I grew up five blocks from the Ohio River. The soundtrack of my life was the constant background noise of heavily laden trains and tugboats pushing barges up and down the river. Their cargo varied from coal to sand and gravel to gasoline and chemicals. Honestly, you never knew what dangers lurked just a few blocks away when you lay sleeping in your bed on those hot summer nights. The toots of the barges signaling the locks…the locks signaling back when it was ok to move forward.

Union Carbide, Bayer, Shell, Corning, Marbon, Viscose, DuPont, Johns Manville…all were as familiar to us as Wonder Bread and Borden’s. We didn’t think anything of it. These chemical, plastics, glass, and petroleum plants were our bread and butter. Like the coal fields of southern West Virginia and the steel mills up north, big chemical plants ruled the Mid-Ohio Valley. If our parents didn’t work there, we knew someone who did.

Occasionally there would be an accident or a fire or a chemical spill at one of the local plants. But, before the EPA taught us the dangers of some of the things in our very backyards, we really never gave it too much thought. It was part and parcel of life here. I remember in grade school when the father of one of my classmates was killed at DuPont. It struck us on many levels. First, it taught us that parents can die. Second, it meant some jobs were dangerous. And, it gave us our first taste of death.

If you saw the documentary Dark Waters, you get an idea of the reckoning between big polluters and the little people who worked for them. DuPont worked with a chemical called C8 that leaked into the ground water all around where I grew up and caused cancers, deformed fetuses, and deaths. The people eventually won a settlement, but money is never enough to rectify a situation like that. Extremely expensive filtration systems have been installed to allow the drinking water from the aquifer below us to be potable because…C8 is a “forever chemical”. It will never break down and is here to stay.

They don’t use C8 anymore. One of my friends spent his entire career working for DuPont…the last several years in a lab trying to come up with a C8 substitute but they were still not successful when he retired. DuPont sold out to a French company called Chemours who subsequently sublease their facilities to other companies manufacturing any number of products.

Tuesday night at 10:00, when people were settling down to watch a little TV before bed, a loud explosion rocked the small communities surrounding the Chemours plant in Belle, West Virginia just south of Charleston…about a hundred miles from the Ponderosa. Amazingly, only four people were injured…one of whom died yesterday at an area hospital. A young man in his 30’s with a family won’t be home for Christmas…or any other holiday. Things are a lot cleaner now and much safer, but still…accidents happen. There’s still a much higher level of cancer here than most places. 

West Virginia is a beautiful state. But the wealthy robber barons have continually raped my home state of her natural resources and left her permanently scarred and polluted. The price of progress? Or the “taking advantage” of simple Appalachians trying to get by the best they can? We were resource rich and education poor and it’s hard to complain when “The Man” was putting the bread in your children’s bellies. 

I’ll never forget the time I flew into the Charleston Airport one summer. We were approaching from the south…not the way I commonly arrived. I looked out the window of the plane and the tops of the mountains…MY MOUNTAINS…were just…GONE! They were shaved off the top in a new, quicker, cheaper method of strip mining. The landscape has been permanently altered. Farmland that’s been handed down from generation to generation has wide, treeless paths cut through virgin timber to allow gas and oil pipelines to pass through. It breaks my heart and makes me sick.

All in the name of fossil fuels. Large, gas-guzzling SUV’s. Mr. FixIt and I contribute with our two pickup trucks so I can’t even complain. I pray for a cleaner world and for some way for my fellow Mountaineers to make a living once the switch is made. We have to do something more than pray. We have to change. And change doesn’t come easy, so I’ve found.

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““ ‘Do not pollute the land where you are. Bloodshed pollutes the land, and atonement cannot be made for the land on which blood has been shed, except by the blood of the one who shed it. Do not defile the land where you live and where I dwell, for I, the Lord, dwell among the Israelites.’ ””

Numbers 35:33-34 NIV