Carolinians sick of "Toxic Smog" — Soda Citizen

Photos and words by Sean Rayford

Karen Reilly at her home in Fort Mill, SC Sunday, August 1, 2021.

A NIGHTMARE

Karen Reilly feels like she’s being gassed and poisoned in her own home. For seven months she’s been experiencing spells of dizziness and vertigo — and recently, head pressure and tightness in her chest. On the last Thursday of July, she woke and drove straight to a Doctors Care facility.

“It's gotten so bad for me that I feel if I stay in my house, I'm gonna die,” says Reilly at her home in Fort Mill, South Carolina on August 1, “This last week has probably been the worst week of my life. It’s a nightmare.”

As July came to a close, she was sobbing and pleading with her husband. She can taste metal in the air and is ready to move.

New-Indy Containerboard in Catawba, SC August 1, 2021.

UNPRECEDENTED COMPLAINTS

In April, Catawba, SC resident JoAnne Carroll returned to Carolina after wintering in Florida. Within a few days she fled back to Florida, gagging and choking as she passed the New-Indy Containerboard plant on her drive south. “That God awful smell,” accompanied a sore throat, headaches and laryngitis.

Back in 2018 New-Indy Containerboard acquired the Bowater Inc. paper plant in Catawba — about seven miles northwest of Reilly’s home in Fort Mill. Bowater produced paper products for magazines, but in November of 2020 New Indy finished re-outfitting the plant to produce brown paper used for cardboard shipping boxes — like the ones used by Amazon.

Betty Rankin lives about five miles north of the plant, on farmland that’s been in family hands since the 1800s. In 2004, after a 30 year teaching career primarily in Virginia, she returned to her home state and had a house built with her husband Jim. Two years later, he lost his life in a long battle after exposure to Agent Orange during Vietnam.

On June 14, Rankin was tending to her two horses, Pancho and Fire, feeding them at the barn. “I was perfectly fine and left the gas mask in the kitchen. I just forgot it,” she says about the mask she now keeps on her in a fanny pack.

Betty Rankin, her horses Pancho and Fire, in the barn where she experienced a health episode she blames on exposure to hydrogen sulfide coming from New-Indy Containerboard Saturday, August 7, 2021.

“All of a sudden this feeling came over me - that I was gonna faint. And the next thing I knew, my legs weren't working right. They turned to jelly and I had to grab onto something and try to lower myself to the floor. I couldn't breathe. That elephant on the chest, it felt like a whole herd of elephants. I was scared. I couldn't process. I couldn't think - get your phone out and call your son,” she says, “All I could do was just sit there in a sheer panic and try to deep breathe.”

So far in 2021, South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control has received more than 24,000 complaints about the air quality in areas around Catawba. In this unprecedented scenario, they sought help from the EPA. When the EPA employees visited the plant for inspections, they reported some of the same symptoms experienced by residents.

Those residents have complained of migraines, dizziness, vomiting, nosebleeds, burning eyes, and a loss of appetite. They’ve also complained about foul odors. The area affects communities stretching across five counties, two states, and in the Catawba Indian Nation. The residents, DHEC, and EPA all blame New-Indy, owned by Schwarz Partners and Kraft Group (New England Patriots owner Robert Kraft).

In May, the EPA issued a Clean Air Act Emergency Order, for excessive hydrogen sulfide emissions at New-Indy, “presenting an imminent and substantial endangerment to the public health or welfare or the environment.” New-Indy failed to comply with the orders and continued emitting unsafe levels of hydrogen sulfide. According to the EPA, hydrogen sulfide can cause “various health effects, such as headache, nausea, difficulty breathing, and irritation of the eyes, nose, and throat.”

CHEMICAL SMOG

Many residents say the air quality worsened after the emergency order — and that July was the worst month yet. They also say their symptoms clear when they leave the area.

At the time of Betty Rankin’s collapse in the barn, the EPA had a temporary hydrogen sulfide meter on her front porch. According to EPA documents on the DHEC website, it recorded a reading of 81 — 11 units above what officials say is a safe level.

Complaints of health symptoms are inconsistent across the area — even within the same household. Some folks only identify a foul odor, one that Lancaster councilman Terry Graham describes as “a chemical smog.” Others, however, don’t smell it or aren’t concerned.

Residents who smell it, say that the rotten egg/sewage odor comes and goes unexpectedly - depending on the the winds and the geography of the land. Many refer to the area as a “war zone.”

In October of 2020, Kathleen (who asked to withhold her last name) moved from Long Island to Waxhaw, North Carolina — about ten miles northeast from the New-Indy plant. In April, she began noticing a foul odor. Sporadic at first, she didn’t think much of it. In May, the symptoms came. In June, she started tasting metal in the air.

