing money, clean jobs and job security to mostly low income and especially in places like ours like in Carbondale,” Mohanmad Ali said.

Mohanmad Ali said the CEJA has allowed an increase of funds to help create more environmentally friendly jobs in Illinois for people who need them.

Shepherd said although the Sunrise Movement was able to help convince lawmakers to pass the CEJA, lawmakers should actually follow through with their promises without other people forcing their hand.

“I feel when politicians do listen, they don’t give credit for their solutions,” Shepherd said. “They take those ideas, and then use them for their platform without giving due credit, then also don’t help those communities by actually following through on those promises,” Shepherd said.

Saxon Metzger, a member of the Sustainability Commission, said the purpose of the commission is to express the citizens’ concerns about the environmental climate to the city. He said the more input the commision gets from the community the better they will be able to voice the concerns.

“Our goal is to create really broad goals as well as specific actions on those goals,” Metzger said. ”I think

that having more input about things like the Koppers wood treatment facility, solar power or things that the city is working on is really important because it helps clarify for the commission what people want us to focus on and want us to do,” According to Metzger, the sustainability action plan will not only move Carbondale toward being more sustainable, but it will also allow for the input given by the citizens to help form new policies.

Metzger said although the Sustainability Commission has ideas for the sustainability action plan, more input from the Carbondale community will help them extend on the plan.

“What we found is that a lot of the demographics represented in that survey were not intuitive of how diverse our population in Carbondale is. A lot of our survey responses skewed older, more White and more upper middle class, which is only one section that we need in the community. To provide that input, we need every single community to provide their perspectives and talk about their needs. That’s how we can really combat environmental racism, “ Metzger said.

According to Metzger most of the input they get is from the well-off White community, but more input from more diverse communities will help the Sustainability Commission find ways to fight environmental racism.

Carbondale Spring, the Sunrise Movement, the Sustainability Commission and organizations like them are all working in their own way to combat environmental racism and bring about change in the Carbondale area.

“I guess the way to do that is to talk to people you know live in this community or have lived in this community for a long time,” Smaligo said. “Learn the stories that have created Carbondale as it is now, because that’s the only way we’re going to be able to actually change it.”

Staff reporter Janiyah Gaston can be reached at jgaston@dailyegyptian.com or on Instagram at @janiyah_reports.

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Page 4

Environmental racism: A lasting legacy of discrimination William Box | @William17455137

Environmental racism is typically the institutional intersection of economics and racially biased outcomes, which often involves environmental contamination.

“Through policies like redlining, covenant laws and zoning, people of color couldn’t get federally funded mortgages to be able to move to certain areas,” Said Jessica Crowe, interim chair of the school of sociology. “You still see those effects today and they’re still technically in some areas even though they aren’t legally enforceable.”

Crowe said the racist policies of the past can still impact community members’ ability to take political action, because communities rely on social networks to affect political change. People in non-White communities in the United States are more often removed or kept separate from social networks of political and business leaders.

The city of Carbondale held a memorial dedication to celebrate the workers of the former Koppers railroad tie site on Oct. 17, shining a light on the legacy of environmental racism and its effect on what are often communities of color.

According to an interview done between Melvin “Pepper” Holder, a community leader and activist, and Amelia Blakely, a writer for the nonprofit Pulitzer Center, “Koppers was the main economic driver for Black families to settle in Carbondale.”

The Koppers site was operational

from its opening in 1901 to its final closing in 1991, and was situated in the northeast part of town, according to the interview. During this time, the site treated wood with creosote, a distillation of tar from wood or coal used to coat the wood and prevent it from degradation due to exposure to the elements.

Evidence existed as early as 1775 that soot and tar could contribute to cancer development, however the easy availability and affordability of the substance made it popular with the advent of railroads and ancillary industries like railroad tie producers.

Used creosote on the site would be held in a lagoon onsite until it could be recycled. However, the lagoon would flood with large amounts of rain, contaminating the soil and seeping into the groundwater underneath. Due to segregationist redlining policies, for the majority of the plant’s time of operation the only communities affected by the environmental poisoning were the nearby Black communities.

An article published in the peerreviewed journal Environmental Health Perspectives in December of 2004 made clear that solving the problem of environmental health hazards must also include an effort to address the lasting racially imposed social conditions.

The article was written by Gilbert C. Gee, a professor at the University of Michigan School of Public Health and Devon C. Payne-Sturges, Associate professor

with the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health.

The article is titled “Environmental Health Disparities: A Framework Integrating Psychosocial and Environmental Concepts.”

“The elimination of disparities in environmental health requires attention to both environmental hazards and social conditions,” the article said.

The article said the two major challenges to this involve understanding how social processes can exacerbate environmental issues and understanding why some specific groups experience greater numbers of illnesses and more severe illnesses when compared to other groups.

The article argues the stress of living in disadvantaged communities can weaken the immune system, making members of the community particularly vulnerable to the effects of environmental racism.

“Residential segregation leads to different experiences of community stress, exposure to pollutants and access to community resources,” the article said. “When not countered by resources, stressors may lead to heightened vulnerability to environmental hazards.”

Jessica Crowe, interim chair of the school of Sociology at Southern Illinois University (SIU), said the echoes of racism and racist policies are still visible if you know where to look.

Crowe said another good example of the ways communities affected by environmental racism can push back

against the issues they face is that of Roxbury, a community in Boston, Mass.

From 1963 to 1983, the neighborhood lost more than two thousand homes due to an outbreak of fires during a period of time when White populations were leaving the community, and lots were abandoned and undeveloped.

The town had a predominantly Black population, and local companies began dumping industrial waste into the abandoned lots. This contaminated the groundwater in the area, sparking an effort to prevent the illegal dumping, and bring attention to the matter.

“It took them years, but they formed a community group, and started getting word out about this issue they were having,” Crowe said.

“They started making contacts with people who did have some power and resources.”

Crowe said the first efforts came from a Boston city movement primarily led by White, uppermiddle class landowners called the Boston Redevelopment Authority (BRA). The original plan put forward for the renovation of the area did not involve community members or leaders. Following community backlash, the community organized its members by going door to door to form a group known as the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative (DSNI).

The DSNI got press coverage on the problem through the Boston Globe, and put pressure on the mayor to acknowledge the problem,

Crowe said. The group used the publicity to gather additional support, creating additional efforts to clean up the dumping sites. The support allowed the community to push for the election of a mayor who was amenable to reform, and sympathetic to their cause.

Crowe said this rise to prominence and political support led to the group becoming the first community-based nonprofit organization in American history to use eminent domain to seize undeveloped land. DSNI filled these lots with low cost homes and placed them under a land trust which kept prices from inflating.

“This is a community that is pretty poor, and doesn’t have a lot of resources,” Crowe said. “But they had leaders who took control, and formed a community group. Then, they built and used their social capital to build a network with people outside the community that could help them, and they were quite successful.”

Crowe said the uphill battle of fighting against institutional discrimination can be discouraging, and progress can be stalled or reversed at times. However, constant battling has led to institutional change in the last seven decades.

“It’s slow moving, and it’s not to say those gains can’t be undone,” Crowe said. “So it’s a constant battle that one can’t let up on.”

Staff reporter William Box can be reached at wbox@dailyegyptian. com or on Twitter at @ William17455137.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

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Local garden programs providing communities with accessible produce Janiyah Gaston | @janiyah_reports

Women For Change, Dentmon Center and Carbondale Spring are all making an effort to help provide fresh food to communities who need it. By growing their own community gardens and providing classes on how to cook different produce, they are educating people on how they can thrive as a community.

Ginger Rye-Sanders, the president of Women For Change, said they started the Red Hen Garden as a way to allow communities a way to grow and get fresh produce whenever they need it.

“We empower people to let them know that when you have control of your life, you have some power that lies within your hand. If things get really bad, you are able to just go to your garden and eat and take care of your family,” Sanders said.

According to Sanders, people can get a sense of empowerment when they are able to grow their own food to feed themselves and their families.

Sanders said one example of environmental racism is the Koppers site which has poisoned the soil and water on the north east side of Carbondale.

“We have had generations of people that live close to this plant that have died. And we are still in a fight to keep that land from being touched, because we feel that there is no remediation” - Ginger Rye-Sanders Women For Change president

“The way that they process the wood was toxic and dioxin, which was used in Agent Orange and we know from the Vietnam War, creosote and some of the other chemicals that are deadly and cause cancer and really killed off people,” Sanders said. “We have had generations of people that live close to this plant that have died. And we are still in a fight to keep that land from being touched, because we feel that there is no remediation.”

Sanders said the Koppers Site has negatively impacted the north east side of Carbondale because the creosote from the site has contaminated the water and soil, making it impossible for people to grow their own healthy crops or use the water.

Chastity Mays, a worker with the Dentmon Center, said the disconnect between people and their food is so

wide that people are not sure what is used on their food.

“They learn that there’s a difference between food that’s grown and sprayed with a bunch of chemicals and food that is grown organically and also helps with their health,” Mays said. “The healthier you eat, the better your health is, so you hit many different areas when you have urban farms in the community.”

According to Mays, having more local gardens like the Dentmon Center will not only help provide more people better access to locally grown food, but will allow people to see what goes into the process of growing fresh fruits and vegetables.

Mays said community gardens not only show communities how their food is being grown, but provide for people who need food and volunteer opportunities.

“We can teach people how to grow and sell the food which means they are their own boss, they’re being entrepreneurs,” Mays said. “Growing that fresh food, giving it to the kitchen and then cooking it and giving it back to the community, that’s another thing that can happen with urban farms.”

Mays said by providing food, entrepreneur opportunities, and teaching people to grow their own food these gardens are helping make the community better.

Marilyn Tipton, a board member of the Carbondale Food Autonomy, said with the prices of food continuing to increase, more people are having to choose between healthy food and cheap food.

“With the price of everything people have to decide, am I gonna buy meat or am I gonna buy vegetables,’ more than likely they’re gonna buy meat and other things that they need,” Tipton said.

Tipton said the Carbondale Food Autonomy was able to plant 12 new gardens in Carbondale and build multiple chicken coops for people to get fresh food to help give people access to healthy food.

According to Tipton, the northeast

side of the soil is so contaminated with creosote that the community is wary of planting anything due to the possibility of being poisoned.

