February 4, 1969
Page 2756
POLLUTION AND POWER IN A SMALL MILL TOWN
HON. EDMUND S. MUSKIE OF MAINE IN THE SENATE OF THE UNITED STATES Tuesday, February 4, 1969
Mr. MUSKIE. Mr. President, the January 26, 1969, issue of Potomac magazine contains an excellent article entitled "Pollution and Power in a Small Mill Town," written by Shelby Coffey III. I ask unanimous consent that it be printed in the Extensions of Remarks.
There being no objection, the article was ordered to be printed in the RECORD, as follows:
POLLUTION AND POWER IN A SMALL MILL TOWN
(By Shelby Coffey III, assistant editor)
For the average resident the reality of Covington is the funereal atmosphere about the streets at night. Car after immobile car is shrouded with plastic covers or with thick white cloths across the windshield. Protection against industrial fallout, claim the car owners. Some Westvaco executives have what they call a mill car, an older car that will not be much ruined by the dustfall, the cinders and ashes. Some people in town claim their white houses have been dyed an unappealing goldfish color because of the pollution.
Ask a service station attendant in Covington how to wash the pollution off your car after it has been in town for several days and he will recommend toilet bowl cleanser and warn you to be careful not to burn your hands with it. One frustrated housewife went so far as to sweep up the fallout on her front porch, pack it and send the box of dirt off to the president of Westvaco in New York city.
L. C. Claybrook of the Clay shoe store has been in business for over twenty years. He says that in an average year he has 30 to 35 customer complaints of shoes falling apart, complaints that Claybrook can't explain except by the way one shoe company replied to his complaints. "They said that some sort of chemical had eaten out the threads."
Dr. Winn is the local, eye, ear, nose and throat physician. He feels that there is a "considerably" higher incidence of bronchitis, colds and sinus trouble than in comparable towns without large mills. But he admits he has no statistics for actual comparison, just a lot of daily complaints.
When Peyton Place began to make it big on television, some of the residents of Covington, Va., took vicarious pride in comparing their town to the fabled New England hotbed of sin and status-strife. There was the giant West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company plant at one end of the town, and the owners of the company had once lived in a baronial mansion set on the hill overlooking the little mill town of 11,000.
Now the home sits in deserted splendor above the factory smoke that broods through the hollows of the Virginia countryside. In the valley, the workers' homes, one- and two-story rectangles of gray and off-white, are squeezed together in regimental rows.
There are classic small town earmarks, Salvation Army volunteers calling for contributions on Main Street just before Christmas addressed everyone by his first name through a scratchy megaphone. Behind the cash register at the best restaurant in town, the owner has set up individual candid shots of all his children. And there are good small town scandals, too, worthy of Grace Metalious: a young college student working at a Shell station part-time hints of scandal behind an unsolved slaying years ago. A wise country-boy-to-city-bumpkin smile on his flushed face above the khaki work shirt, he explains, perhaps jokingly: "This is a funny town. You can get a ticket if you park five minutes overtime on Main Street, but you can get away with killing somebody."
That story would make a whole Monday evening TV installment. But this sort of gossip is not what really sets hot words flying these days in Covington. The deep concerns of the 60s have come to this urban anachronism. What really stirs passions, wrath and intrigue, what brings on questions of conflict of interest on State boards, what brought state-wide interest in this little town last fall was air pollution.
For the newcomer, the passing motorist, the unprepared visitor, Covington begins as an odor – a harsh sulfurous smell that meanders and settles into your car, your motel room if you spend the night, and your slightly shocked nostrils in any case. The odor covers Main Street in Covington, an archetypal collection of two-story buildings – dime stores and jewelers and clothing stores with sensible discount prices advertised in show windows where mannikins wear styles imitating what was fashionable in New York a year or two ago. And the sulfur smell is stirred by the customized machines of lynx-eyed young men, with slick hair; their rumbling autos driven past sidewalks where people still take the time to stop when they say hello in passing.
