Steve Hodges

Partial Transcript: I’m Steve Hodges. I moved here from Pennsylvania in 1980 to Cocke County, Tennessee. The jobs were hard to find back then, so I got a job as a rafting guide on the river. There was only one rafting company on the river at that time. All the people that were going to raft signed up in Gatlinburg. They didn’t see the river ‘til they got here. And most of them were afraid of the water. Back then we had bucket boats where we had to bail the water out of the raft with five-gallon buckets. And the water was so foamy that people were afraid to get the water on them like there’s something wrong. But the money was non-refundable. They had to go or lose their money, so most of them went down the river.
So, when I would take it out of the river next to the post office in Hertford, the local people would come up to me and say, that river’s going to kill you. And I thought they were talking about falling in the river and drowning. But no, they were talking about people were dying in that town. They nicknamed the town Widowville because most of the men had died in that town. So, I started looking into it. I was a supporting member of Greenpeace before this, so I contacted Greenpeace to see if they had any information on this problem. They sent me a publication called “No Margin of safety”. It was a document put out by Greenpeace, but it was a couple from Oregon through that Freedom of Information Act that got all this information about pulp and paper mills in this country. I found out through this publication, there’s a hundred and five paper mills in this country that use chlorine to bleach your paper white. And that’s a bioproduct—cancer-causing dioxin is formed. It is not in the water. It is in the fish and in the sludge. It attaches itself to fatty tissue. It also said, if you have a chlorine bleached packaging, the dioxin stays in the packaging and will migrate into the food, so you’re getting little traces of dioxin every time you eat the food. Canton has banned chlorine bleach milk cartons in the 1980s to protect their citizens against the tainted milk.
In this country, our EPA decided to cover it up. The administrator of Region Four in Atlanta, I quote, said, “We are obligated by law to make environment decisions. Making those decisions without any regard to economic impact is wrong.” EPA, environmental pollution allowed, if you’re a big corporation in this country. They completely covered it up and didn’t do anything. If they had done something in 1983, when congress appropriated money to study these papermills, that was thirty-five years ago, there’s no telling how many people’s lives would have been saved in that amount of time. Now, I’d like to turn it over to my wife Jill, and she can talk about the alternatives.

Partial Transcript: Yeah. Actually, Hertford was a logging town. It had a movie theater. It had sidewalks. And back then, they knew there was something wrong, but they were kind of afraid to speak out—you know, to speak out against your government. You know, there’s no telling what they would do. And the best thing that ever came out of this whole fight is, local people actually got up at EPA hearings and spoke for a clean river. That was the best thing that ever happened.
So that was the greatest victory that I saw—that people stood up for their rights after—back then, it was over eighty years they didn’t have a voice in what was going on in their community. They knew that most of the men had died. And it was from eating the dioxin-contaminated fish. Now, they say a little bit of dioxin isn’t going to hurt you, but dioxin bioaccumulates in your body. I know that you get some dioxin and the next day, you eat another fish with dioxin. It adds to what is already in your body. It keeps adding and adding until you get cancer. And that’s what happened.

Partial Transcript: Yeah. Forty years in this community and people were really great to us. I didn’t have anything when I moved down here. They brought me canned goods and a refrigerator. I didn’t have a stove. The people are really nice and helpful in this community, and I really appreciated what they did for me. And I’m just sorry that I couldn’t have found out sooner about this problem with the pollution, so I could’ve saved more lives. Now they have a choice. They know what’s killing them, and then they have the choice not to eat the fish out of the river.
Okay. Before the one hearing—EPA hearing—we met with some of the widows in Hertford, and they filled out three by five cards of all the people that died living along the river. The whole living room floor was covered with these cards. Can you imagine? There was hundreds of people that had died. And we feel it’s because of the polluted fish in the river. But—

Partial Transcript: I actually have a picture of it. When I was rafting on the river, it was three foot of foam. And it was black as a black top road. You couldn’t see a half inch below the top surface of the water.
It smelled like rotten eggs. Yeah. It smelled really bad.
We didn’t know what to look for back then, but now it seems to me—I’ve heard some stories of the people that are rafting now, and they’re getting sores on their body. And I believe it’s chloracne—it’s from dioxin contamination. It’s sores. They come out when your body’s heated up in the summer and you sweat. They might go away for a while, but they always come back. They never leave, so it’s like a lifetime thing you have to deal with. There’s no cure for it at all.