“A few people plant gardens in buckets, but you can’t plant food in a space where you may be contaminating people, you know, we may be getting poisoned,” Tipton said.

Tipton said if the city or Beazer Inc. the company who currently owns the Koppers site, should get the land on the north east side tested, so the community can get moving in the right direction to see what could be done next.

Women for Change, the Dentmon Center, and Carbondale Food Autonomy are all helping to provide the citizens of Carbondale with access to fresh food.

“We empower them and then they’re able to empower their children and so that way we started a generational trend of showing families how to stay empowered when it comes to food,” Sanders said.

Staff reporter Janiyah Gaston can be reached at jgaston@dailyegyptian. com or on Instagram at @janiyah_ reports.

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Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Black community wants soil retested and SIUC soil expert agrees Claire Cowley patienceisclair@gmail.com

Environmental contamination issues stemming from the Kopper’s Superfund site in Carbondale, Illinios, have been a decades-long flashpoint between mostly-Black residents on the city’s northeast side, private businesses and various government agencies.

Residents trace their struggle to have the site tested, monitored and cleaned to the area’s history of segregation.

Rodney Morris, a northeast side Carbondale resident who has been fighting this issue for the last ten years, said the communication between the Black community, the federal Environmental Protection Agency (USEPA), and the city has mostly amounted to various groups attempting to shift blame and responsibility.

Nearby residents demanded in June 2021 that their residential property be retested because previous tests used inaccurate soil sampling techniques.

Those challenged tests showed no contamination and no risk of exposure to toxic chemicals.

Morris said the USEPA never tested south of the fence around the Koppers property, although there is a map showing a few areas along the fence line the agency reportedly tested, concluding it would not need to test beyond that point.

“Still, the creeks that got filled with creosote would come through the neighborhood, and the contaminated air would come into the neighborhood, dust would blow into the neighborhood,” Morris said. “There’s no way that it couldn’t be contaminated further than south of the fence... They just refuse to pay to test it.”

The land located at 1555 North Marion Street in Carbondale, Illinois, was initially owned by the Ayer and Lord Tie company and considered the largest creosote plant globally.

The railroad tie production facility was operational from 1902 and was officially closed after finding onsite contamination in 1991.

Beazer East Incorporated bought the land in the late 1980s and conducted Resource Conservation and Recovery Act Corrective Action activities under the USEPA Region 5 office in Chicago.

Site investigations identified the primary contaminants as creosote, pentachlorophenol, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, dioxin/furan compounds, and arsenic, which can all harm humans.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) says long-term exposure to high levels of arsenic is associated with higher rates of skin cancer, bladder cancer, and lung cancer, as well as heart disease.

Dioxin/furan is likely to be a cancercausing substance to humans, according to the USEPA. People unintentionally exposed to large amounts of these chemicals have developed a skin condition called chloracne, as well as liver problems.

Marilyn Tipton, a resident of the northeast side whose father worked at the Kopper’s facility, said with all of

the contamination in the ground, she would not grow a garden because it would contaminate her vegetables.

“I had tried to grow a garden, but was just scared to eat it,” she said.

Tipton is a member of Carbondale Spring Food Autonomy, known for organic gardening, and the group would like to put a garden in the northeast neighborhood.

“Until we can find funding to get this land tested, there is no way that we could put an organic garden over here because we wouldn’t know if the food would poison us or not,” she said.

Tipton said Beazer selected her property to get tested for contamination, and she completed all the paperwork, scheduled a date, and told Beazer East she would like to be present while it conducted the soil sampling.

Beazer representatives called Tipton the day before they were scheduled to arrive, and said they’d found a different property to test.

“It made me feel bad… It made me feel helpless because… they didn’t want to test my property,” Tipton said.

“Did they find somewhere else because I asked to be here while they did the testing?”

Morris said the EPA knows that they are Black and poor, and the northeast side does not have the money to retest the ground themselves. If they were able to retest the ground, he is positive that their land would be contaminated.

“They only did a surface check of the land, and they didn’t do what is considered a real test,” Morris said.

“Now, my point has always been if they come in and test the soil, and the soil is not contaminated... all the money they spend arguing, fussing, and fighting with us... if the land weren’t contaminated, we wouldn’t have anything to say.”

Morris said the EPA Region 5 office that oversaw this issue is the same region that told Flint, Michigan, its water was safe.

“We are just a bunch of Black people

that are being deceived,” he said.

Morris said the city tried to pacify Black residents when the Planning and Zoning Commission said no to land developer Brightfield’s special use permit proposal to install a solar array farm on Kopper’s site in 2018.

“They gave us a blanket to lay down in hopes that it would rock us to sleep,” Morris said.

Morris said the city could have had the solar operation on the Koppers site if they had proved that the land was safe, but they did not.

“They don’t want to come over here and test because the results are going to be that our land is contaminated... it is just that simple,” Morris said. “It’s a joke... It’s really a joke.”

Morris said he isn’t trying to get the EPA and Beazer to test his land, specifically.

“It could’ve been across the street from me, it could’ve been the land next door to me, it could’ve been the land behind me,” Morris said. “Just land south of the fence.”

Brian Klubek, a former microbiology professor at SIU in the Department of Plant, Soil and Agriculture Systems, said the residents are right. The soil samples did not go deep enough to detect contamination.

Klubek said the residents asked him to get involved in demanding the retesting of the soil located south of the Koppers site for hazardous chemicals, specifically in their backyards.

Klubek said residents can’t be sure no contamination in those yards exists if the city or EPA do not look.

“It struck me that they only took samples at the surface six inches, and that was it. After that, they never went any deeper,” Klubek said.

Klubek said if the sampling does not go any deeper, the sampling team really can not say the land is contaminationfree.

“I believe they took a 6-inch sample from the soil surface and no deeper,”

Klubek said. “I would not expect to detect high concentrations of dioxins or furans when these compounds have the potential to move deeper into the soil or be removed by run-off.”

Soils at that location, called urban soils or human-modified soils, no longer possess the profile characteristics they had beforehand.

“Nevertheless, there are soil samples located near that same area that are pretty much similar to poorly drained soil samples. So, that site was probably the same,” Klubek said.

In ecology, poorly drained soil is a condition in which water is removed from the soil so slowly that the soil is saturated periodically during the growing season or remains wet for long periods.

Klubek said the soil profile must be considered in situations like this.

“When these soils are wet, we call them tight because they do not drain very easily... you have pooling of water at the surface. However, when you get past the rainy season, it gets very, very hot, and it dries out,” Klubek said. “It starts forming cracks within the profile itself.”

Water moves and starts infiltrating more easily into the soil when it starts raining again because of those cracks, Klubek said. A team can take samples of dioxin/furans or organic compounds there.

Klubek said a band of these compounds are usually no thicker than two or three inches, and, if that band exists, where it is and how close it is to the soil surface would dictate if it were a risk or not to human health and the environment.

“So if the band is at the 10-inch, there’s a potential risk there because you’re treating soil modification at the soil surface as your chance to modify the soil, bring that soil back up, and bring that stuff back up,” Klubek said.

“On the other hand, if it’s down at the 23-inch depth, that would make a safer difference because you won’t go down

that deep, and that will just sit there, and then there’s no potential risk.”

Klubek said the city needed a gridtype sampling system, especially for the residents right next to the Koppers field.

“They didn’t cut by a grid system… they [were] just helter skelter, here and there, and maybe took one or two samples out of the yards that live next to it,” Klubek said. “They went several blocks beyond that, just healter, skelter.”

The city cannot adequately analyze the results because the testing was too scattered, Klubek said.

Tipton said the soil still needs to be tested in her backyard.

“We will not be satisfied until the soil is tested right,” Tipton said.

Donald Monty, a retired Carbondale city manager and who observed the soil sampling to ensure a proper supplemental investigation, said mistrust of the local government and governmental agencies is a part of a long history of segregation and racism in the United States southern regions.

“The lunch counters would not allow Blacks, the movie theaters would not allow Blacks...they had to sit up in the balcony, or Blacks could not stay at hotels and so on,” Monty said.

He said Southern Illinois is south of Louisville, Kentucky, so in many respects, the old culture around Carbondale was probably more akin to what it would have been like in the south than, say, in a northeastern city.

“In the 1960s, the Varsity Theater then was the big movie theater in town and finally allowed black patrons to sit mingled with the white patrons,” Monty said. “So you have got that as a background not much different than if you were to go talk to people in rural Kentucky or Tennessee or Alabama… maybe not as blatant, but nonetheless.”

Monty said additional testing would be worth doing, but to keep in mind that the resident’s have a deep mistrust of the EPA and city.

Please see CHANGES | 11

Page 7

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Creosote: The toxin holding America together

William Box | @William17455137

The Kopper plant site used more than a half-dozen chemicals to treat wood products with preservatives for use on railroad tracks, telephone poles and other important wooden pieces of American infrastructure before its closing in 1991.

Creosote was the primary chemical used, but other elements and compounds, including arsenic and toxic dioxin compounds, were also used at the site according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) site report.

Creosote comes in multiple forms, but the most common are coal-tar creosote and wood-tar creosote. These are produced through burning their titular materials and distilling the resulting tar along with arsenic and other chemicals released by the burning into a liquid which can be injected into wood to prevent decay.

The EPA report also describes an incident in 1939 in which an undrained tank of creosote was intentionally dumped onto the ground to prevent an explosion of the extremely flammable substance. It also states how the compound was regularly spilled and released during routine storage and storage.

The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the Center for Disease Control (CDC), released a report on creosote detailing how it contaminates the environment as well as how it affects plants, animals and people exposed to the substance.

“Coal-tar creosote is released to water and soil as a result of its use in the wood preservation industry,” the ATSDR said. “In the past, waste water from wood treatment facilities was often discharged into unlined lagoons.”

According to the report, this sludge contained some compounds which were water soluble and others which would take much longer to decompose. Many of the compounds which take longer to break down remain toxic even as they leech through their lagoons and into the soil and groundwater underneath.

The ATSDR stated how exposure of humans to creosote can be made through the skin, through exposure to volatile compounds released during burning and distillation and through ingestion of contaminated food and/or water.

“Skin cancer and cancer of the scrotum have resulted from long term exposure to low levels of creosote, especially through direct contact with the skin during wood treatment and during production or manufacture of creosote-treated products,” the ATSDR said.

