A sign outside the Velsicol chemical plant. (Photo: Ashli Blow)
When 40 people gathered to hear about the future of a defunct chemical plant in North Memphis, many were surprised to learn the company has still been storing and shipping toxic materials for years.
Environmental advocates and residents met Velsicol Vice President George Harvell earlier this month at the Hollywood Community Center. Harvell organized this pre-application meeting as part of a mandatory step for his company to renew a state-sanctioned permit with Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC.)
For generations of Black families in the communities of Hollywood and Douglass Park, Velsicol’s toxic legacy is a familiar burden. Harvell recounted the company’s history during his presentation, citing familiar information about how Velsicol manufactured several pesticides that were later found to have harmful effects on both human health and the environment.
However, his presentation took an unexpected turn when he began discussing the storage of existing Velsicol products. People interjected with questions about how that was possible when the company stopped its chemical production in 2012. Warnings are posted at the Wolf River about the potential toxicity of fish caught there, a legacy of Velsicol.
Through Velsicol’s hazardous waste management permit, however, it is authorized to store and distribute chemicals including Hexachlorocyclopentadiene, also commonly referred to as hex. Used in flame retardants and pesticides, hex is a manufactured chemical that does not occur naturally.
Warnings are posted at the Wolf River about the potential toxicity of fish caught there, a legacy of Velsicol. (Photo: Ashli Blow
Harvell gave conflicting remarks on the current source and acquisition of hex prior to storage at the Memphis facility. At the start of his presentation, Harvell said, “Velsicol is not manufacturing any products anywhere in the world, and we just broker chemicals.”
Moments later, he detailed “the four main products that Velsicol manufactures.” These four chemical products, including hex, are prominently advertised on Velsicol’s website.
As people asked for clarification about the product development in the meeting, Harvell backtracked, explaining, “I misspoke, but we’re not manufacturing. We’re storing them in the warehouses.”
Harvell initially denied that the company is extracting chemicals from contaminated water and soil on its site and reselling them as these products. However, his responses became inconsistent when a resident directly asked, “Where are you getting them from?”
Storing and distributing legacy pollutants
Hex is a crucial component in now-banned pesticides such as chlordane, aldrin, dieldrin, and endrin – all of which are legacy chemicals that still contaminate soil and water on and around Velsicol’s Memphis facility to this day, although Velsicol does not manufacture it now.
Laboratory testing has identified chemical residue since the 1970s, when industrial hygienists reported excessive levels of hex to the EPA based on air sampling. Im 1982, a memo from the City of Memphis documented that soil samples taken from around the site exhibited the chemical’s oily-greasy nature and indicated the potential for hex preservation in the soil.
In the 1990s, Velsicol was the sole producer of chlordane in the United States, despite its banned status for use in the county. The Memphis plant continued to manufacture chlordane for international export. When it stopped production later that decade, the company then reported a subterranean plume of chemicals roughly the size of the Liberty Bowl stadium.
It contained 80,000 pounds of carbon tetrachloride.
According to the National Library of Medicine, hex can be produced as a byproduct of creating carbon tetrachloride. Recent reports filed with TDEC showed low levels of the hex compound remain on-site, while around 7,000 pounds of carbon tetrachloride persisted, as noted in the latest publicly available Corrective Action Effectiveness Report (CAER). These reports are required annually by TDEC, and David Winchell, a consultant for Velsicol and senior engineer with the firm WSP, signed the 2022 report.
During Thursday’s meeting, Winchell and Harvell took questions about if these legacy chemicals tie into their modern products, but they did not give straightforward answers.
When a woman in the meeting asked, “are those chemicals coming from out of the ground, because you’re cleaning up?” Winchell replied, “No, those are products. I’ll let George speak to that …”
Harvell continued, “Those four products, with the exception of hex, I don’t think we’re finding them on the plant side.”
The woman posed her question again, “Are they coming out of the ground?” Harvell empathically responded with “no.” She asked a third time about their origin, and in response, he said, “The carbon tetrachloride is coming out of the groundwater.”
Despite repeated inquiries from The Lookout to both TDEC and Velsicol regarding the specifics of extraction activities over the last decade and the remaining clean-up tasks, simple answers have not been provided.
The cost of clean up
Velsicol’s defunct 62-acre site in Memphis has led many residents to believe it’s a federal Superfund site, because of perceived inactivity and deteriorating infrastructure, though the EPA hasn’t listed it as such.
The facility is operating under a Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) permit, which allows Velsicol to legally store, treat and dispose of hazardous waste. Winchell and Harvell told people on Thursday they want to continue remediation of legacy pollutants, though it is unclear what is left to clean up.
In both federal programs, a distinction between RCRA and Superfund sites is that Superfund sites prioritize remediation and redevelopment, whereas RCRA is primarily focused on the management of hazardous waste. However, land reuse has successfully happened under RCRA permits.
