ORIGINAL ARTICLE CAN BE FOUND HERE:  https://richmond.com/news/state-regional/kepone-disaster-hopewell-james-river-life-sciences-products-allied-chemical/article_ccf5babe-dfe9-11ee-8d92-7f1d1511ad4e.html

The roach poison was as fine as flour, and it looked like it, too.

Dale Gilbert would come home caked in the stuff. So would Thurman Dykes, Frank Arrigo and the other 135 workers who baked up Kepone for Life Science Products, beginning in March 1974.

Many had been lured to Hopewell by the promise of a good paycheck. But in 1975, they sat before a hearing of Congress. Gilbert’s hands shook as he said he never knew that Kepone, a neurotoxin, could be harmful. Not even the bosses took precautions.

“Like a dust storm most of the time” was how Gilbert described work conditions before a congressional oversight hearing.

March marks the 50th anniversary of Virginia’s Kepone disaster: a 16-month spell during which workers for a small Hopewell chemical company dumped the harmful pesticide into Hopewell’s waterways. The viscous, discolored run-off first jammed up the city’s sewer system and then ultimately led to the yearslong closure of the entire James River to commercial fishing.

This story ran in the Aug. 14, 1975, edition of the Richmond Times-Dispatch.

The company primarily held responsible was Allied Chemical, a major nationwide chemical corporation. Allied was made to pay more than $13 million in a one-of-a-kind legal settlement that birthed the Virginia Environmental Endowment. The endowment has funded many times that in conservation efforts since its inception.

Still, environmentalists and scientists today worry that another Kepone crisis isn’t hard to imagine, given the weakening of monitoring programs that protect the James.

The chemical’s true name was chlordecone. Virgil Hundtofte and William Moore had set up their own operation to produce the tan, cakey powder. Their newly formed company was called Life Science Products. Chlordecone would be its only product, and Allied Chemical would be its only client.

Both were former employees with Allied Chemical at the company’s sprawling plant in Hopewell, which is now owned by plastics producer AdvanSix. With international sales of Kepone growing, Allied was pivoting away from making it in-house. The outsourcing deal would simplify operations.

Production at Life Science began in March 1974. The process involved adding five chemicals in vats, then drying the product until Kepone powder remained. It was then sold to Allied, which shipped it north to Baltimore and then internationally to such placess as Ecuador, Venezuela, Australia and Guadeloupe. Kepone had shown promising results at staving off pests. Its main use was against the banana root bore, a black beetle that eats the roots of banana trees.

A whistleblower lawsuit filed by a former worker alleges that Richmond city officials routinely violate the Freedom of Information Act by denying, delaying, or charging exorbitant amounts for public records. The problems extend beyond city hall, with the Richmond Police Department and Richmond Public Schools also facing criticism for their lack of transparency. 

Within a month of production beginning, problems arose. First came the surprise shutdown of Hopewell’s wastewater treatment plant, which cleans the runoff from the city before it joins the James.

“Something that smelled odd was killing the bacteria the digester normally uses to break down waste materials,” said William R. Havens, the plant’s manager. He traced the smell back to Life Science.

The plant closed in July 1975 after a cardiologist for one of the workers sounded the alarm. Workers at Life Science Products were trembling. Gilbert, who later testified before Congress, was referenced to a local cardiologist, who took his blood and sent it to doctors at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Until then, workers had just shrugged off their health concerns as the “Kepone shakes.” But as the picture became clearer, so too did the harm to workers. Some had been made temporarily sterile, and others suffered memory loss. The risk of cancer seemed obvious to Edward Isaacs, one of the first neurologists to treat exposed workers at the Medical College of Virginia.

“These four gentlemen come in with horrible movement disorders, twisting and shaking,” said Isaacs, who described how the pesticide became trapped in the workers’ bodies. From the moment of absorption, it was being recycled — from the liver to the circulatory system, from the blood to the nervous system, and then back again through the intestines and into the liver.

“It was never getting out of the body,” Isaacs said. “They were repeatedly getting poisoned by the same stuff.”

In congressional oversight hearings, documents emerged that showed Allied knew the insecticide was “very toxic” if ingested, according to a report the company had commissioned in 1963.

Among the first to respond to the threat to the river was David Paylor, then an aquatic biologist with the Virginia Department of Environmental Quality. Paylor described the panic that struck the agency. Would thousands of Virginians become as sick as these workers?