Higher doses of exposure in a short period of time were shown to lead to skin rash, chemical burns, convulsions, mental confusion, kidney and liver problems, unconsciousness and death according to the report.

Chaparral creosote, derived from burning the chaparral bush and leaves, is used in small amounts in some commonly available commercial products, most notably being found in some herbal remedies and psoriasis shampoo. This form, while potentially dangerous in large doses, is not as dangerous as the exposure one can be given through soil, air and groundwater contaminated with wood or coal-tar creosote.

In Carbondale, a local community action group known as the Concerned Citizens of Carbondale (CCC) raised a monument

“In addition to this method of spreading the toxins to the neighborhood, the air, water and soil in the area also became contaminated with the chemicals” -Concerned Citizens of Carbondale Local community action group

in Attucks Park to celebrate the workers of the former Kopper site and to raise awareness to the ongoing effects of the site’s contamination. A website was created by the CCC as a part of the memorial to detail the history of the community’s interaction with the site.

“Located in the Black, underserved neighborhood of the city, it employed mostly Black workers at a greatly reduced wage,” the CCC said.

According to the site, the men working at the plant would routinely be drenched in creosote and other toxic chemicals at the plant. This contamination would be so complete that workers would have to bury their clothing in their yards to remove some of the toxins before they could be washed clean.

“In addition to this method of spreading the toxins to the neighborhood, the air, water and soil in the area also became contaminated with the chemicals,” the CCC said. “This resulted, and continues to result in a high rate of cancer in the neighborhood, particularly multiple myeloma, which can be directly linked to creosote poisoning.”

The site was closed for active production in 1991, but it was only in 2004 that a decision was reached by the EPA to begin soil remediation in an effort to decontaminate the area. According to their report, Beazer East Inc., the company which purchased the property following its closing, began initial decontamination efforts in 2004 with efforts from Beazer and the EPA continuing to this day.

At the start of the decontamination process, the field was visibly contaminated with creosote according to the EPA report.

This was compounded by the lack of barriers around the contaminated property, exposing children and families living nearby to the carcinogenic material readily accessible on the ground for children to be exposed dermally and ingested with food when hands went unwashed.

Cleanup efforts included removing acres of soil as well as draining and clearing and moving a portion of a nearby creek while placing an engineered cap over the remaining contaminated soil to prevent additional rainwater contamination while the contaminated soil and groundwater underneath are contained to the site.

The EPA is to monitor the contamination of the groundwater and soil in the area as part of the remediation process. However, this has sparked some controversy from the community.

According to the CCC, the EPA prioritized testing on the property and north of the property, the direction the nearby stream flowed. However, residents from the nearby predominantly Black community to the south of the property asked for their property to be tested as well This testing took place in April 2005 and

deemed the land free of contamination, though residents and the CCC believe the tests were inaccurate as testing only penetrated through six inches of topsoil and did not not test the groundwater underneath.

“Many of our residents that worked at Kopper’s, children, spouses and neighbors that were exposed to the toxins have died with multiple myeloma, sardosis, heart attacks, and many other diseases,” the CCC said. “We have contacted lawyers, our senators and congressmen for help but to no avail.”

In 2013 Brightfield, a company which uses the formerly contaminated areas to set up solar panel arrays, was given a permit to develop the area. Following a three year period of inactivity on the land, the permit expired and was not renewed when applied for in 2017.

EPA reports determined in March 2019

additional contaminants were found outside of the initial remediation area, including to the south closer to the residential neighborhood. Additional efforts to decontaminate the area began in Nov. 2020 and was declared complete in April 2021.

This declaration generated an outcry from the CCC who still believe adequate testing has not been conducted in their neighborhood.

“We are helpless in this fight because we are unable to hire an attorney, have our land tested or get a public health assessment,” the CCC said. “Our voices remain unheard by the State EPA, US EPA and the City of Carbondale.”

Staff reporter William Box can be reached at wbox@dailyegyptian.com or on Twitter at @ William17455137.

Page 8

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Contaminated wood treatment site hurting community 100 years later Janiyah Gaston jgaston@dailyegyptian.com Jamilah Lewis jlewis@dailyegyptian.com

Environmental racism has been a long standing problem within society. The most common way it can be shown is the neglect of one the environmental health of one area due to it having a lower socioeconomic status.

Until the US Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) began setting regulations for polluting industries, wood treatment plants across the United States routinely neglected to address the dangerous waste byproducts from their sites which sometimes contaminate nearby communities.

Some wood plant treatment sites are known for being in marginalized communities exposing them to toxic chemicals like creosote, dioxin or PCP(pentachlorophenol).

According to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry, PCP is commonly used as a pesticide and a wood preservative for products like railroad ties.

Since PCP is carcinogenic when people are exposed to high concentrations of it, the risk of getting cancer in people exposed to it is increased.

A case study from the University of West Florida goes in depth on the history of the American Creosote Works Inc. site in Pensacola, Fla., and how it negatively impacted marginalized communities around it.

Wastewater from the superfund site would leak into surrounding streets and waterways of the block groups near the site.

Six out of the eight census blocks have a diversity count over 50% with most having an income lower than the national average. The other two blocks being mostly white with a diversity index of 15.6% estimating the others at 87.5%.

According to an article made by the news organization Inside Climate News on the Pensacola superfund site, it is known as one of the most dangerous wastes sites in the U.S. The site was used to make telephone poles, homes, ships, and bridges . In the early 20th century around 1902 until 1981, workers on the sites were ignored

by America Creosote Works and their complaints of illnesses and skin irritations from chemical exposure.

Another site that exposed communities on a daily basis were the Kerr-McGee wood treatment sites. Their main base of operation was located in Oklahoma City and collectively treated almost half of the railroad ties used in America, according to ICW. Kerr-McGee had multiple sites from New Mexico to Missouri. The contamination from the sites in Bossier City, La., Avoca, PA., and Columbus, Mo. that the groundwater and soil were contaminated.

According to the EPA the site on Columbus Mo, is currently under investigation. As for Avoca and Bossier City no other information could be found on the clean up status of these sites.

The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) acknowledged creosote as harmful to humans and is still used today but under monitored use.

Residents living near these sites noticed the dangers they were exposed to later on with the little information they were given.

A neighboring waste site, Escambia Woods in Pensacola, Fla., was investigated by the EPA in 1996. This resulted in the evacuation

“Some of my family members had birth defects and side effects from creosote because we were born on the north side there.”

- Darryl Weber Carbondale resident

of four neighborhoods and providing new housing, becoming the third-largest environmental relocation in U.S. history.

American Creosote Works Inc. filed for bankruptcy in 1981 with many other wood plant sites in the nation following suit, leaving the cleanup cost of around $50 million per site to subsequent owners.

The sites turned their plants over to the EPA’s Superfund Trust which was tasked with clean up. At its peak the Trust had a fund of $4.7 billion in 1997, now at $75 million at the beginning of 2021.

The Koppers wood treatment plant has been around since 1897, and was used to cure wood, telephone poles, and railroad ties. The plant is located on the northeast side of Carbondale which is a predominantly minority community.

Members of the Carbondale community have voiced their concerns with the negative impact the plant has had on the health and living conditions of the people in the communities near it.

According to Darryl Weber, a resident of Carbondale, the people who lived and worked near the site were exposed to PCP and creosote for almost 90 years. He said his family has lived near the Koppers Site since 1930 and has suffered negative health effects from the contamination of the land and water.

“Some of my family members had birth defects and side effects from creosote because we were born on the north side there,” Weber said. “After 1930, my grandfather farmed the land, they drank the well water and of course breathed the contaminated air from the plant.

In 1945, he moved to the south side of the plant in 1945 and was still exposed.”

Weber said his aunt had to be homeschooled for a period of time due to her falling into a puddle of creosote, causing her to develop black lung disease.

Weber said when it was found that creosote could cause cancer, Beazer Inc. did nothing to get the people who had been exposed to it medical testing.

“If you had been exposed to Roundup or Agent Orange, it’s news all across the country that you’re receiving medical help and care for that exposure,” Weber said. “But, there’s been no enforcement of Beazer East’s hands when it comes to Carbondale, Illinois.”

According to Weber, when it came to people being exposed to creosote because of Koppers, there was no response from anyone.

Because of this lack of action Weber is looking to get a congressional hearing to get justice for the people affected by Koppers.

Weber is not the only resident frustrated with the lack of action towards the Koppers Site. Carbondale resident Melvin Holder said the workers and their families were constantly exposed to creosote on a daily basis while working at the plant.

“These men worked in this stuff. Their clothes would be so saturated with creosote

that they would bury them in the ground to try to get the ground soak up some of the creosote from it. Holder said. “They carried these cross ties, however much they weighed, 100 pounds 200 pounds, and creosote soaked on their shoulders.”

According to Holder, because creosote was such a prevalent part of the wood curing process for Koppers, the workers could not avoid coming into contact with the dangerous chemical.

Holder also believes the state and county are complicit in the harmful behavior of the plant and its effect on the community.

“Who were the people who were interested in being humane to people?” Holder said.

“The city wasn’t, and I say [this] because the state and others in the science community knew in 1933 that creosote was a harmful deadly thing. Yet, they did nothing about it

and continued to let it operate.”

Holder said the city and EPA should have taken some sort of action toward the Koppers site once they found out that the chemicals they were using were poisoning the community.

Carbondale resident Rodney Morris, who lives near the plant, has tried to reason with town officials about getting things in the community fixed.

“It took me months of fighting with the City Council to get the ditches dug out here.

We would flood and everything else, since we don’t have sidewalks or drainage. We have ditches. This street north is just ditches,” Morris said.

Morris said the city shows no concern for the people living there if they refuse to take action and make these communities a cleaner and safer place.

“They’re doing $4 million for what’s called a North American shrew. That’s some kind of little animal that looks like a rat or something like that. That’s what this $4 million claim means: they don’t care about anything south of their property. You want to clean up for the North American shrew but you don’t care about the people.”