The EPA typically designates a Superfund site when a company lacks the financial means to conduct clean-up or has abandoned its site.
The Memphis facility has faced several financial challenges over the decades. In 1986, people who lived near its rural dump site, then referred to by Velsicol as a farm, collectively filed a class-action lawsuit.
“Velsicol has taken the position that without the farm, the Memphis plant would close,” reads the court case. “Thus, the Court believes that it would be appropriate to deprive Velsicol of a reasonable part of the profit it made by improperly disposing of those chemical wastes to keep that plant open.”
The case raises questions about stockpiling chemicals and “unjust profits.” Attorneys argued that Velsicol may have pocketed between $23 and $63 million from not paying for proper chemical disposal, leading to significant settlements. The dump site later became a Superfund site, similar to the one in the Hollywood neighborhood, where Velsicol faced another class action lawsuit in 2008 for contamination, resulting in smaller settlements for affected residents.
During a months-long investigation into the Velsicol facility site in Memphis, The Lookout submitted a public records request to determine the company’s profits and clean-up expenditures over the past decade. The Tennessee Department of Revenue denied the request, citing sealed records.
Velsicol in Memphis is now navigating bankruptcy proceedings after filing for Chapter 11 in September. Discussions with the EPA and Department of Justice regarding future actions are underway, as confirmed by Harvell.
As part of the renewal process for Velsicol’s RCRA permit, the company must demonstrate to the state its financial ability to cover the costs of clean-up. In their previous permit renewal, Velsicol committed to providing $2.5 million for this purpose.
Velsicol is required to submit their current application to TDEC by April 3.
Following submission, TDEC will review and potentially revise the draft permit. This process can take over a year to complete, but in some cases, it can take as little as 60 days. If the review period is shorter, TDEC may hold public hearings on the draft permit as soon as this summer.
In the meantime, environmental justice movement organizers are trying to get a clearer picture of Velsicol’s present operations and upcoming plans.
The community wants more opportunities to engage with Velsicol over its redevelopment plans and federal funding opportunities, similar to those offered by the Superfund site process, particularly as the RCRA permit’s renewal occurs only once a decade — the only time public comment is required.
Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.
Entrance to a Memphis Velsicol plant. (Photo: Ashli Blow)
A chemical company in North Memphis that spent decades dumping toxic materials into waterways is looking to renew a state permit that would allow hazardous waste operations to continue at its defunct facility.
Unlike other Velsicol facilities across the United States that have become Superfund sites — a federal designation that allows the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to fund cleanup of contaminated areas — the Memphis location, 119 Warford St., has worked under a state-sanctioned permit since 2014. Under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) in Tennessee, companies can store, treat, and dispose of hazardous waste. The primary difference between the two is that RCRA addresses the management of hazardous waste and Superfund is geared toward the remediation of abandoned sites with contamination.
Environmental advocates and residents question whether a hazardous waste permit is the appropriate avenue for Velsicol or whether the company is using it as a means to circumvent national Superfund site status.
People will have a rare opportunity to ask during a public meeting on March 21 at 6 p.m. at the Hollywood Community Center, when Velsicol representatives plan to discuss its plans to renew and update its corrective action permit.
The public meeting comes in the wake of the company’s recent bankruptcy filing and their obligation to submit a new work plan to the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) to address contamination at a neighboring property, an affordable housing apartment complex.
“This [RCRA] permit is really supposed to be used for facilities that have hazardous materials on site … it’s not really supposed to be used for a long-term cleanup,” said Sarah Houston, executive director of watchdog group Protect Our Aquifer. “Really that should be something that has more federal oversight like the Superfund program, and we just see that this permitting structure has really made this a very slow cleanup process and isn’t doing the real due diligence of removing the toxins from the soil and the groundwater and really finishing the job.”
Velsicol created chemicals so dangerous that it changed environmental policy nationwide. Their pesticide production with chemicals like dieldrin and endrin became the center of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring,” published in 1962 and credited with the start of the modern environmental movement. Carson described the chemicals as the “elixirs of death” and warned of its neurological effects on people and wildlife, as well as its nearly irreversible pollution in ecosystems.
As America responded with federal regulation, such as banning chemicals for domestic use, Velsicol continued to make chemicals like chlordane through the early 1990s in Memphis — more than 30 years after the national reckoning. Meanwhile, the Black community around it was left to live with an enduring toxicity.
The Memphis facility closed in 2012, but to this day, as people pass by Velsicol, the 62-acre site appears unchanged from behind the chain-link fence. Many think it is a Superfund site, because of its appearance resembling that of a desolate lot.
The secretive operations of today’s Velsicol
In Southwest Tennessee, Velsicol is known for disposing of their chemicals in two landfills that became Superfund sites: One in the Hollywood community in Memphis and the other in Toone, an hour east of Memphis. Their cleanup at these dumps, and subsequent lawsuits and settlements, were heavily followed by mainstream media and politicians, but little public understanding exists about the facility where the chemicals were originally produced.