But on a "bad day" when the precipitators at the mill are acting up and the cove-like air conditions in the valley cause an inversion, a thick bluefish haze clogs all of Covington. Main Street, three blocks from the huge barrel-like stacks of Westvaco, becomes a blurred image like a faded, aging photograph of the little town your grandfather talked about spending his hard but fair childhood in.
Then comes the sense of claustrophobia. You can't get away from the smell, the haze, the feeling that your lungs are swallowing in some vaporous disaster. As if you stepped into a room where a hundred chainsmokers had just held a two-hour meeting.
This is just a newcomer's impression. Most Covington residents said "you get used to it" and shrug. After all, the mill employs over 2000 workers, pays a sizable share of the city's and Alleghany County's taxes and has been, in effect, the economic life of the community for the past seventy years.
On the other hand, some Covington citizens decided not to shrug it off. Last September, in a carefully worded series of questions that detonated a political blast in Richmond, a citizen's group terming itself the Alleghany Crusade for Clean Air Inc. took a deep breath and trumpeted an open letter to the Governor of Virginia. The letter asked, among other things: "Do any members of the State Air Pollution Control Board transact business, or benefit indirectly from business, with West Virginia Pulp and Paper Company?" (The five-man State board was set up as a result of a state air pollution act passed in 1966.) The letter also asked if the makeup of the Technical Advisory Committee, which studies technical matters for the State Board, was such that members of the Committee could "present impartial advice on Air Pollution Control matters when such advice may be contrary to their company interests? Does this constitute a conflict of interest?"
One member of the State Air Pollution Control Board is Frank Kinzer, an insurance man, in Covington. "It smells pretty good to us (natives)," Kinzer says with a smile, referring to the economic benefits that the mill has brought to the little Virginia town.
"There was one time when the air smelled clean," recalls Kinzer. That time turns out to have been during a strike. And back then when the winds were fresh and had maybe an unfamiliar hint of honeysuckle was also a time "when a single dollar went a long way . . . because they were scarce."
In its seventy years in Covington, the Westvaco mill has brought millions of dollars to the area's economy. In turn the mill has asked for and received the co-operation of many grateful members of the community. And vitriolic as they sometimes wax on the subject of Westvaco's behavior, members of the Clean Air Crusade are always careful to add that they don't want to see the mill driven out of town. A speech by high Westvaco official Crawley Williams on Jan. 12, 1961, seemed to hint that "the economic facts of life" might indeed affect the status of mill as employer.
The Covington Virginian, the local newspaper, headlined the next day: "Don't Take Mill For Granted Says Mgr., Civic Effort Needed." Some townspeople were described by the newspaper as "stunned" by the implications. The official Westvaco position is that Williams did not mean to imply any sort of threat to people who were not willing to put forth much "civic effort" or to the community in general. He was, they feel, misinterpreted. Some of the Clean Air Crusaders respond to this interpretation of misinterpretation with pithy phrases associated with the nearby farm country.
For Frank Kinzer, though, Crawley Williams is not a figure of controversy but a good friend whose companionship he has valued much of their adult lives. They have been "going to the Kentucky Derby together for years." A distinguished-looking man with silvery hair, and a soft Virginia accent, Kinzer declares with patrician emphasis and pride that he and Mr. Williams are "personal friends."
As a member of the State Board concerned with air pollution, Kinzer says he is careful not to go to "these meetings" in Covington where the pollution problem becomes a subject of controversy. His presence, he feels, might be misconstrued, and "the Governor wouldn't like that either." He says that his insurance business is about 60 per cent with union employees at the Westvaco plant and about 40 per cent with mill management and other local people. He worked at the mill himself a couple of summers while he was in college. And he has "the personal insurance of three mill managers."
In this delicate position Kinzer tries "to be friends with everybody ... to see both sides." Otherwise, "You would cut your own throat if you leaned too much to one side or the other." On the other hand, he doesn't think too much of the activities of the Covington Alleghany Crusade for Clean Air; they are, he says, "always agitating ... writing letters claiming they have 1400 members . . ." In short: "Keeping things stirred up . . . " No matter how hard the Crusade members try to represent the State Board and its Technical Advisory Committees as a witches' cauldron of conflict of interest, the members feel that progress is being made in the touchy and newly explored area of air pollution. The Technical Advisory Committee was set up to advise the State Board on the mechanical aspects of controlling pollution.