Staff reporters Janiyah Gaston and Jamilah Lewis can be reached at jgaston@dailyegyptian. com and jlewis@dailyegyptian.com.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Page 9

Rick Crossly addsnew plants to his yard Aug. 12, 2021, in Carbondale, Ill.. He said he spends a minimum of two hours on plant maintenance every day and loves coming home to something beautiful that makes him smile. Dominique Martinez-Powell | @dmartinez_powell.photography

Award promotes awareness to Keep Carbondale Beautiful

William Box | wbox@dailyegyptian.com Joel Kottman | jkottman@dailyegyptian.com

Making Carbondale beautiful one yard at a time is a primary goal of the non-profit that hands out the Bright Spot Award.

The award is granted by a board of directors who confer it based on community nominations and is awarded monthly to a residential and commercial winner.

Anne Krippenstal, the executive director of Keep Carbondale Beautiful, said, “It is used to recognize people who have contributed to the environment in a positive way.”

This award is presented for revitalization of property, new construction, planting, beautification, upkeep, maintenance or rehabilitation, according to the group’s website.

“We like to see all different types of homeowners get involved, and we love it when neighbors nominate other neighbors, “ Krippenstal said.

“I think that brings the community together when neighbors recognize other people. It’s a really awesome thing that I think we do.”

She said the group doesn’t have a very defined set of parameters.

“People know this and we like to take notice and recognize nice yards. We get a variety of yards.

We don’t have a one size fits all,” Krippenstal said.

The latest residential recipient of

the award was Rick Crossley.

Crossley, a computer engineer, redesigned his yard with a ring of flowers around the mailbox. Along the drive, he installed a rockbordered French drain, and framed his doorway with a collection of potted plants while freshly spray painted furniture lined the front deck.

Crossley makes a point to repurpose abandoned or otherwise trashed items within his home and garden in an effort to combat unnecessary waste and pollution. His commitment to environmental friendliness and community engagement caught the attention of the people in his community, many of whom then nominated him for the Bright Spot Award.

“People kept coming by and saying they’d put my name in,” Crossley said. “I was just floored by the people that knew about the award and kept telling me they’d nominated me, they’d called for me, they’d sent emails about me and I was just touched.”

Crossley said he appreciates the way the award has galvanized his community and provided it something to be proud of, especially considering how new he is to gardening.

“This is the first year I’ve owned my own garden. This is the first summer I’ve been able to do this,” Crossley said.

The Business Bright Spot Award

Rick Crossly addsnew plants to his yard Aug. 12, 2021, in Carbondale, Ill.. He said he spends a minimum of two hours on plant maintenance every day and loves coming home to something beautiful that makes him smile.

Dominique Martinez-Powell | @dmartinez_powell.photography

went to Baker Family Dentistry in July 2021. Dr. Douglas Baker, with his wife and daughter, gave a complete facelift to his building.

A handmade railing now greets guests as they enter the property, alongside a bubbling fountain, a well manicured lawn and new, modern sidings along the outside of the office.

“Someone from the city of Carbondale came by and notified me [of the award] last year. It was in

the winter so I asked if they could come by when there were things flowering and looking a little nicer,” Baker said.

Baker and his family also cleaned litter out of the surrounding area and planted holly trees. Various bird and small wildlife feeders are maintained along with flowering rose bushes for pollinators.

Baker said it had been about 60 years since the office had been fixed up.

Some businesses experience an increase in positive feedback due to being the recipients of the award.

“It gives exposure to the time and effort you spend to make your office look nice, not only for yourself but the neighborhood you live in,” Baker said.

Staff reporters William Box and Joel Kottman can be reached at wbox@ dailyegyptian.com and jkottman@ dailyegyptian.com

Page 10

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Carbondale Community Resilience Fair introduces environmental changes to the community

Janiyah Gaston jgaston@dailyegyptian.com

The Carbondale Community Resilience Fair is the first one to come to Carbondale. The Resilience Fair was held over Zoom on Aug. 28 to discuss climate change in Illinois and how Carbondale plans to initiate environmental change in the city.

The Resilience Fair was put on by the Carbondale Sustainability Commision, which aims to make Carbondale more environmentally sustainable, and other organizations that also want to better Carbondale’s sustainability. The fair’s main goal was to educate and inform people about what environmentally sustainable practices are going on in the Carbondale community.

Amy McMorrow Hunter, founder and sponsor Climate Economy Education Inc., is one of the event organizers. She said...

“I am one of the organizations running the fair. It is being organized by the Climate Economy Education Inc. which is a non-profit which I am the President and CEO of. It is also

being organized by The Southern Illinois Cooperative Business fund Thirteen organizations came to the event, including The Carbondale Sustainability Commission, Peace Coalition of Southern Illinois and SIU-C’s Students Embracing Nature Sustainability Environmentalism (SENSE).

Brenna Whitley, a student representative for SIU-C at the Sustainability Commision and also a member of SENSE, said they hope the fair will get more students involved with improving the environment.

“I would love it if we had a really good representation of our student population from SIU and there is a number of takeaways that I would like students to gain from this event. I would love to see students understand the opportunities here in Carbondale,” Whitley said.

Jane Cogie, a member of the sustainability commission, talks about how the commission views the Carbondale Resilience fair Aug. 28, 2021 in Carbondale, Ill. Cogie said, “We’ve seen the big picture and climate change is real and already impacting our lives […] Doing

our part as the sustainability commission members also means listening to and learning from you. You know what your neighborhoods need.”

Justin Schoof, one of the presenters for the Carbondale Resilience Fair, discusses an infographic from the 2021 IPCC report Aug. 28, 2021 in Carbondale, Ill. “In the end, what we see is that the human impact on climate more or so matches the observed change. So, in other words, when we say how much of the observed warming are humans responsible for, the answer is really just about all of it,” Schoof said.

During the fair’s panel, which discussed Carbondale’s sustainability action plan, Justin Schoof, a Geography Professor at SIU-C, spoke on the effects that climate change has had on Illinois.

“I am going to be talking about the climate change that has happened in our region and the climate change that may potentially happen in our region. I will talk a little bit about the causes and the impacts of those changes,” Schoof said.

Gary Williams, the Carbondale city manager spoke on the future plans

Carbondale has to combat climate change.

“We charged the sustainability commission with developing a climate action plan… the purpose of the plan is to present some aspirational goals to the city council… to see how we can reduce our energy usage,” Williams said.

Saxon Metzger, a member of the Sustainability Commission talked about the action plan and how it will benefit the Carbondale area.Sean Parks, program manager of the Value-added Sustainability Development Center, will speak about how co-ops can help improve the community and environment.

The action plan was organized by the Carbondale Sustainability Commision.

The action plan’s purpose is to provide better insight about what plans the city of carbondale has to move forward with making Carbondale a more environmentally sustainable place.

Metzger focused on showing how the action plan will help improve Carbondale.

Williams talked about some of the operations they have now that are

helping the community. He stated that Carbondale is a certified tree city, which has allowed Carbondale to plant more trees and a recycling program.

Schoof said carbon dioxide is the main cause of climate change, and the last decade has been some of the warmest on record.

Metzger said switching to renewable energy will result in a massive reduction in fossil fuels and expanding the recycling program would reduce the expansion of landfills.

Parks said he works with co-operatives, and believes they can also help improve the environment because the democratic structure allows businesses to make decisions based on community needs instead of profit.

“We know with more certainty than ever what climate change is doing to our environment and to our natural systems, to our economy. We know we have solutions to fix that,” Hunter said.

Staff reporter Janiyah Gaston can be reached at jgaston@dailyegyptian.com or on Instagram at janiyah_reports.

WELCOME, ALL!

Epiphany Lutheran Church

Look for the sign

Refreshments after Sunday services

Pastor Brian Coffey

Please join us for worship at

Epiphany Lutheran Church on Sundays at 9:30 a.m.

Jazz Service - second Sunday each month at 5:00 p.m.

Refreshments after Sunday services

We are just 4 blocks west of the SIU campus at 1501 W. Chautauqua Phone 618-457-2065

E-mail office@elcarb.org

For more information for what is going on at Epiphany, point your smartphone camera or QR reader here:

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Changes 6 continued from

Mike Slenska, environmental manager for Beazer East Inc., said Beazer has already conducted such soil testing as part of the site investigation process, both along the site’s southern property boundary and residential parcels located south of the site.

“The residential parcel soil sampling conducted by Beazer occurred in 2012, and the results of the sampling included in the site’s 2015 Human Health Risk Assessment,” Slenska said.

According to the Field Sampling Activity report included in the Human Health Risk Assessment, the sampling team was composed of Caroyln Bury of USEPA, Tom Edmundson of Illinois EPA, and Rob Young of TechLaw Incorporated in 2005.

TechLaw Inc. is an environmental consultant that helps government and commercial clients assess performance, manage risk, implement sustainable remedies, and resolve uncertainty, according to their site.

According to the report, the sampling team collected fourteen soil samples for PAH and PCP analysis based on a review of the existing onsite data and input from northeast community representatives, including one sample from the Koppers facility in an area known for contamination and one background sample from a residential area.

According to the report, the samples were analyzed for polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs) and pentachlorophenol (PCP) to determine whether contamination from the Koppers facility had migrated off-site into the neighboring community.

According to the Centers for Disease Control (CDC), pentachlorophenol causes neurological, blood, and liver effects through acute inhalation exposures to humans.

According to the Illinois Department of Public Health (IDPH), similar health effects can happen when exposed to polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons coupled with repeated skin contact, resulting in redness and inflammation of the skin.

According to the report, samples were collected from depths of approximately zero to six inches below the ground surface.

The sampling team compared the results to EPA Region 9 Preliminary Remediation Goals (PRG) and the Illinois Tiered Approach to Corrective Action Objectives (TACO) guidelines for residential properties to determine if the concentrations of PAHs and PCP detected in the soils could be potentially harmful to residents.

“The sampling team met with representatives of the neighboring community the day before the sampling event [and] the sampling team used the community representatives input and existing onsite data in establishing the soil sample locations.”

Surface soil sample 13, for instance, was collected in the Koppers Former Process Area, from within the facility’s boundaries that appeared to be visibly impacted by creosote because the objective was to obtain a “signature” of the PAHs present in the creosote-impacted soils at the facility.

Another soil sample location featured a large area southeast of the Koppers site and south of the property line, which Kopper’s managers had reportedly used to store treated railroad ties several years ago.

According to the report, sampling locations included locations north, west,

and east of the Koppers site. In addition, the surface soil samples collected from Oakdale Park and a recreation area located in north-central Carbondale were considered a background sample and located approximately one mile west of the facility.