In anticipation of its permit renewal, something that only happens once every 10 years, the Lookout conducted a months-long investigation into Velsicol in 2022. We reviewed 125 public records that documented 40 years of its cleanup efforts. Under RCRA, Velsicol is required to submit a yearly Corrective Action Effectiveness Reports (CAER). To accurately understand the technical data in these reports, the Lookout talked to lawyers, policy analysts, and chemists who work with site remediation.
According to those reports, since 1999, Velsicol has been trying to reduce a fluctuating plume of chemicals beneath the facility that’s mass measured around 126 acres, which is roughly the size of Liberty Bowl stadium. The company calls the plume “under control.” It monitors a network of wells to calculate the boundary and weight of the plume, made mostly of carbon tetrachloride – a chemical used as house cleaner that is now also banned for consumer use by the EPA.
Their plume has decreased from over 80,000 pounds to 7,000 pounds of chemicals over 20 years.
“The fact that they have removed 90 percent doesn’t mean that it’s 90 percent less toxic. There’s much more in terms of threat and potential injury than just the total,” Christopher Reddy, a marine chemist who analyzes drinking water for pollutants, including pesticides, told The Lookout in 2022.
Velsicol reported to TDEC that it extracted another 2,659 pounds as of 2023, and it is unclear how much of the plume remains.
Scientists such as Reddy and advocates like Houston express concern about lingering chemicals and the groundwater’s flow, as these concentrations of chemicals may move downward into the ground and potentially reach layers of the Memphis Sand Aquifer, the primary drinking water source for over one million residents in the region.
But there are even more concerns about what lies above the surface.
Bankruptcy, residential contamination
Guided by RCRA regulations, the remediation for topical contamination in soil has unfolded gradually, marked by a series of inspections, investigations, action plans, status reports, and investigations.
During their permit tenure, Velsicol incurred minor violations from TDEC for mislabeling materials. However, following The Lookout investigation, Velsicol faced a different array of violations and deficiency notices from TDEC.
Last August, when attempting to file its latest CAER, Velsicol submitted a document that did not include analytical laboratory reports. This January, TDEC gave Velsicol a violation for not having documentation of hazardous waste management training in recent years. According to monitoring reports filed over the last decade, Velsicol employs two people at its Memphis facility.
The fact that they have removed 90 percent doesn’t mean that it’s 90 percent less toxic. There’s much more in terms of threat and potential injury than just the total.
– Christopher Reddy, marine chemist
TDEC is also now requiring that Velsicol submit an interim measures work plan by the end of April to address contamination at the neighboring Cypress Gardens Apartments on 1215 Springdale Street. The property manager of the affordable housing apartment complex hired an independent environmental consulting agency, Tioga, to collect soil samples. The Lookout reached out to the property manager, but they did not respond to comment.
Tioga took the tests to a lab that found several pesticides including aldrin and endrin with dieldrin exceeding the EPA’s contamination limit for residential properties.
“The findings of this assessment indicate that soil contamination associated with the former Velsicol plant still remains on the property and could potentially post a continued risk,” said the report, signed by Tioga Geologist John Luke Hall.
The report specified that the western building alongside Cypress Creek, where Velsicol disposed of their hazardous waste for years, was most at risk. The environmental consultants recommended the removal of the soil between the apartment building and Cypress Creek.
It would be a part of existing work that Velsicol does to extract patches of contaminated soil on its property, where a baseball diamond-shaped consolidation pile at the northwest corner of its property Each time soil is added to the pile, a tarp-like impermeable liner is put over it and welded into place. Eventually, the pile will be capped and “monitored in perpetuity to ensure the cap is not compromised.
“[The permit] comes around every decade,” said Kathy Yancey-Temple. “So we’re here again, and we have to fight them off again.” (Photo: Ashli Blow)
The Lookout reached out to Velsicol’s Vice President George Harvell for comment, but he had not responded to our request by the publication of this article.
Velsicol Chemical LLC and its parent corporations filed for bankruptcy in September, and Harvell wrote in a letter to TDEC that the company plans to reorganize. It’s a similar step that the Velsicol plant in Michigan, which operated under a different corporate parent, took, also filing for bankruptcy and relying on the EPA and State of Michigan for funding to clean up its site. It’s now one of the country’s costliest Superfund sites.
“[The permit] comes around every decade,” said Kathy Yancey-Temple. “So we’re here again, and we have to fight them off again.” (Photo: Ashli Blow)
Kathy Yancey-Temple lives near the Velsicol facility in Douglass Park, a historic community established by a formerly enslaved individual to provide safe property ownership for Black families during the Reconstruction era. The neighborhood is now surrounded by industry.
Yancey-Temple believes that Velsicol’s toxic practices have been at the expense of her community’s health and livelihoods.
