A Gadsden civil jury has found Monsanto/Solutia liable for contaminating parts of our community. We’ll have to wait to hear the decision on monetary damages and the case will be appealed. So resolution, for Monsanto and the plaintiffs at least, is still some time off.What, though, does this verdict mean for our community? It is a validation of at least 12 people of what many have been saying for years: that we have a problem.
Monsanto attorneys will now double-time it to the Alabama Supreme Court looking for some sympathy. That’s another story. But let’s forget about Monsanto for a moment, and focus on our collective future.
An opening now awaits us to do what we have been trying to do for a very long time. Let’s use this development, this validation, to convince the federal government, especially the Environmental Protection Agency and Monsanto that we need a long-term, comprehensive clean-up.
Talks on this now are going on between the government and Monsanto, but what will that clean-up look like? Will it include long-term monitoring, possible relocation of some residents, health clinics, a comprehensive environmental study of all of the area and surrounding watersheds.
It should.
It is also high time to carry out a health study. We have a PCB problem, there is no doubt about that. But how has it impacted the overall health of the community? To answer that question we need people who know what they are doing, someone who can carry out a detailed historical analysis of just what kinds of health problems we have.
Exposure to PCBs has been shown to be related to certain ailments. Do we or don’t we have a higher instance of those ailments than other communities?
Let’s try to get to the bottom of this. Public health experts tell us these kinds of questions are supremely difficult to answer and can be very expensive. Yet our community offers a unique opportunity for the Centers for Disease Control or the University of Alabama at Birmingham an excellent opportunity to carry out research from which the world can benefit.
As for Monsanto, Solutia’s CEO John Hunter said he’s disappointed in the verdict, wants to remind everyone of all the clean-up activities and sampling the company is now involved in.
We say fine, but Monsanto could have saved itself a lot of trouble if it would have been open about the situation in the first place.
It didn’t help Calhoun County and it didn’t help Monsanto that the state of Alabama in the form of the Alabama Water Improvement Commission, the predecessor of ADEM, was on the scene in the early 1970s. As we have previously reported, the head of that agency at the time was a Mr. J.L. Crockett and according to an internal Monsanto memo dated May 7, 1970, he had advised Monsanto employees to “give no statements or publications which would bring the situation (PCB contamination) to the public’s attention.”
Then in a Monsanto internal memo dated August 7, 1970 and labeled “Confidential — F.Y.I. and Destroy” regarding PCBs found in fish in Choccolocco Creek, Crockett is quoted again telling Monsanto that he “will try to handle the problem quietly without release of the information to the public...”
Listening to an idiot like that will get you in big trouble. It always pays to be open.