The results of PCP analysis did not detect PCP at a high concentration in any sample other than one sample exceeding PRG and TACO guidelines, the Illinois Environmental Protection Agency’s (IEPA) method for developing remediation objectives for contaminated soil and groundwater. These remediation objectives protect human health and take into account site conditions and land use for residential exposures, according to the IEPA. Additionally, the background sample did not detect PCP, nor was the chemical detected in any soil supplies collected outside the boundaries of the Koppers site.

“The exceedance was expected since the sampling team collected sample 13 from onsite soil material that contained visible creosote,” the report said. “Sample one was collected adjacent to a large drainage feature and an associated sample two collected in a step-out pattern to the south of the sample; one did not contain PAHs or PCP at concentrations exceeding the residential criteria.”

The report also said that the scientist rejected PCP results in six soil samples because of low surrogate recoveries and low calibration response. Target analytes may not have been detected if present in low concentrations.

The non-detected results, for instance, were rejected because the recoveries of the acid surrogates two-fluorophenyl and phenol-d5, which are PCP compounds, were less than 10 percent below laboratory quality control limits.

The following year, the city of Carbondale completed a supplemental investigation because northeast residents were still raising concerns about possible health hazards and water contamination in their neighborhood.

David Kimmle, a civil engineer for Hurst-Rosche Engineers Inc., said that topographic information, including the presence of waterways and other bodies of water, should be considered when establishing a sampling plan.

According to the Field Sampling Activity report, 11 subsurface soil samples were collected at six locations throughout the local neighborhood.

Kimmle said both random and gridtype sampling plans are appropriate based on the nature of the contamination, intent of the sampling program, and availability of historical information or previous sampling results.

“With random sampling, test locations are selected separately, randomly, and independently of previous sample locations,” Kimmle said. “With grid sampling, test locations are selected systematically at given intervals.”

Random sampling is appropriate if sample locations are selected randomly with uniform coverage, whereas grid sampling ensures the entire area of sampling is systematically covered.

“With both sampling plans an appropriate number of samples must be collected to establish the desired level of confidence in the sampling plan,” Kimmle said.

Kimmle also said selection of supplemental and specific test locations is appropriate after the results of a random or grid sampling program are available.

Jennifer Sandorf, a project geologist formerly with Blasland, Bouck, and Lee Incorporated, which later merged with

Page 11 Arcadis Incorporated who conducted onsite soil sampling for Beazer, was present during the sample collection with Kimmle.

Kimmle said the sampling team used a post-hole digger to dig down to the one feet depth at each designated location to test for PAHs and PCP as the EPA did the year before using the same method.

“Sandorf collected split samples on behalf of Beazer [and] Monty also accompanied the sampling team,” Kimmle reported. “An auger was then used to auger down to the two feet depth, where a second soil sample was obtained and split by Sandorf.”

Kimmle also said the appropriate depth to detect toxins is dependent on numerous conditions, including but not necessarily limited to soil type and profile, presence of groundwater, and means by which the potential contaminate may have entered the subsurface. Without this information an appropriate depth of sampling cannot be recommended.

Kimmle agreed with Klubek in regard to consideration of soil profile and its characteristics in the soil sampling process.

“Yes, the soil profile and soil characteristics… along with many other factors… must be considered when establishing a sampling plan and sampling depth,” Kimmle said. “The soil type and soil profile may dictate the ability for toxins to migrate within the subsurface.”

Monty said he does not remember why the two-foot depth was determined.

However, the local soil tends to form a “hardpan” just a couple of feet below the surface. This hardpan is particularly impervious to water percolating through it.

According to soil research done by the University of California Agriculture and Natural Resources, hardpan forms when the tillage presses soil directly below it together, forming a compacted layer.

Deep compaction occurs further down in the soil profile caused by excessive weight on soil, mainly when soil is wet.

It can be hard to break up soil once deep compaction occurs.

“Maybe this was a factor in deciding how deep to take the samples,” Monty said.

Only 11 soil samples were taken as a matter of practice by the sampling team, Monty said. When sampling, the team does not test 100 percent of the lots.

Instead, they select a “representative” sample of scattered sites throughout the area of concern.

“If testing at one or more of the sites turns up contaminants, then you would go back and do more intensive sampling in those areas to see the spatial extent of the problem,” Monty said.

Kimmle said the answer to selection location is dependent on the intent of the sampling program and other relevant information.

“For example, one neighborhood may have residential lots encompassing a quarter acre, whereas another neighborhood may have residential lots encompassing an acre,” Kimmle said.

“The sampling plan and coverage of individual properties will likely be different for these two scenarios.”

One soil sampling location was at the Eurma Hayes Center, where the sampling team took a sample at a 24-inch depth with no visible signs of contamination.

Other soil sampling locations included an alleyway, an open lot behind Thomas School, and a residential lot.

The sampling team detected traces of benzopyrene, chrysene, and pyrene from a 12-inch depth sample. However, the

parameter concentrations were below remediation objectives established for the respective parameters, Kimmle said.

The test results indicate that the sampling team detected no PAH concentrations above statewide remediation objectives established by the IEPA for residential properties in any collected soil samples, Kimmle said.

Monty confirmed there were sites selected in advance farther away from the Koppers facility because one of the neighborhood’s concerns was that the EPA’s testing did not take samples far enough away.

“Oh, yes, they were [sampled]...

Thomas school is six blocks south of the Koppers site, [and] the Eurma Hayes was another four or five blocks south of that,” Monty said. “I think one of the sample sites was at a public housing project way down on Oak street, which is a long way away.”

Monty also said there was sampling done in residential yards where residents have concerns of Koppers run-off chemicals contaminating the soil near their homes.

“My wife and I lived for eight years up in the northeast just three or four blocks from the Koppers site, and we had a garden in our backyard as did our neighbors, and we all grew good crops,” Monty said.

Monty said his family had neighbors growing food and eating food on their lots for decades, but he never heard any mention by any of them of any concern about the healthfulness of the food.

“It may be that some people have a perspective that there was a problem and were afraid, but that’s different from there being an actual problem,” Monty said.

Kimmle said he can not provide a direct answer to whether he agrees that the soils located at the surface would no longer possess the same characteristics they had beforehand due to them being urban or human-modified soils nor whether he thinks residential yards closest to the Superfund site must be tested for contaminants.

Kimmle also can not provide a direct answer to what circumstances the sampling team would not go deeper than six inches or locate a band at 10-inch or 23-inch depths to test the concentration levels to determine potential risk.

Monty also said if the residents want to do soil sampling and testing themselves, he would say have at it.

“But they need to hire a firm that’s competent to do it or get a university research lab who is technically competent to do it,” Monty said.

Just as important is that the study is done by a group all of the stakeholders can agree to.

“If the city is paying for the study then no matter how, no matter who does the study... it’s obviously biased because the city paid for it,” Monty said. “If the EPA pays for the study, the results have to be biased because the EPA paid for it.”

Though the city hires a firm to do this work regularly, and that firm wouldn’t have an interest in risking it’s reputation to skew test results,Monty said, there is still an issue mistrust in the Black community “I think to overcome years of suspicion and sense of injustice that just get passed down from generation to generation… I think part of that has to do with people working together,” Monty said. “The city and people in the neighborhood are working together on projects of common interest to try to get a positive outcome.”

Monty also said the city has been making efforts for many years to try to do things better, to improve things between Black residents and the city administration, and they need to find a way to develop some good faith.

“You have to have some faith that if you hire people who professionally do this work and are impartial...they have a lab, they test it, they crunch the numbers and make a report...at some point you have got to be willing to accept that kind of information,” Monty said.

Klubek said for the residents to conduct their testing would be very expensive, and Beazer is responsible for retesting the soil south of the Koppers site.

“That would be the responsibility of Beazer since they own the property,” Klubek said. “As I said, these profiles are poorly drained, so during wet conditions, you can have surface run-off from the Koppers site into their [neighbors’] yards... if you have movement from Kopper’s field into their yard, that’s their [Beazer’s] responsibility.”

Klubek said Beazer does not own the residential property. However, they are still responsible for preventing these contaminants from migrating off their site into the residential area next door.

“If you are in a car accident and somebody hits your car... they don’t own your car, but they are responsible for the damages to your car,” Klubek said. “That would be a parallel.”

Monty suggested interested parties might also obtain existing soil samples from the EPA and have the Illinois Department of Natural Resources pay for them.

Morris said the residents on the northeast side have considered a GoFundme page and other fundraisers to conduct their soil sampling and testing at an estimated cost of $61,000.

Monty also said the other thing to look out for is background contamination levels at the sampling sites the resident’s consultant will analyze.

“We’re down-wind from St. Louis,” Monty said. “We’re downwind from some coal-fired power plants that’s off to the northwest of us here. SIU has a coalfired power facility...all of those things introduce background levels of chemicals into the air, which precipitates out,” Monty said.

Monty said the contamination levels of concern are strictly located on the Koppers site property itself, and keep in mind that science changes.

“You can have tested at one time based on what you are testing for and at what levels you consider it to be harmful, and 20 or 30 years later, people might be looking at different chemicals,” Monty said.

Klubek said the best way to prevent off-site run-off and protect the residents next door is to haul in fresh clay and build a berm to serve as a separation barrier between Beazer property and the residents.

If there is any surface run-off, that berm would prevent any surface-off from entering the yards.

“What you can do with that berm is put some grass, because that grass can act as a biofilter as well,” Klubek said. “The biggest thing is to create a berm like you have your levees to control your water and to control any potential run-off from their field into their yards. Same principle.”

Claire Cowley is a second-year master’s student at SIU from Chicago. She is studying professional media and media management with a focus in multimedia journalism. Her research interests are environmental and racial justice.

Page 12

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

‘Cooked’ documentary highlights un-learned lessons from disaster response

Jason Flynn | @dejasonflynn

In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, tens of millions of people around the country have become keenly aware of massive gaps in the US public health system.

Researchers have begun to look back at past pandemics and epidemics, like the AIDS crisis, for insight into best practices galvanizing the public in mitigating spread and managing long term effects of the disease.

Others are looking at a different sort of disaster, those caused by extreme weather events, as another learning source.

In a series of panels hosted in the summer of 2020, filmmaker Judith Helfand co-organized a retrospective of her film “Cooked: Survival by Zip Code” to review some solutions that can be gleaned from these catastrophes, most of which have never been adopted.