“Some individuals have questioned if another Kepone-like event could occur in Virginia’s future. The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes.’”
— Mike Unger and George Vadas, Virginia Institute of Marine Science

Kepone production has since been banned worldwide. The workers found some relief in a drug called cholestyramine, which was able to do what doctors so far had not been able to: absorb Kepone so that it could pass out of the body.

Isaacs recalled radio host Paul Harvey announcing the drug’s discovery during a national broadcast: “Good news America, they found the cure to Kepone,” Harvey told listeners.

In the James, scientists realized that the most efficient solution was to do nothing. The chemical was slowly sinking deeper into the riverbed, trapped by layers of sediment.

“It’s still there,” Paylor said. “It would have been basically impossible to remove it.”

Most of the punishment handed down to Allied came by way of Federal District Judge Robert R. Merhige Jr., a U.S. Air Force veteran with a reputation for straight talk.

“It seems that everyone was sitting around on their couches. It sounds like a bunch of politics, everybody being nice to everybody else,” Merhige commented from the bench.

Ultimately, the company pleaded no contest to 940 criminal violations of the Refuse Act and the Clean Water Act. Merhige said the company “took shortcuts” and ordered Allied to pay $13.2 million, the equivalent of about $75 million today.

Then, Merhige took an unusual step. Rather than route the money to the government, he ruled that $8 million from the settlement would go toward an organization he felt would be more directly concerned with conservation in Virginia.

That organization became known as the Virginia Environmental Endowment. Born out of the initial fine tugged out of Allied Chemical, it has since distributed several times that sum in its 47-year history.

In 1986, the endowment gave a lifeline grant to the Southern Environmental Law Center, which has since spread to five other Southern states since its inception. The endowment also gave similar seed grants to the James River Association, the Elizabeth River Project and the Virginia arm of the Chesapeake Bay Foundation.

“The endowment has really proven to be the silver lining in an otherwise dark period of environmental history here in Virginia,” said Joe Maroon, the endowment’s current director.

In 2017, scientists with the Virginia Institute of Marine Science expressed concern at protections in place around the James River.

“Some individuals have questioned if another Kepone-like event could occur in Virginia’s future,” wrote marine scientists Mike Unger and George Vadas. “The answer is an unequivocal ‘yes.’”

Unger and Vadas described a withering of monitoring efforts that track the health of Virginia’s main artery. The DEQ had to develop rigorous testing of the river to make sure it could once again be fishable and that Kepone levels were receding. The testing, mostly done for the department by VIMS and the Division of Consolidated Laboratory Services, was described by study author Unger as being broad and capable of looking for unknowns. It helped VIMS find new hotspots for polychlorinated biphenyls, for example.

Over time, the department deprioritized the unknowns, Unger said, in favor of more pinpoint measuring ability around known chemicals like PCBs, Kepone, mercury and nitrogen.

“It’s geared towards the regulatory community,” said Unger, referring to the businesses that have state-sanctioned permits to release chemicals into the James. “That’s where the money and effort went.”

At the same time, threats seem to be multiplying in the form of new chemicals, plastics and even pharmaceuticals like birth control, which has been linked with fish mutations in the James. Among those threats are PFAS, the “forever chemicals” linked with cancer that have been found in drinking wells in several Virginia towns, as well as in a Roanoke reservoir. The chemicals come in thousands of different varieties.

Irina Calos, a spokesperson for the Department of Environmental Quality, said it would be highly unlikely that Virginia would experience another prolonged pollution incident without notice.

“There are many safeguards in place today that did not exist in the 1970s, which contribute to significantly reducing this risk,” Calos said.

Calos said the organization felt some budget-tightening during the 2008 recession, but that funding for monitoring has since been restored. In 2022, the agency actually had more water-monitoring stations than it did in 2008, Calos said.

This year, the agency will sample water at 1,500 locations. with tests that can ferret out which water bodies are endangered, even if they do not zero in on all the individual possible pollutants, Calos said. The agency is testing for PFAS in fish at roughly 100 locations.

“We recognize that there are thousands of chemicals which may enter the environment, and it is not practicable, or even possible in some cases, to individually measure each chemical,” Calos said.

Bills in the legislature have targeted some of these, like tar sealants used to pave streets. But scientists liken one-off efforts to a game of Whac-A-Mole.

“As certain chemicals come along, there’s always something to replace them,” Unger said.

Maroon celebrated Virginia’s recovery, but lamented cutbacks that he says have left the river vulnerable.

“Is the James River healthier today than it was in 1975? Yes. But would we have caught Kepone with the monitoring systems we have in place now?” asked Maroon. “Probably not.”