Welcome to the Sunday Discussion segment! Each week here on Geek Alabama, Sunday Discussion will feature a serious topic that needs to be featured and talked about. You can “discuss” it on your own social media networks as comments are banned here on Geek Alabama.
For forty years, a community in Anniston, Alabama lived alongside one of the most contaminated industrial sites in American history — and nobody told them.
On January 1, 2002, the Washington Post published a front-page investigation revealing that internal company documents — many stamped “Confidential: Read and Destroy” — showed concerns about toxic PCB chemicals had been recorded as early as 1937. The Associated Press reported that by 1969, fish in the local waterway tested at PCB levels 7,500 times the legal limit. Yet production continued for decades.
The Boston Globe documented that the residents most heavily exposed were Anniston’s Black community — placed in the highest-risk jobs, living in neighborhoods built closest to the facility, and the last to receive any compensation.
In February 2002, an Alabama jury found the company LIABLE on six counts — including suppression of truth and wanton disregard for human safety. The New York Times reported the final settlement at $700 million, one of the largest environmental contamination agreements in American history at the time.
A peer-reviewed study published in Environmental Health Perspectives (2010) found PCB levels in Anniston residents running two to three times the national average — years after the plant had stopped production.
Some things money cannot fix. This is the DOCUMENTED story of what happened in Anniston — told through court records, internal memos, and the people who lived inside it.
Categories: Discussion Talk Stuff