As an organizer for the Center for Transforming Communities, Yancey-Temple has had difficulties in getting clear answers about the company’s actions over the past decade, submitting her own public record requests to the state for information. Despite her efforts, neither she nor other community members have received outreach from the company about health implications of the contaminants that linger.
Years of committed environmental justice advocacy efforts played a crucial role in the company’s closure. Yancey-Temple is confident that continued community organizing can be instrumental in navigating this next phase and advocating for a thorough cleanup to conclude, allowing the property to be redeveloped.
“[The permit] comes around every decade,” she said. “So we’re here again, and we have to fight them off again.”
Tennessee Lookoutis part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.
“It’s years and years of pollution. We just make the assumption, because why wouldn’t it be contaminated?” Kathy Yancey-Temple lives near the now-closed Velsicol plant in Memphis. (Photo: Ashli Blow)
In North Memphis, milk crates and cardboard boxes sit under a pecan tree that doesn’t bear fruit anymore. Kathy Yancey-Temple is building raised beds for a community garden on her street. On a sunny autumn morning she spends her time buying soil to fill these upcycled planters. She doesn’t trust what’s in the ground.
“It’s years and years of pollution. We just make the assumption, because why wouldn’t it be contaminated?” says Yancey-Temple, a smokestack behind her. She lives in Douglass Park, an island amid industrial manufacturing plants. Some call it Memphis’ chemical corridor.
“We are surrounded by industry. Not only have they victimized us by putting these large industries across the street, but companies like Velsicol have not properly cleaned up.”
Within walking distance of her home, Velsicol manufactured chemicals for pesticides so powerful that a spray could kill a flying insect before it even hit the dirt. Velsicol was a large producer of products like chlordane – a man-made substance that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) banned in 1988 because of its cancer risk. Velsicol’s North Memphis legacy is still alive in the depths of the Wolf River and shallow layers above the Memphis Sands Aquifer, where sediment contains hazardous industrial chemicals that do not dissolve in water.
While Velsicol facilities across the United States have become Superfund sites — a federal designation that allows the EPA to fund clean-up of contaminated sites — their Memphis location, 1199 Warford St., has been operating under a state-sanctioned permit that allows Velsicol to store, treat and dispose of hazardous waste.
Velsicol’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act (RCRA) permit expires in two years. Community members and environmental activists are asking that state agencies, elected officials and the EPA carefully review what’s been done in the last decade. Investigations in other cities, like a lawsuit filed in Washington, D.C. this October against Velsicol, found the company financially responsible not just for environmental degradation at one of their facilities but for the cost of cleaning up citywide rivers, with traces of chlordane.
We are surrounded by industry. Not only have they victimized us by putting these large industries across the street, but companies like Velsicol have not properly cleaned up.
– Kathy Yancey-Temple, resident of Memphis’ Douglass Park neighborhood
Velsicol has not publicly responded to that lawsuit, and their vice president who oversees the Memphis facilities did not want to comment on national or local future plans.
For Yancey-Temple, getting honest answers from neighboring industries is part of addressing the injustice that goes back six generations. The Rev. W.A. Plummer, formerly enslaved, founded Douglass Park for other Black families to safely buy property during Reconstruction. Her family has been there ever since.
A heritage of being close to the soil influenced the community from its inception, according to the Memphis Landmarks Commission. In this bayou, people grew their own food and caught fish for decades. Meanwhile, industries tucked them into a corner between highways and railroads.
A map shows industrial uses in and near the Douglass Park neighborhood in Memphis. Velsicol facilities are marked in green. (From the Resource Conservation Recovery Act’s Corrective Action Effectiveness Report)
Everything goes belly up
Velsicol earned its foothold in the mid-century industrial economy with chemicals that killed living things – insects, rodents, plants – cheaply and efficiently.
Old manufacturing sites like their 1942 Memphis facility dot the country. State, local and federal regulators are still negotiating cleanup at long-shuttered plants in places like rural Illinois, where chlordane was also made, and a suburban New Jersey site that processed mercury. Cleanup at a former Velsicol site in central Michigan, where the company produced DDT and the flame retardant polybrominated biphenyl, has been stop-and-start for 40 years. These properties occasionally change hands, laden with millions of dollars of liability and flirting with bankruptcy.
Additionally, landfills in the southwest corner of Tennessee where Velsicol sought to dispose of their chemicals made Superfund Site status: one in the Hollywood community in Memphis and the other in Toone, an hour east of Memphis. In Toone, Velsicol buried over 300,000 55-gallon drums of industrial waste that contaminated nearby water and soil. Neighbors sued, initiating Sterling vs. Velsicol, an 8-year legal battle in which Velsicol was held liable for millions in damages. The ruling was overturned on appeal.