Partial Transcript: It looks a lot better. You can see to the bottom a lot of times, but the money that they put into the mill was for modernization. They had equipment that was there from 1908 when they started. If they had spent—they could have spent less money and went chlorine-free, instead of just modernizing their equipment. And I want to ask him, what are they checking? It says that there’s no dioxin in their F-line. Well, what are they checking? The water? There’s no dioxin in water. It’s in the sludge and in the fish. I want to see studies that are done of the sludge. I don’t wanna see them kill fish because—I don’t want to see that. When the EPA did a cancer study of the people living in Hertford, they sent a veterinarian to do a study on people. That was an insult. And they blamed the cancer on radon. That’s why people were dying in Hertford. Well, radon is a natural occurrence coming up from the basement of your house. People in this area don’t have basements. They can’t afford to dig a basement. So, they covered the whole thing up. And we’re pretty well disgusted with them that they didn’t protect our lives, and they’re more worried about that papermill making a profit. That’s what it all comes down to.

Partial Transcript: Every twenty years, there’ll be a push. You know, whenever a new administration comes in—in Congress or—to clean up the river. They started taking the sludge out and putting it in the landfill. And that was like false hope, you know. The river looked better, so the people said, oh, it must be alright now. It’s okay to eat the fish. But no, it wasn’t alright. That dioxin could be in that river for a hundred years. What helps dioxin in the laboratory is ultraviolet light will help break it down. And that’s why we had a fight for fifty color units. They said they couldn’t meet fifty color units.
Fifty color units is what allows the sunlight to penetrate to the bottom where the dioxin is in laboratory tests. Ultraviolet light will break down dioxin. And that’s why we fought for that. The papermill said they couldn’t meet eighty-five color units. Now, this is really something that I don’t understand. They allow the state of North Carolina to do their own testing on the color issue in the river. I talked to the person that tested the river one day up at Waterville, and I said, well when do you test the river? When they let it out of the dam? And she said, “No, my boss in North Carolina said don’t test the river where they’re releasing the polluted water into Tennessee. Test it where they’re not releasing the water through the hydroelectric dam.” That way you’re getting Big Creek coming out of the national park—pure water—and you’re getting Joe riverbed water, which is pretty pure too. Mountain streams empty into that. So, the company that couldn’t reach eighty-five color units is getting twenty color units, thirty color units, because what are they testing? The pure water coming out of the park. Now, I brought this up to our water quality person in Tennessee, and he couldn’t look at me. I said, why aren’t you doing something about this? He couldn’t look me in the eye. I said, you sold us out, didn’t you? And he— I asked him—he’d actually been taken on a rafting trip by the executives at the Champion papermill—asked him why are you allowing this to happen? I said, why aren’t you doing something? He stammered a little bit. I said, you sold us out, didn’t you? I just couldn’t look me in the eye and walked away from me. Actually, he was seen being taken out to dinner at restaurants in our county by Champion executives. Champion paid for the meal with their credit cards. So not only did the EPA sell these people out, our own state officials sold us out. And it’s just a shame, you know? These people are good people. They might be poor, but that doesn’t give them a reason to be dumped on by pollution that causes cancer. It’s shameful to me.

Partial Transcript: Well, we called for public hearings. We called for state—Tennessee had a hearing. And at that hearing, we got a list of the people that died, we believe, from the Pidgeon River, eating fish and stuff. And artist 0:14:07 ??? s/l Daylen Demario made a wall and put everybody’s name on it, like the Vietnam wall and put it at the hearing and put ribbons at the hearing to block off the seats. And we said, if these people would’ve been alive, they would be sitting in those seats telling them to clean up the river. But they were gone. We’ve had black ribbons at their seats and everything. And the relatives wanted to go sit in the seat of their relative that died. I thought that was pretty respectful for what had happened to them. So, we had several hearings we went to. Went to the hearing in Raleigh, North Carolina. We were the only people that went there because we wanted both sides to hear what was going on. The hearing officer at the one in Raleigh was just hearing one side of the story. Champion was saying, oh, look at these rafting companies going down the river. There’s nothing wrong with the river. But I was there, and Jill was there to tell them. Actually, I’m in that picture, and I lost my job as a rafting guide because my boss had found out about dioxin, and he wouldn’t take people down to expose them to the dioxin. So, it’s good that they heard both sides of the story.
The Dead Pidgeon River Counsel was the group we started with. And they actually didn’t want to get too controversial. They were business people that were in the group. And we found out about dioxin and everything. They just—they didn’t want anybody to know it because they’re promoting business. So, Greenpeace wanted to post the river with the Dead Pidgeon River Counsel and they refused to go with Greenpeace. And that’s when our people broke away from that group and started our own group—Americans for a Clean Environment—ACE—the river with Greenpeace all the way up to the mill in Canton and all the way down through the river.
The warning is “Danger: Dioxin in River. Don’t eat the fish out of the river.” But they’ve all been taken down. Now, the warning signs have all been taken down. And I know dioxin just doesn’t disappear overnight. It’s going to stay there for a pretty long time. The reason I got so involved, the Champion executives had a meeting in Newport to tell everybody, just leave us alone. We’ll do the right thing. Well, I got up at the meeting, and I said, I’m a river guide on the Pidgeon River. Is there anything you’re putting in the river that might be dangerous to me, that could harm me? You know, he said, not as far as we know, we’re not. A week later from Greenpeace, I get this “No margin of safety” talking about dioxin—most dangerous chemical ever analyzed by the EPA. In other words, my life didn’t mean nothing to them, whether I died or not from this exposure. And that got me started. And that’s how a lot of activists get started. They get mad because they’re lied to. And that’s basically what happened to me.