The chairman of the Advisory Committee is I. Russell Berkness, a Richmond businessman dealing in industrial equipment such as paper mill pumps and boiler accessories. Berkness says he does business with Westvaco. When asked how much business, he replied, "I don't think that's a proper question." Later he added that the business he does with Westvaco is, at the moment, "no more than we do with a lot of others" of the major industries in Virginia. As Berkness sees it the potential for conflict of interest "falls back on the personal ethics of the individuals." He stands on his record, and feels that the men on the Advisory Committee have uniformly advocated progress in pollution control.
"They don't say 'we can't live with this.' In my contact with them they have said they want to move along for the Governor and for the public." And before the Federal government gets involved.
Berkness says he will have been on the Committee two years in March and that he and his fellow members have been asked if they will accept reappointment. Among the other members who are on the Advisory Committee are some who drive the Crusaders into suspicious broodings.
One of these gentlemen is William D. Major, one of the superintendents at the Westvaco plant in Covington. He is the chairman of a subcommittee on process industries, which is concerned with industries like Westvaco. Other members of the process subcommittee include W. C. Chapman, Technical Director of the Bleached Paper and Board Division of Union Camp, another paper- manufacturing concern: Robert Frazier of the Frazier Quarry in Harrisonburg; Dale Kieffer of Borden Chemical Co.; George Kneass of Foote Mineral Co., and John S. Lagarius, President of Resource Research Inc. in Reston, Va.
"Sometimes I get this feeling of helplessness," says A B. Caul, chairman of the Alleghany Crusade, as he drives by the vast Westvaco mill.
Thick smoke is rifling out of the stacks and flattening a little higher up, forming a giant gray pancake over Covington. "Did you ever read the novel Hawaii? Remember the fort? The great impregnable fort?"
One man who definitely does not feel any sense of impotence about the present pollution controversy is Virginia House Delegate Lewis McMurran of Newport News, chairman of the State Air Pollution Control Board. After the Crusade's letter to the Governor, McMurran told the Associated Press, "Our job is to clean up the air in Virginia, not to drive out or close down the state's industries."
He also stated that the technical advisory committee was made up of professional engineers and that the state was lucky to have their advice. He said that the State board, not the advisory committee, made the decisions and that State law required that no member of the board "may be connected with any industry that would be subject to air pollution control regulation."
In a sense, part of the uproar over air pollution is the fault of the geography of the place which creates "inversions" which in turn keep the smoke spread out over the town. Mill experts say this happens 150 to 200 days a year. Also the company points out that it has spent $5 million on air pollution control, $8 million since 1966.
This does not satisfy the hardcore local critics. They point to the sixty-odd years in which Westvaco spent only 2 million. Further, the critics charge that Westvaco is acting more from self-interest than benevolence in setting up recovery units, since the material recovered is lucrative. Allan Lindsey, a mill supervisor specializing in pollution problems, says that the control devices in the carbon section of the plant are now nearly able to pay for the process itself.
But as Doug Luke, a young Westvaco official and a relative of the founder of the company, puts it: "We have nothing to be ashamed of. We are making substantial progress."
For the small percentage of the vocally disgruntled among Covington's residents, progress is not coming fast enough. Spend two hours with a group of the Crusaders and you witness displays of outrage, gallows humor, a little irrelevancy and a sense of frustrated righteousness.
A letter in the Covington Virginian last March replying to a Crusade member has typified, to the despair of the crusaders, the attitude of many townspeople who feel that their jobs might be hurt by any change in the status quo of the mill. The letter read: "Dear Sir: May I make a suggestion to our so unhappy new citizen of Covington, J. I. Bernhardt? Why don't (sic) he find a place more suitable to live in that will meet his needs? I am sure we are not holding him here. If it wasn't for the 'Gold Dust' falling around him he would have to leave anyhow. (Signed) W. Wallace Harris, Covington, Va."