The company’s slow collapse started with the scrutiny that followed Rachel Carson’s American reckoning with the chemical industry through her 1962 book “Silent Spring,” credited with the start of the modern environmental movement. It warned about the long-term effects of DDT and its wider family tree of industrial chemicals like chlordane, dieldrin and endrin. All were made in Memphis.
Carson’s words wielded such power that Velsicol threatened legal action against her publisher. The book started to unravel Velsicol’s biggest value proposition: manufacturing highly profitable chemicals that posed threats to the health of people and their environment.
As national pesticide policy evolved, two U.S. senators pointed to Velsicol’s waste-treatment plant in Memphis as the source of neurotoxic endrin in the lower Mississippi River where millions of fish floated, belly-up. Cypress Creek — which feeds the Wolf River and, eventually, the Mississippi — abuts the Velsicol site. A Carson biographer, Linda Leer, reported that the senators used this as final evidence to draft a predecessor to the Clean Water Act.
In the next 30 years, the EPA heavily regulated the use of chlorinated pesticides. During that time, Velsicol and its assets were bought and sold for parts.
However, they did not regulate the manufacturing and export of chlorinated pesticides for other countries. Through the early 1990s, Velsicol’s plant in Memphis became the sole U.S. producer of chlordane, favored for killing termites, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry. A United Nations treaty in 2001, signed by 90 countries, banned what they called the dirty dozen, a spate of pesticides including chlordane. Velsicol was eventually acquired by private equity firm Arsenal Partners for $250 million in 2005. It closed its Memphis plant in 2012.
Technically, Velsicol continues to operate the 62-acre site, still leasing out space while it cleans up its legacy pollutants – a description used by governments to describe banned chemicals that linger in the environment. But understanding Velsicol’s remediation can be like trying to see through the Mississippi River.
The Lookout filed public records requests with five state departments to learn what Velsicol has cleaned up since shutting down its plant. The Tennessee Department of the Environment and Conservation released 125 public records that document 40 years of Velsicol cleanup.
Under RCRA, Velsicol is required to submit a yearly Corrective Action Effectiveness Reports (CAER). To accurately understand the technical data in these reports, the Lookout talked to lawyers, policy analysts, and chemists who work with site remediation.
The latest CAER, submitted this year, shows that, over the last decade, Velsicol has been remediating contaminated groundwater and a contamination plume emanating from its site. The underground cloud where contaminants have slowly seeped through the soil is roughly the size of Liberty Bowl stadium: 126 acres. About 60 percent of the plume reaches into what Velsicol calls a “deep zone.”
Velsicol monitors a network of wells to calculate the boundary and weight of the plume, made mostly of carbon tetrachloride – a chemical used as house cleaner that is now also banned for consumer use by the EPA.
The wells are estimated to annually remove 2,229 pounds of carbon tetrachloride. Based on Velsicol’s annual reports to TDEC over the last decade, their system of pumping out water to treat it for pollutants is working. Their plume has decreased from over 80,000 pounds to 7,000 pounds of carbon tetrachloride. Velsicol reports the plume is “under control.” According to members of the American Chemical Society, that doesn’t mean that what remains isn’t a concern.
“The fact that they have removed 90 percent doesn’t mean that it’s 90 percent less toxic. There’s much more in terms of threat and potential injury than just the total,” said Christopher Reddy, a marine chemist who analyzes drinking water for pollutants, including pesticides. “Pollution and chemicals, it’s a lot like buying a house, it’s all about location. Where is that 7,000 right now and how does that impact the local neighborhood?”
The plume doesn’t stay in just one place beneath 1199 Warford. It moves. In 2018, it spiked to 280 acres – its original size – before shrinking to its current acreage. TDEC attributes the fluctuation to heavy rainfall. Executive Director of Protect Our Aquifer (POA) Sarah Houston said future rain events like this are likely to continue moving the concentration of chemicals downward.
POA is a watchdog organization that tracks contaminated hotspots throughout the aquifer — a subterranean reservoir of saturated sands that is the region’s drinking water source for more than a million people. Polluted sediments can contaminate water as it seeps down into the natural reservoir.
“The flow of groundwater is just so slow in Memphis, and that has been one of our saving graces as far as all these polluted sites,” Houston said. “Most haven’t reached our drinking water yet, even though they’ve been in the ground for, you know, 50 to 80 years. So, when you see those kinds of spikes in concentration, in the deeper formation, it means that it’s had enough travel time to get that deep. We have these ticking time bombs all over Shelby County.”
Meanwhile, above ground, chemicals like chlordane and dieldrin have attached themselves to upper layers of soil. Guided by RCRA regulations, the remediation for topical contamination has been a slow march of inspections, investigations, action plans, status reports, and investigations.
As recently as 2018, soil samples for dieldrin were under the limit for commercial properties, but nearly three times the EPA standard for residential properties, like at the nearby Springdale Apartments.
