Our Road: Then -- E25: The Alleged Soul City-Afton Dump Connection Artwork

Our Road to Walk: Then and Now

Our Road to Walk: Then and Now is a podcast series hosted by Deborah and Ken Ferruccio broadcast from Warren County, North Carolina, known as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement. The purpose of the series is to share the inside, untold, documented, forty-four-year PCB landfill history which serves as a roadmap and guidebook for communities everywhere who want to actively help protect the environment, especially marginalized communities, through education and activism based on science for the people. Our goal is to raise the consciousness of our listeners by informing and inspiring them and by winning their hearts and minds so that they want to join Our Road to Walk on a mutual pilgrimage for the planet, person by person, community by community, region by region, and nation by nation.

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Our Road to Walk: Then and Now

Our Road: Then -- E25: The Alleged Soul City-Afton Dump Connection

August 23, 2023 • Deborah and Ken Ferruccio

In this episode, Ken and Deborah receive alarming information from two reliable inside sources about a connection in the planning stages between Soul City and the proposed Afton PCB landfill site. Ken shares the information concerning the connection with Concerned Citizens committee members who advise him that he needs to share the information with the public through the news media.

In addition to waste generated by industrial production at Soul City, other waste would be shipped to Soul City by rail. The sources said that near the rail head, which was then under construction at Soul City and which Ken and Deborah have a photograph of, would be two, large basins, one for municipal sewage and the other for chemical waste.

The alleged connection has credibility. In the county’s civil complaint attempting to stop the state from purchasing the Afton property for the PCB landfill, officials write that they “are informed and believe that the state has undisclosed plans for the Afton tract of land as a principle site for large quantities of other toxic and dangerous chemicals.”

In fact, the allegation is serious enough that Raleigh’s WRAL TV Action News 5 sends reporter Leila Tvedt to interview Ken. She arrives in a helicopter that lands in the soybean field adjacent to the Ferruccio cabin.

Ken and Deborah also learn that a local businessman close to the Governor had offered land for a radioactive waste dump.

As Ken continues to inform the public and the Hunt Administration through the news media, he addresses the way that the EPA is transforming the agency to legalize unsafe hazardous waste disposal sites. He says that the EPA’s latest Federal Register is in essence a confession of the many unknowns involved in the management and disposal of chemical waste.

Ken writes that since crucial aspects of landfills are dangerously unpredictable, and since without predictability there can be no scientific justification, a vocabulary of faith is infiltrating a vocabulary of science.