Our Road: Then -- E31: 1980: A Landmark Victory for Polluters -- Only the NIMBYs Stand in the Way 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 -- E31: 1980: A Landmark Victory for Polluters -- Only the NIMBYs Stand in the Way

January 23, 2024 • Deborah and Ken Ferruccio

Photo: At his parent’s home in New Hampshire, Ken works on his manuscript titled: Toxic Aggression, Fighting on the Front Lines: The North Carolina PCB Story
(October, 1980).

In this episode, Ken and Deborah continue to share with their listeners the events of 1980 as they relate to their PCB situation in particular and as the events relate to the larger hazardous waste issue in North Carolina and across the country.

As the history is unfolding in this second year of their PCB narrative — 1980 — what is occurring with EPA hazardous waste regulations will be an EPA toxic chemical watershed; a landmark victory for polluters; and a flashpoint for a chemical point-of-no-return for us all.

The Governor needs to slow down the roadside PCB cleanup process. He needs EPA hazardous waste landfill regulations to catch up with the state’s plans to bury the PCBs in Warren County perilously close to groundwater.

What to do with the roadside PCBs is vexing the Governor, and what to do with hazardous and radioactive waste across the state and nation is vexing industry and government as well.

Warren County citizens and citizens elsewhere are proving how politically explosive the waste issue is. Meanwhile, waste industries are busy capturing the EPA.

Ken and Deborah aren’t waiting passively for the state’s next move. They spend months writing a manuscript in hopes the documented PCB narrative will help stop the PCB landfill. As they complete the manuscript and submit it to a literary agent for review in October, 1980, EPA’s decimated hazardous waste landfill regulations are simultaneously implemented.

The regulations will help make waste disposal the growth industry of the 1980s, and chemicals in the environment a way of life.

“Only the NIMBYs stand in the way of this government/industrial overwhelming and unstoppable force” (William Sanjour, From the Files of a Whistleblower: Or How EPA was Captured by the Industry it Regulated).