The fact that they have removed 90 percent doesn’t mean that it’s 90 percent less toxic. There’s much more in terms of threat and potential injury than just the total.
– Christopher Reddy, a marine biologist who analyzes drinking water for pollutants
Velsicol extracts contaminated soil, puts it in a dump truck, and moves it to a baseball diamond-shaped consolidation pile at the northwest corner of its property by railroads, according to TDEC Deputy Communications Director Kim Schofinski. Each time soil is added to the pile, a tarp-like impermeable liner is put over it and welded into place. Eventually, the pile will be capped and “monitored in perpetuity to ensure the cap is not compromised,” Schofinski wrote in an email.
The Lookout filed a public records request to find out how much Velsicol has spent over the last 10 years, but the department of revenue denied the request citing sealed records. As part of Velsicol’s legal requirements for their RCRA permit, the company had to assure the state they could provide enough money to cover the cost of cleanup. They proved they could commit to $2.5 million.
Velsicol’s RCRA permit will expire on Sept. 30, 2024. They must submit their application 180 days before the expiration date. Velsicol will be legally required to release a draft permit and host public participation for feedback on their plans. It’s a process communities across Tennessee are long familiar with.
Pushing for answers of today
As Velsicol closed the doors to its Memphis plant 10 years ago, another community across the state grappled with its own defunct site. In Chattanooga, the Velsicol plant produced its own toxic set of chemicals like benzene, chloride, and benzoic acid in Alton Park — a Black community with industry sprawled around them and a similar history to Douglass Park.
The Sierra Club, Chattanooga for Action, and other environmental groups were organizing against TDEC and Velsicol, because they believed solutions proposed under an emerging hazardous waste permit were insufficient.
Attorneys writing on the behalf of the conservation group Tennessee Riverkeeper sent TDEC a letter saying the agency was “just rubber-stamping an inadequate remediation plan submitted by Velsicol.” The attorneys in that letter went on to express concerns about the environmental sustainability of the plan and argued that by just covering up contamination, hazardous liquids would continue to drive deeper into their limestone aquifer.
“We have ‘residue hill,’ where there were chemicals buried out there on site, and so if we have a tornado, an earthquake, or something like that, it can disturb the chemicals,” said Milton Jackson, who served as president for a group called Stop Toxic Pollution (STOP). “I don’t care how much dirt you put on top of the property. You are still going to have underwater currents and chemicals in the ground.”
Milton Jackson, former president of Stop Toxic Pollution (STOP) in Chattanooga. (Photo: Brooke Bragger)
Jackson started investigating Velsicol and other industries in the early 1990s when his wife’s asthma worsened. He went to every level of government involved in overseeing environmental pollution to get information and then took his questions to Velsicol executives. His research was so extensive that he worked with the University of Tennessee to publish a case study on environmental justice and community collective action.
So when Velsicol went to modify their Chattanooga permit in 2011, Jackson and the environmental organizations were ready to hit the streets with petitions. It resulted in changes to the permit including a deeper soil cover and explicit language about soil establishing and maintaining vegetation.
“(Activists) can do the same thing in Memphis too, they can do the same thing as I did, but you have to stay with them and go in and talk with them,” said Jackson. “Get all the facts together, and they will do what you want.”
When given the opportunity, Memphis residents have also pushed back. In 2008, Velsicol settled a class-action suit in the Hollywood community that paid out $2.1 million to the owners of 195 nearby properties contaminated by dieldrin.
They’ve also spoken up during previous permit renewals. Records from TDEC provide snapshots of neighbors’ responses to Velsicol cleanup at 1199 Warford. Residents have long held the suspicion that Velsicol’s process lacks clarity, tainted by asymmetric information meant to favor the company and leave residents in the dark. Questions at a 2006 community meeting at the Hollywood Community Center mirror the public’s concerns today: What is tested, who sees those results and who decides what happens next? Who pays for it? Is it safe for us to grow vegetables in our backyards?
The problem now is that residents and environmental activists are having a hard time meaningfully connecting with Velsicol, raising more questions about who still works for Velsicol and what they spend their time doing.
According to monitoring reports filed over the last decade, Velsicol employs at least one person at its Memphis facility. As of 2018, site manager Dawei Li oversaw the storage and disposal of hazardous materials. Hazardous waste inspection reports show that Li, along with Vice President George Harvell, participated in state-led compliance evaluations and corrected minimal violations such as mislabeling used oil.
The Tennessee Lookout emailed Li and Harvell, requesting interviews. After no response, a reporter went to the Velsicol site to ask for an interview in person.
Empty vending machines stood outside a shipping-and-receiving building, where a man opened the door. He connected the reporter with Li. Harvell was also there and said Velsicol is still trying to remediate and redevelop the property — the similar vague statement Velsicol made nearly eight years ago when its RCRA permit was approved. In the interim, they’ve been trying to lease space on the site.