Partial Transcript: I actually lived in Pennsylvania when they had the Three Mile Island meltdown. Jimmy Carter was the president back then. And when that melted down, we’re living fifty miles from Harrisburg. And the officials told us, if we went outside, we should put a hat on. That’d protect us from radiation. And we said, no way. You know, we got to get out of here. We don’t want to be exposed to this. And we moved to Cocke County Tennessee right near the most polluted river in the United States, and we decided, you can’t run from pollution. You got to stay and fight. And that’s what we did. We started to make a better community for our neighbors, so they wouldn’t have to be in fear of living here.

Partial Transcript: What the papermill and North Carolina would have to do is switch to a chlorine-free technology. There would be no dioxin in the sludge and in the fish. But it’s hard for one of them to say they’re wrong and they’re causing dioxin because you have a 105 of these mills. If one admits there’s a problem, then they’re all going to have to switch, and it’s going to cost them some money. But what is more important—people’s lives or the big profit that they make?
David Weintraub
The only difference in the product would be the—not making paper, it just wouldn’t be bright white, right?
Steve Hodges
That’s right, but they make paperboard for milk cartons, which is the problem. And they’ll tell you at the papermill that the inside of the milk carton is coated with plastic. That dioxin can’t get through there to the milk. But I actually took a tour of the plant, talked to the chemist in the laboratory and I asked them. They say, yes, there is a way for the dioxin to get into the milk. They can’t seal the corners inside with wax, so it can migrate. And they actually told me that at the papermill.
In this country, papermills only bleach one way. That would be with chlorine or chlorine dioxide. The EPA is not making them go chlorine-free. They’re saying chloride dioxin is good enough for these mills to use, but it isn’t because they’re still using a form of chlorine and there’s no safe levels of chlorine because of no-safe levels of dioxin.
But in Europe, they have a choice between unbleached or bleached packaging.

Partial Transcript: Well, it just shows you that Champion was one of the richest corporations in the world, but we stood up to them and they actually sold out to the employees. They got tired of fighting us. So, we hope with employees owning it, employee stock ownership plan, that they will feel better about cleaning up the river because they actually live where the pollution is. The executives from Champion, they live somewhere else. They didn’t live near the pollution. They didn’t have to deal with it. So, we’re hoping that they will want to do something about it. In fact, we had a meeting before the papermill was sold to the employees. The biggest bank in town, in Asheville—that’s what I call it—we had a meeting with the union leader from the papermill. And he told us that it was a crime against God’s creation, what they did. And that if they got their jobs back, and started bleaching again, they would make the river better. And I told him, I’ll believe it when I see it. And sure enough, they haven’t done anything different. Things are as normal as it was thirty-five years ago, except they’re not using straight chlorine. They’re still using a form of chlorine, which puts cancer-causing dioxin in the environment.

Partial Transcript: I just hope it never goes back the way it was. That they’ll stay on top of it and make sure that they keep the river looking the way it is. You know, a lot of jobs have opened up since the river was cleaner. Most industries don’t want to locate near a river that’s got three foot of foam on it. So, you’re seeing new industry come in and the rafting companies—there’s thirteen now on the river. And they hold a national kayak competition on the river. So, it looks a lot better. But the dioxin in the river—it’s everywhere. There is no body of water anywhere that doesn’t have dioxin in it, no matter how remote. It could be on the top of a mountain. It’s got dioxin in it because dioxin is windblown—goes up in the air and eventually, it’s going to come back down and pollute more streams. And that’s what I have against this BFR. They’re burning it in a lime kiln, the organic chlorines—it means it must come down somewhere. Once it goes up the stack—it’s in a lime kiln with no pollution controls whatsoever on it. The state of North Carolina said, you don’t have to go through a hearing or anything. We’ll take you on your word. If you want to do it, you just go ahead. So now this dioxin is coming down in other streams polluting more streams. And also, people are breathing it. When it was in the river, you could stay out of the river. Don’t eat the fish. Don’t walk through it. But you can’t stop breathing. And that’s the problem I see.