“Cooked,” opens with Helfand’s reflection on Hurricane Sandy, which devastated residents around her New York City home.

Helfand was lucky enough to have a disaster prepping brother and a mom in the suburbs, where their biggest inconveniences during the storm were light outages and a badly drawn Scrabble hand.

Meanwhile, surging floodwaters swept past brownstones, shown in archival news footage, making the city impassable and stranding residents.

That reflection led Helfand on a quest to find out just how communities prepare for and recover from disasters like Sandy.

She ended up honing in on a 1995 heat wave in Chicago during which hundreds of people died.

The event was so startling it was picked up by national news outlets, who found nearly all of the deaths were in low-income Black neighborhoods on the city’s south and west sides.

The event represented such a complete failure of society and government to support residents in a time of crisis, numerous organizations point to it as an inciting incident in implementing disaster preparedness measures.

Yet, as the movie shows, those measures don’t address the deeply rooted racial and economic problems that are themselves a recipe for disaster.

The source material for the documentary is Erik Klinenberg’s book “Heat Wave: A Social Autopsy of Disaster in Chicago.”

“Heat waves kill more Americans than all of the other so-called natural disasters combined,” Klinenberg says near the beginning of the movie, addressing a government committee. “Disasters are not just important because they represent extreme cases, but also because, in looking at them closely, we learn to recognize conditions that are present but difficult to perceive.”

On screen we see a transition

from Chicago’s gleaming lakefront and majestic downtown skyline, to neighborhoods farther south where lots are overgrown, buildings are boarded up and streets are practically empty compared to the city’s bustling tourist center.

The area used to be teeming with activity, community organizer Orrin Williams says in the movie.

“Only the downtown had more economic activity than the 63rd and Halsted corridor,” Williams said.

Black and white footage, over fifty years old, shows theaters, department stores, restaurants and all of the city traffic that goes with them.

“If the heat wave happened when I was growing up, I think the outcome would’ve been a lot different. When it got really hot people would sleep on the back porch or sleep in the park,” Williams said. “People felt much safer.”

In 1995 the people who died as a result of the heat wave, mostly elderly people and people with other health conditions, were confronted with severe, “community structural issues,” that left them defenseless, former City of Chicago Director of Epidemiology Steve Whitman says in the movie.

Businesses where people might go to seek out a cooling break largely disappeared, libraries and schools that served the area closed, residents often can’t afford air conditioning units or the electricity to run them, there’s a lack of public green space, and a fear of neighborhood violence leads people to fear opening a window lest someone break in.

The result was 739 deaths over the course of four days of over 100 degree heat.

As new bodies were found each day, and for weeks after the weather had cooled, the coroner’s office was so full the city had to requisition nine refrigerated trucks to store all of the bodies that needed to be examined and cataloged.

Maureen Finn, a Cook County forensic scientist, described the office situation as “running a gauntlet” of dead bodies.

The situation feels eerily familiar as the US healthcare system is stretched past capacity in waves as the COVID-19 pandemic lurches on.

Then-Mayor Richard M. Daley tried variously to place the blame for the deaths on victims for not seeking help and family members for not checking in. He also called into question the efficacy of the official count of excess deaths, another tactic people in the US have seen play out on a mass scale during COVID. “I think there was a lot of denial… A lot of heads of state… it didn’t touch them,” southside resident Geraldine Flowers says in the movie. “It’s about a lack of compassion on a lot of parts.”

The difference between the vibrant south side of William’s childhood, and the current reality is

not the result of a tragic accident, or benign neglect.

Retired Chief Medical Officer for the Cook County Department of Public Health Linda Rae Murray says, in the movie, while she was outraged by the way the heat wave was handled, she wasn’t shocked by it.

“I know what happens during heat waves, and I could see that the city is not responding accordingly,” Rae Murray says. “Even if the city had responded in an appropriate way, we would’ve seen differences, hopefully not as great, between poor communities that are underresourced and communities that are better resourced.”

Over time, segregation, government restrictions on certain loans for Black people, referred to as “redlining,” predatory lending practices and systematic disinvestment from redlined communities devastated the local economy and created the foundation for the vast majority of present day community problems.

“Racism is not a disaster. It is something human beings invented, created and keep healthy,” Rae Murray says. “Segregation is something human beings invented, specific human beings, for specific purposes.”

Whitman explained the zip codes with the highest number of deaths and the highest levels of poverty had significant overlap. Of the 14 neighborhoods with the highest percentage of residents in poverty, seven were also zip codes with the highest number of deaths.

“None of this is rocket science,” Murray says.

“We all know what it takes to make a healthy neighborhood. It doesn’t require you to have mansions on the street. It requires you to have the grocery stores, the coffee shops, the restaurants, the beauty parlors, the barbershops. These are all institutions that help make streets safe. They provide places for people to go for help,” Klinenburg said the most horrific part of the incident was not just that so many people died due to circumstances that were wholly preventable, but also how it happened.

“It’s the way they died, alone and isolated,” Klinenburg says, again foreshadowing the isolation of the current pandemic.

Following the heatwave the city implemented a mitigation plan and climate action plan that included a centralized emergency outreach and response center, a public relations campaign and some limited downtown greenspace initiatives.

Yet, the south and west sides still lack the same facilities they were lacking in 1995. Helfrand captures a scene of children playing in the stream of an uncorked fire hydrant outside Jim Harris Cleaners, in lieu of a pool or park amenities, which police arrive to shut off, and disperse the hot crowd.

Klinenberg, being interviewed for a 10th anniversary retrospective of the heat wave, says ominously, “My biggest concern now is if we refuse to come to terms with this crisis we’ll doom ourselves to experience it again.”

Whitman explains in a seminar in a tiered-seat classroom that Black communities in Chicago have a life expectancy 15 years lower compared to residents in “the Loop” downtown. Those communities also have worse outcomes for a broad swath of things like cancer, unemployment, school closings, and on.

“The differences in health and measures of health are growing worse everywhere we look in Chicago, and the reason that’s happening is because the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer… they’re getting sicker as well,” Whitman says.

Soon after the retrospective press tour depicted in the documentary, another disaster strikes. Hurricane Katrina devastated New Orleans, especially poor Black people who had significantly less ability to flee the storm and resulting flood.

By this point we can make out the emerging pattern playing out across the country, and trace it back to our own recent experiences with disasters, such as forest forest fires, the deep freeze in Texas, oil spills, epidemics and tornadoes. The communities without the resources set aside for crises are also going to bear the brunt of the damage.

Helfrand sets out to observe a variety of disaster preparedness seminars and drills to see just what communities and groups to address recovery problems are getting for their money.

One press event in a Chicago suburb, where past mayoral candidate Tori Preckwinkle was a keynote speaker, displayed a couple dozen multimillion dollar response vehicles.

Another drill in Chicago’s Englewood neighborhood used an abandoned public housing project for a tornado response drill, including hired actors with faux injuries, downed trees and demolished cars. Helfrand notes Chicago experiences, on average, one Tornado related death a year.

The largest venture is a Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) joint operation drill simulating a massive midwest earthquake involving over 10,000 people.

“I was too busy marveling at our nation’s ability, a seemingly unconditional commitment to save lives, marshall resources, rebuild infrastructure and ensure citizens are fed, housed and provided medical care,” Helfrand says in a voice over. “That is, as long as it’s in the wake of a natural disaster.”

Helfrand asked officials and seminar attendees if those same resources could be deployed to strengthen and buffer communities

experiencing the slow moving disaster of extreme poverty.

“Every day I go into an exam room and I work with people that have medical conditions, much of which could have been prevented or at least made much easier to deal with if they had the structural conditions they need to stay healthy,” Rae Murray says.

3,200 people die just in Chicago every year from issues that could have been mitigated, Whitmer says.

In one of the retrospective seminars hosted in 2020, Thea L. James, an associate chief medical officer at Boston Medical Center, said the safety net hospital she works at sees mostly patients with these kinds of avoidable medical issues.

“By design, our patients and these communities have lower health status due to things like food insecurity, housing insecurity, lower levels of education attainment,” James said. “A key factor and root cause [is] lower income, lack of financial stability, and lack of opportunities to build assets or build wealth.”

The year before COVID, 34.7% of all admissions to Boston Medical were Black. That percentage increased to over 40% in 2020, and non-White people accounted for 80% of all deaths in that hospital system.

Maudlyne Ihejirika, a Chicago Sun-Times reporter and moderator for another of the Zoom seminars, said we’re facing the same problems that were pointed out in the aftermath of the Chicago heat wave crisis, 25 years later.

Most of those problems were also outlined decades earlier in government reports like the Kerner Commission report on civil disorders, which followed mass uprisings in the 1960s.

That report opens with a quote from then-President Lyndon B. Johnson.

“The only genuine, long-range solution for what has happened lies in an attack— mounted at every level—upon the conditions that breed despair and violence. All of us know what those conditions are: ignorance, discrimination, slums, poverty, disease, not enough jobs.

We should attack these conditions— not because we are frightened by conflict, but because we are fired by conscience. We should attack them because there is simply no other way to achieve a decent and orderly society in America.”

Those lessons have yet to be transferred into mass action.

“Bodies once again have piled up in communities of color, in communities plagued by poverty, in communities, even more so today, disinvested,” Ihejirika said. “Did we learn anything? I dare say no.”

Jason Flynn can be reached at jflynn@dailyegyptian.com, by phone at 872-222-7821 or on Twitter at @ dejasonflynn

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Page 13

Tornado survivors share stories of the splintering storm and aftermath Sophie Whitten | @swhittenphotography

In the cold and miserable rain, Mickey Fowler worked tirelessly out of his restaurant, which had been torn apart by tornado damage, to feed the volunteers coming to Mayfield’s aid.

“I had a lot of food left here, so we took food out and we’re cooking it all for the community,” Fowler said.

The tornado that cut through Mayfield, Kentucky, on Friday, Dec. 10, left Fowler’s K&N Root Beer, along with many other businesses - and homes - , completely demolished. The south side of the restaurant was lost to the storm, and mud and debris was scattered across the floors and remaining walls, but the smell of warm meals still flowed out of the kitchen as Fowler and members of his church prepared food for the community.