Harvell said his company’s ethics have changed; they are dedicated to managing the contaminants and plan to renew their RCRA permit.
“The Velsicol of today is different than the Velsicol of yesterday,” he said.
Harvell said his company has been transparent throughout the RCRA permit. The next day, he withdrew his commitment to a full interview with the Lookout.
Warnings are posted at the Wolf River about the potential toxicity of fish caught there, a legacy of Velsicol. (Photo: Ashli Blow)
The healing of a river and its people
Beneath the amber-colored water and knobby roots of swamp-thriving conifers, the bass, catfish, and perch dwell in the Wolf River’s contaminated sediment. As they swim, their bodies pick up carcinogens.
Chlordane is among the most frequently found containment at dangerous levels in fish, according to TDEC sampling. It accumulates in their fatty tissue, posing a risk for people who eat them. While visible TDEC signs warn of the effects, people still go to the river to catch fish for a meal.
Ryan Hall – director of Land Conservation at the Wolf River Conservancy – stands on a sandbar in the river behind Douglass Park. Near him, a monarch butterfly lands on a discarded tire.
Ryan Hall, director of Land Conservation at the Wolf River Conservancy. (Photo: Ashli Blow)
It’s only the final 22 miles of the Wolf River that runs through Memphis from the mouth of the Mississippi that has endured a host of toxic chemicals. Upstream, at the iconic Ghost River section of the Wolf, it’s an ecologically intact, natural wonder.
Velsicol’s RCRA permit does not cover clean-up at the Wolf River, but Hall’s organization is devoted to protecting these wetlands – once so ruined by pollutants that biologists called it a dead river.
“Water quality is at the mercy of our soils,” says Hall. “What was dumped into it is one of the biggest degradation factors of the Wolf River ecosystem.”
The Wolf River has been making a comeback through natural ecology and time. It’s a kind of healing that people like Yancy-Temple and her community are experiencing themselves.
Yancey-Temple doesn’t only spend her time in the garden. She is a community advocate for the Center for Transforming Communities, a group trying to create sustainability in economically depressed areas.
She says they can’t separate poverty from pollution, that the exploitation of Black people, land, and water are interlinked. It’s a systemic issue discussed widely between scholars and movement leaders in environmental justice.
“We’re trying to get back to what was already natural here,” says Yancey-Temple. “We’re just at the beginning of it.”
Tennessee Lookout is part of States Newsroom, a network of newsbureaus supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Tennessee Lookout maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Holly McCall for questions: info@tennesseelookout.com. Follow Tennessee Lookout on Facebook and Twitter.
About Bianca Phillips story, “Richards House Redux” …
Thank you so much for bringing awareness to Memphis Heritage’s first “receivership” project.
We hope, through this program, that the community and city leaders will understand MHI’s commitment to being part of the solution of blight in our city, especially in our older neighborhoods.
Many of the blighted properties in Memphis still have good bones, are built with higher quality materials than are available today and built to last more than 100 years. Many of these inner city properties are worth reinvesting in and will assist in revitalizing neighborhoods.
We are not saying that all buildings should be saved — far from it. But if we can effectively reuse these properties, get them back on the tax rolls and in some cases teach the building trades, through the redevelopment, then I think we can all win.
June Waddell West
Director, Memphis Heritage
About Mike Working’s Viewpoint,
“Deforming Justice” …
Mike Working’s column on the recent appointments by Governor Haslam to the Task Force on Sentencing and Recidivism is right on point. This assortment of white Republicans is clearly not tasked to develop reasonable guidelines for incarceration, sentencing, and rehabilitation of those “caught” in the criminal justice system. The group identified, so far, fails to include representatives from those who are involved with criminal defendants on a daily basis, namely, public and private criminal defense lawyers and advocacy groups, such as the NAACP, which have a longtime involvement with offenders.
Madeleine C. Taylor, Executive Director
Memphis Branch NAACP
About Bruce VanWyngarden’s Letter From the Editor about Tiger football, Lucy, and Charlie Brown …
I love Tiger football. I just hate that my season ticket is between Pigpen and Peppermint Patty.
Jeff
About Louis Goggans’ story, “Bloody Beale Street Incident Leads to Sunday Morning Fee” …
The street will remain open. There will be a fee for its use, just as there are fees to park on the street, ride the bus, or play golf on a city-owned course. Time to try something new. If it does not work, I’m sure there will be a plan C, D, E, and so on. As far as closing off the street for a select few, well, that precedent was set the moment the police began to card individuals at Beale’s access points.
Barf
Really, just go at 11:59 p.m. to avoid the cover charge. This way you’ll have plenty of money left to get drunk and act like a fool. Ain’t we lucky we got ’em, good times?
Midtown Mark
About Bianca Phillips’ story, “Velsicol Seeks Permit for Site Clean-up” …
Not only do the areas near the plant need to be included in the investigation, but also the bed of the Mississippi River, including the Wolf River harbor. The Tennessee Department of Environment has posted these areas as having fish that are unsafe for human consumption. Veliscol’s chlordane — now out of production — attaches to the sediment. The organisms that several fish species eat interact with the sediment, causing the fish to become contaminated. In an area with so much subsistence fishing, this contamination lingers. Additionally, we are starting to make more recreational use of the Mississippi River. There’s a real need to find a way to stop this pollution.
Sue Williams
About Toby Sells’ webpost, “Shelby County Prosecutor Censured by Tennessee Supreme Court” …
Tom Henderson has been around much longer than Amy Weirich, and he has engaged in this unethical behavior for years. The tragedy is that Weirich knows of his questionable behavior and instead of firing him as an example for all other asssistant attorneys general, she has promoted him to teach the way to try cases. By allowing him to remain on the attorney general’s staff, she gives tacit approval to this unethical behavior. We had a chance to replace her in the last election but instead of focusing on her and her staff’s unethical behavior, we reduced the election to name calling: Joe Brown is a “clown.”
The Velsicol Chemical Corporation in North Memphis ceased its manufacture of toxic chemicals used in pesticides and flame-retardants back in 2011, and since then, much of the plant’s infrastructure has been demolished. But Velsicol is now making way for new life on the site.
Last week, the Tennessee Department of Environment and Conservation (TDEC) held a public hearing at the Hollywood Community Center during which Velsicol was requested permits to continue cleaning up contamination on the plant’s site at Jackson and Warford and to officially wrap up its closure of a hazardous waste incinerator that was recently torn down.
At that meeting, George Harvell, vice-president of Velsicol’s Memphis Environmental Center, said Velsicol was retaining a warehouse on-site to store chemicals but that the company was open to sharing their property with other companies. Delta Recycling, which recycles concrete, and the Donovo Group, which helps develop and remediate environmentally impaired properties, are already operating on the Velsicol site.
Harvell said, as Velsicol moves forward with cleaning up contaminated soils, he hopes to welcome other industrial businesses.
“Velsicol is going to be here, but we have to get jobs out here [on the site],” Harvell said. “At one time, there were 400 jobs at Velsicol, and now there’s one full-time operations manager. We want to keep our operation here, but we have to get some other businesses in here to help carry the light bill.”
For about 70 years prior to the plant’s 2011 closing, Velsicol manufactured hexachlorocyclopentadiene, more commonly referred to as “hex.” It was primarily used in the pesticide endosulfan, which was banned in the U.S. in the late 1970s. After the ban on endosulfan here, Velsicol continued to ship hex to other countries. Endosulfan is believed to cause both reproductive and developmental damage in humans and animals.
“Now only a few places in the world have registration to use endosulfan. Demand has just gone down,” Harvell said.
George Harvell
The new Velsicol sign mentions Delta Recycling, which has begun operation on the former plant site.
That led to the plant’s closure in 2011. But Velsicol still stores a few chemicals made in other plants, including a new product called Velsiflex that replaces phthalates in plastic, at the Memphis site.
Harvell said the rest of the site’s infrastructure is about 90 percent demolished, and now they’re working on cleaning up contaminated areas on and around the site.
Forty-four areas around the site have been targeted as having high levels of contamination. Harvell said there are a number of ways they can go about cleaning those up.
“It could be digging up the soil and replacing it with clean material. Or the remedy could be covering [the area] with a membrane cover or an asphalt cap or a parking lot,” Harvell said.
Several environmentalists attended the TDEC meeting last week, and they stressed the importance of cleaning up not only the contamination on Velsicol’s property but surrounding areas, including Cypress Creek, which Velsicol dumped its waste into for years before the revised federal Clean Water Act was enacted.
Sandra Upchurch, who attended last week’s meeting, grew up on Edward Avenue in North Memphis in a house that backed up to Cypress Creek. Unaware of the pollution, a young Upchurch often floated down the creek on homemade rafts.
“I got some acid burns on my legs, and my mother kept telling us not to go out there. We had a path down behind the house leading to the creek, and eventually my father destroyed it to keep us out. I was just trying to be Huckleberry Finn,” Upchurch said.
Cypress Creek is outlined as an “area of concern” for Velsicol’s cleanup efforts, and Harvell said the company “still has work to do in Cypress Creek” as well as on the Springdale Apartments site, where contaminated dirt from the creek was piled up for years.
Scott Banbury, conservation program chair for the statewide Sierra Club, said he’s glad to see the company picking up its mess rather than abandoning the property.
“I think it’s good that they’re maintaining the viability of the property,” Banbury said. “The last thing we’d want is for them to just walk away from it. It would become a brownfield, and there would never be a chance for industrial reuse.”
There’s a public comment period on the TDEC permits through September 2nd. Written comments can be submitted to Solid.Waste@tn.gov.
Greg Cravens 
George Harvell 