Fowler had owned the restaurant for the past forty years and was working the night the storm hit town.

“We were working. We were running, operating. We were serving food, and I sent some of my servers home because I knew it was coming, and we were listening to the radio and TV, so the last [server] stayed with me and I sent [the others] on home,” Fowler said.

Fowler grew up in Mayfield and remained there throughout adulthood, working at his restaurant and pastoring a church, Pryorsburg Independent Bible Methodist Church.

“I’ve spent my whole life here.

I’ve raised my family here, raised my kids, my grandkids. They all worked [at the restaurant] at one time or another, and kids all over the community have come to work for me,” Fowler said. “There’s no telling how many young people that have worked for me over the years.

40 years. A lifetime.”

According to Fowler, he locked the door just ten minutes before the tornado struck, and as he drove home, he could hear the storm flattening the town.

“I got out and locked the door, came around here, stopped and prayed and told God, I said, ‘God, you gave me this 40 years ago, just take it,’” Fowler said, tearing up.

“And he did. He took it, but I got out. I was right about the edge of town when I heard it hit just behind me, and I knew it was gone.”

Fowler didn’t let the destruction of his business end his work in the restaurant. The Sunday following the tornado, Fowler asked his church to help him bring food to the town and the volunteers helping with the relief efforts.

“I said, ‘You know what? Let’s let our light shine and be the hands and feet of Jesus. Let’s go up here and cook this food and feed the community as best we can.’ So that’s what we’ve been doing,” Fowler said.

Mickey Fowler cooks food for community members and disaster relief volunteers Dec. 17, 2021 at Fowler’s K&N Root Beer in Mayfield, Kentucky. “We’ve served over 1500 sandwiches since Tuesday,” Fowler said. Sophie Whitten | @swhittenphotography

Fowler and his team have handed out more than a thousand sandwiches since they began serving them on Tuesday, Dec. 14, and the community has helped the team with their work along the way by donating food to cook and serve.

“There’s just a tremendous, tremendous outpouring of love,” Fowler said. “These people, these people here are good, good people.”

Fowler is now retiring from the restaurant business after the storm.

“I’m good with it. I’m seventy years old. I was ready to retire.”

Southwest of Fowler’s K&N Root Beer, Sarah Bryan cooked lunch over a propane stove on her front porch, her yard still inhabited by a downed power line, while buckets and totes surrounded the house to collect rainwater.

Bryan was at home with her husband and her dog when the tornado hit.

“The absolute scariest thing I’ve ever experienced,” she said.

“We were out here on the front porch watching the storm like good southerners, because we do love to sit on the front porch watching the storms,” Bryan said, “and we kind of noticed that the clouds were looking a little different than normal.”

Bryan and her husband decided to go inside and prepare for the storm. They unplugged appliances from the outlets, grabbed candles and flashlights, and put on shoes.

Bryan said it then became “eerily quiet.”

“The wind stopped blowing and the rain stopped, and my husband and I were looking at each other going, ‘something’s up,’” Bryan said.

She said they had planned to stay

in the bathroom because there was only one window and it was larger than the laundry room, which was windowless, but when the tornado hit, they decided the laundry room was safest.

“We were standing there and all of a sudden, it just got absolutely stone-quite. Like you could hear a pin drop,” Bryan said.

Bryan and her husband grabbed their dog and ran for the laundry room, hearing electrical pops from the power lines outside as they began to take shelter.

“I covered [our dog] and my husband covered me. We couldn’t get the laundry room door shut, so we just hunkered down,” Bryan said. “Our ears popped but I could hear [my husband] saying, ‘We’re going to be okay, we’re going to be okay, we’re going to be okay.’”

According to Bryan, it took about twenty seconds before they began to hear the tornado make its way through their home.

“I heard the door blow, and then we heard the glass break, and we felt the wind, and the house shook insanely, and then it was over,” Bryan said. “That was it.”

The three of them waited a few more moments before leaving the laundry room, only to find their house in pieces.

“Every window in the house is broken except for the living room, which is where we’re currently living. The bedroom was shaken up, completely flipped over [...] Stuff was dangling from the light fixture,” Bryan said.

However, the weather problems didn’t end with the tornado. The following day, the couple worked to insulate the house against the dropping temperatures by hanging

tarps on the roof and strapping cardboard and aluminum foil on the windows to help reflect heat.

Bryan said, “The first night was really chilly because we didn’t have anything, and we were wet and we were out that night [...] in the back, nailing up tarps and stuff in the middle of the night and pouring down rain, so the first night we were pretty awful.” was not far behind, though.

According to Bryan, a crew of volunteers that her husband worked with brought supplies the next day to secure the house, and people from around the community brought donations of food and water as well.

“We’re not local to Mayfield, but we have absolutely felt 100% local because everybody’s been absolutely fantastic,” Bryan said.

While the physical damage has been done, the emotional damage still takes a toll on the survivors of the tornadoes. Bryan, like many others, now face the trauma of the disaster and the emotional hardships stemming from the night.

Bryan said she couldn’t leave her home for the first two days.

“It took me two days to really get out of this area because I don’t think my mental health would have been able to do it,” She said. “I’ve been waking up pretty much every morning with cold sweats and panic attacks.”

A few days after the tornado, a severe thunderstorm came through Mayfield and Bryan said she felt as if she was reliving the storm all over again.

“The wind was blowing really bad,” Bryan said, “and you don’t think about it until you wake up and you’re in the laundry room and you’re not but that’s where

your head’s at.”

Down the road from Bryan, George Rodgers remembers the night as an equally traumatic experience.

“They say it sounds like a train.

It doesn’t sound like a train. It’s unimaginable, the sound. It’s something like you’ll never hear again. I don’t ever want to hear it again,” Rodgers said.

He, his wife, his sister-in-law, and his two dogs found shelter in a windowless room of their house when the tornado came through.

“It shook the whole house,” Rodgers said. “We thought it was coming in and I thought we were ready to go.”

Rodgers and his family made it safely from the wreckage with minimal damage to their home, but he said he never wants to relive the experience.

“It’s once in a lifetime for me [...]

I’m 65, and I don’t ever want to see it again,” Rodgers said.

The tornado, while terrifying, has proven the town’s resilience.

Volunteers line every corner and drive down every street offering help to those impacted by the storms, whether it be food, water, blankets, toys, shoes, gas, tool kits, or a pair of hands to sift through debris.

“I’m so proud of Mayfield, just how great we’ve all come together,” Bryan said. “We’ve got some really good humans here [...] So that in itself, it’s worth everything. We’d be so much worse if we didn’t have a good community.”

Rodgers said he was amazed by the amount of donations and volunteers that have come to the town’s aid through this trying time.

“I’ve got to thank everybody that’s helped us and it’s amazing how much help we’ve had, and I appreciate it,” Rodgers said. “I was losing my faith in people for a long time. It was getting really bad, but this brought it all back. It brought all my faith back. We’ll get through it.”

Rodgers also offered advice in the form of a plea.

“Don’t take the weather for granted. If they tell you that something is going to hit and they tell you to hunker down, take cover.

Don’t take it for granted. ‘Well, it’s not going to hit me.’ It will hit you.

Don’t believe the, ‘Well, it never hit before.’ No. It will hit,” Rodgers said. “Take that to heart, for me.

I’m telling you. I’ve been in it. We know.”

(Editor’s Note: If you have been affected by the tornadoes and are struggling with your mental health, contact the National Suicide Prevention Hotline at 800-2738255) Photo Editor Sophie Whitten can be reached at Swhitten@ dailyegyptian.com or on Instagram @ swhittenphotography.

Page 14

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Upturned car rest among other demolished cars and debris of nearby buildings Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky. Dominique Martinez-Powell | @dmartinez_powell.photography

Donations for tornado victims pile high in Mayfield, Kentucky

Sophie Whitten | @swhittenphotography

Driving south on U.S. Highway 45 over the hill into Mayfield, Kentucky, the town appears to have collapsed in on itself into a pile of wood, bricks and metal scraps in the aftermath of the Dec. 10 tornado.

Downed power lines lay across streets and yards, clothes and shoes hang from tree limbs, cars

sit upside down on heaps of rubble, glass and debris litter hollow building floors, and bicycles, toys, and the remaining pieces of normal life peek out from underneath strewn branches and collapsed homes.

From a distance, Mayfield on a recent Saturday seemed like a ghost town, demolished by the tornado; however, with a closer look, it became clear the town

Two people work among the debris of a building that was leveled in the Dec. 10 tornado Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Dominique Martinez-Powell | @dmartinez_powell.photography

was filled with people in the grips of hope, overflowing with an abundance of love and compassion for one another.

In the midst of the debris, volunteers stood on nearly every street corner cooking hot meals, handing out cases of water, filling up cans of gas, or giving directions to relief centers. Cars stopped for pedestrians walking on sidewalks to offer clothes, food, and blankets, while disaster relief organizations drove through town to bring help to those who were unable to leave their homes.

Darrick Holloman, a pastor at High Point Baptist Church in Mayfield said there were an overwhelming amount of donations immediately following the tornado.

“I spend a lot of my time returning phone calls and returning texts, mostly from generous churches, ministries, businesses,” Holloman said. “You talk to somebody, I don’t know if he’s a CEO, but a very important person at a corporation who says, ‘I have six semi trailers coming your way, what do you want on it?’”

High Point Baptist Church decided it could best help the community through serving hot meals to people affected by the storms. With the help of two organizations called Giving Bak and Southern Baptist Disaster Relief, the church has served more than 15,000 meals since Monday, Dec. 13.

“I got in contact with [Giving Bak] and they said, ‘Hey, we’re coming up, we’ve got capacity to feed 40,000 meals.’ And so they’ve come up and we’ve just run with that,” Holloman said. “We were bombarded on day one, Monday, and we did almost 1,500 meals,

believe it, and that’s been our lowest day yet.”

According to Holloman, as long as there is a need in the community, the church will continue to serve meals, and the community, in turn, has continued to donate food to the church to make that possible.

“The only request I made a few days ago, I said, ‘We need bread.’ That’s my only thing. I didn’t even publicize it. I just hit a few churches,” Holloman said, pointing to a wall of bread in the back of the building. “First Baptist Church in Woodlawn, Illinois, loaded up a truck, and I had a connection there, a former pastor who used to be from West Kentucky, and they showed up and they’ve dumped all this bread [...]They just showed up with this bread and that was unbelievable.”

The Southern Baptist Disaster Relief and volunteers from High Point Baptist church spent hours organizing and sorting the donated bread. They, like many other organizations in town, have been flooded with more donations than they have volunteers to handle them.

“There’s so much supplies that have come in from everywhere that almost all of Graves County is accepting nothing,” Holloman said.

He said many organizations have been redirecting donations to smaller, surrounding towns such as Dawson Springs, Kentucky, which were just as devastated by the tornado but aren’t receiving the same level of aid from the community. High Point Baptist Church has also been storing some supplies for when the next disaster strikes.

“We have way more of everything that we will ever

need, so some of that has got to be stored away, what isn’t perishable, and it’s got to be ready to go to the next tornado or the next hurricane,” Holloman said. “That’s a good problem to have. I think one of the lessons going forward from this is how to respond to emergencies wisely.

You can get too much stuff. You really can.”

John Hoback pets his dog Kye after being reunited Dec. 18, 2021 at the Mayfield-Graves County Animal Shelter in Mayfield, Kentucky.

John Hoback (left) and a Mayfield-Graves County Animal Shelter volunteer pet Hoback’s dog Kye after they were reunited Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Volunteers from the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief prepare food plates to give to those left in need due to the Dec. 10 tornado at High Point Baptist Church Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Volunteers from the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief prepare plates of food to give to tornado survivors Dec. 18, 2021 at High Point Baptist Church in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Two people work among the debris of a building that was leveled in the Dec. 10 tornado Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

A volunteer clears debris in a building destroyed in the Dec. 10 tornado Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Upturned car rest among other demolished cars and debris of nearby buildings Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Volunteers cook food to feed community members at the Please see DONATIONS | 15

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

Donations continued from

14

Mayfield-Graves Fairgrounds Dec. 19, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Beverly Caskey gives toys and supplies to a tornado victim Dec. 19, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

“We just wanted to ride through to see if there were some people that needed some help that couldn’t get to the fairgrounds or some of the donation places,” Caskey said.

Lineman from Tupelo, Mississippi repair damaged electrical lines Dec. 19, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

A volunteer at the MayfieldGraves Fairgrounds moves cases of water bottles Dec. 19, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

William Vinson (front) and his father, Chad Vinson, shovel debris from the road Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

William Vinson shovels dirt and debris out of the street Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Clothes hang from tree branches after the Dec. 10 tornado Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Debris from the Dec. 10 tornado piles on top of cars and the remains of buildings Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

Bricks and cinder blocks pile high on the side of the road in the after math of the Dec. 10 tornado Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

A sign that says, “Hope” sits in front of a demolished building that has “we will be back” and “Mayfield Strong” painted on one of the walls Dec. 18, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky.

The same situation occurred at the Mayfield-Graves County Animal Shelter, which took in more than sixty animals in the first few days after the tornado.

Employee April Wright said the animal shelter has a wishlist and donation link on its Facebook page, but the shelter can no longer house the abundance of donations it has received.

“We’re recommending that if larger shelters in larger areas are wanting to send massive donations for them to find another shelter that has been impacted that’s not receiving the assistance that we are,” Wright said.

For now, the shelter put its focus on the animals and creating a safe environment for them to live while they wait for their owners.

“We’re providing all necessities as far as food supplies, whatnot, but we are also housing animals that people can’t at the moment,” Wright said. “We’re boarding them until they can get a place to stay.”

According to Wright, the animals are also microchipped and vaccinated when they are brought to the shelter.

“Once their owners are able to come get them, once they’re reunited, they’re already vaccinated, and have a microchip in the event something happens, they can be relocated,” Wright said.

The volunteers at the shelter said they have seen their share of miracle stories come from the disaster.

When John Hoback walked into the shelter looking for his dog Kye with his picture and a description, he was not optimistic that he would find him. However, once the volunteers checked his image, they recognized Hoback’s dog immediately.

A few days prior, the volunteers at the animal shelter had found Kye lying in a puddle of water in a ditch by the road, cold and confused. According to one of the volunteers at the shelter, had Kye not been found when he was, he may not have survived the night, but the team rescued him from the ditch and brought him back to the shelter where he was taken care of and given a safe and warm place to wait for his family.

“I’m just thrilled,” Hoback said.

“I had some bad nights worrying about [Kye], driving in the rain looking for him. He’s great.”

Hoback’s is one of many

Page 15

Volunteers from the Southern Baptist Disaster Relief prepare plates of food to give to tornado survivors Dec. 18, 2021 at High Point Baptist Church in Mayfield, Kentucky. Dominique Martinez-Powell | @dmartinez_powell.photography

reunion stories, but there are still many displaced animals waiting to find their families.

“If someone has a lost pet, we have a thread on our Facebook page that is specifically for lost and

found pets,” Wright said. “We also are keeping found animals on that [...] If one is found, contact us that way we can have the information.

If they’re able to house it, we’re encouraging that, just making sure that they let us know, they make it known, that way we don’t have some random animal that someone’s looking for and we have no contact information.”

Wright also urged people who would like to donate to the shelter or other organizations impacted by the tornado to be careful about where the donations are going. Scammers have been taking pictures of shelters or other organizations in town and posting them to social media where they raise money to keep for themselves.

“Our donations that come directly to us, there’s a button on our Facebook page for donations. Facebook gives us 100% of all donations made through Facebook. Anybody that is wanting to make monetary donations, stick with that because there’s already been plenty of people that are trying to capitalize on our tragedy,” Wright said.

The work in Mayfield is far from over. While the donations are overflowing in schools and A volunteer at the Mayfield-Graves Fairgrounds moves cases of water bottles Dec. 19, 2021 in Mayfield, Kentucky. churches - homes and businesses Dominique Martinez-Powell | @dmartinez_powell.photography are still flattened across town.

“Those who want to help, have to think long term,” Holloman said. “There’s going to come a day, very soon, I’m told and I’ve already seen, that the cameras are going to be gone, and the food trucks on the road are going to be gone, and we’re not going to be in the news cycle, but the devastation is still here.”

Holloman said he is glad for the help from the surrounding communities but prays for the aid to continue through the winter and spring as the town begins to rebuild.

“There’s a surge of help, which is excellent, nobody wants to turn down help, but my guess is in two months or three months, the needs are going to be rapidly changing,” Holloman said. “I’m hopeful that people’s hearts have been moved and have had an emotional experience by what they’ve seen. I need that heart to be moved when, in two months from now, I need it in the spring because that’s when things change, and we’re gonna need outside this community to help.”

Photo Editor Sophie Whitten can be reached at Swhitten@ dailyegyptian.com or on Instagram @swhittenphotography.

Wednesday, January 12, 2022

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Small finds, small joys: Discovering remnants of possessions lost to the Kentucky tornado

Todd Tolbert(left) and his wife, Kit Tolbert, carry out a “tea kettle” that they found at the bottom of a pile of scattered belongings Dec. 19, 2021 in Dawson Springs, Ky. Dominique Martinez-Powell | @dmartinez_powell.photography Sophie Whitten | @swhittenphotography

The walls and roof of a Kentucky storage unit had been torn off by the Dec. 10 tornado, stirring everyone’s possessions into a stew of mud, books, toys and furniture on the concrete slabs where the units used to stand.

On Sunday, Dec. 19, 2021, residents of Dawson Springs, Kentucky sifted through the rubble of the collapsed storage unit in search of any salvageable remnants of their belongings.

It was the last day people were allowed to search for their property before the units would be cleaned out and disposed of, so many, including Robert Evans and Cheryl Vincent spent the last daylight hours combing through piles of lost possessions.

When the tornado hit town, Evans and Vincent found shelter a mile away from the storage unit in a root cellar.

When describing the storm, Evans said, “She don’t take it serious ever. She’s gonna just ride it out…I said, ‘Look, it’s serious’...I didn’t know if we were going to make it to the root cellar, and I’ve been in one or two before...

It puts

the fear of life in you in a way that you don’t ever want to know.”

According to Evans, while he used to want to see the storm, all he could think of on Dec. 10 was to make it to the root cellar.

“I just wanted to get in that root cellar as quick as I could,” Evans said. “I found out the hard way, a long time ago, the same situation.

I thought we’d ride it out. I just wanted to see a tornado so bad. I wanted to see it so bad, I just got to see it. When I was younger, I probably would have got in my vehicle and ran down [to the storage unit] just to see it, but after the other two, you realize that it is something you don’t want to see.”

While Evans and Vincent made it to safety, many of Vincent’s belongings were destroyed in the storm.

“This was just my extra belongings with my furniture as well, but I’ve lost it all. It’s sad. It’s very sad, and I can understand how other people feel because they’ve lost their homes and families, too,” Vincent said.

Also searching at the storage unit on Dec. 19 was Marvalyn Tolbert with her son and daughterin-law, Todd and Kit Tolbert.

Marvalyn Tolbert had two very specific items she was searching for: her grandfather’s mailbox and her grandmother’s tea kettle.

The family first found the general area where the storage unit was located by spotting the old family stereo, but unfamiliar debris

was piled high around what looked like the Tolbert property.

According to Marvalyn Tolbert, she found the mailbox quickly, but the sun was beginning to set on the last day they could search for her grandmother’s old tea kettle.

Todd and Kit Tolbert climbed on top of decaying chairs and halfbroken desks to search for it. They lifted away old mattresses, wire bed frames, sheets of insolation, and scraps of metal until Kit

Tolbert finally called out that she may have found something.

As the sun slowly met the horizon, Todd and Kit Tolbert uncovered what looked more like a giant cauldron than a kettle.

It was under a nightstand and cardboard boxes and brought out for Marvalyn Tolbert to see. With a smile on her face, she said it was, in fact, her grandmother’s tea service. It was beaten up and covered in mud, but it was found,

and the Tolbert family was able to go home with two of their most precious belongings.

The family was unable to stop for an interview, however. For a distraught family in a destroyed town, there were simply more important things to do.

Photo Editor Sophie Whitten can be reached at Swhitten@ dailyegyptian.com or on Instagram @swhittenphotography.

Cheryl Vincent clears off a picture of her and her son that was found in the aftermath of the Dec. 10 tornado Dec. 19, 2021 in Dawson Springs, Kentucky. Sophie Whitten | @swhittenphotography