Pollution in Waxhaw, NC — Kathleen in Waxhaw, NC August 1, 2021.

“I'm sick all the time. My throat burns, as soon as I come outside now. I don't even have to smell it. My skin itches. It's like it's on fire — and my eyes burn red for days. And it goes all in my nasal passages. All into my chest now,” says Kathleen, who records her symptoms in what she calls her “poison journal."

At first, she thought it was just her. Her next-door neighbors aren’t effected, but the neighbors across the street complain of symptoms and the smell.

In Reilly’s household in Fort Mill, neither her husband nor their three teenagers suffer from symptoms, although Reilly says her girls’ appetites have decreased.

“I understand that people that are original southerners here, you know, they don’t think it's a problem. They think it's the old Bowater [plant]. And [they think] all these northerners are moving down and trying to change things. I kinda understand where they are coming from. There are some rude northerners. I'm not one of them,” Kathleen says with a laugh.

Reilly, a Fort Mill resident of 12 years, notices a similar sentiment. She says some of her neighbors just don’t want to hear about it and have asked her not to talk about it in neighborhood social media groups.

When the the old Bowater plant was operating, it emitted hydrogen sulfide for years — but at much lower levels. Residents believe olfactory fatigue is at play. The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences defines the condition as “an adaptation to constant stimulation of our sensory system for smell.” Like when a cat owner can’t smell the litter box.

“You’ve got factions, if you saw the cars that were passing us today, some of them took great joy giving us the finger. Most of them didn't. There's a polarization,” says Rankin about a protest near a plant entrance on Saturday afternoon.

Residents protest near an entrance to New-Indy Containerboard Saturday, August 7, 2021.

Kerri Bishop, a Rock Hill resident since 2016, says that folks most affected appear to be newcomers to the area. She manages a Facebook group of concerned residents. “Most of our group is from up North. Maybe it’s because they haven’t been here that long,” she says.

Bishop, who has become the lead resident investigator, says things started going downhill for her in January. She has pre-existing cranial nerve issues and says hydrogen sulfide effects those with neurological disorders to a greater extent. “It’s almost like a muscle spasm when it happens,” she says, “It’s like a sharp stabbing pain. And it’s horrible.”

Luckily for Bishop, on the southern end of Rock Hill about ten miles from New-Indy, it hasn’t been as bad recently. “I think it has to do with the wind, because it’s not better for everyone else,” she says.

Kerri Bishop goes door-to-door leaving information about hydrogen sulfide exposure from the New-Indy plant July 31, 2021 in Fort Mill, SC.

In late July, Kathleen’s best friend visited her in Waxhaw for a weekend. When the odors came, her friend fell ill. “Her body was violently shaking,” says Kathleen. When she drove her friend to the airport for her return home, Kathleen had to walk her inside — to the restroom where she vomited.

“I don’t know how you live here,” her friend told her.

LEADERS

York County Councilman William “Bump” Roddey has lived his entire life in Rock Hill, working at the plant under different ownership for nearly 25 years. He doesn’t smell foul odors in his part of Rock Hill and he says he doesn’t get complaints from constituents — or from other Rock Hill residents.

“I have confidence as an employee, as an elected official, as a citizen of this community — that this company is doing all that it can to make this right, not only with DHEC and the EPA, but they want to be a good corporate citizen in the community,” says Roddey, a former lab technician now working in the chemicals/caustisizing areas, “Who doesn’t want to be a good corporate citizen?”

On July 28, state Sen. Michael Johnson (R), serving York and Lancaster counties, penned a letter to New-Indy CEO Dr. Richard Hartman. It read, in part, “Based on my recent phone call with DHEC officials last week, there is still a “several feet thick” layer of crust on the ponds. Also, the water continues to be non aerobic, and the release of hydrogen sulfide continues. It is time for this to end. When New-Indy announced its’ investment in York County, it was widely believed that New Indy would be a good neighbor, in the tradition of Bowater, and not cause new issues that would harm our community. Unfortunately, the problems that have developed since that time have shown the opposite — New-Indy is not a good neighbor.”

Betty Rankin looks over notes written on a document from DHEC Saturday, August 7, 2021.

Johnson says that every morning he wakes to emails from constituents with nosebleeds, trouble breathing and other health problems that they blame on hydrogen sulfide.

According to the Elrod Pope Law Firm, representing more than 1200 residents in a class action lawsuit against New Indy, there was a cascade of preventable errors at the plant - each one exacerbating the next.

Betty Rankin feels that the she and fellow Carolinians have become collateral damage. She’s worried because her doctors don’t know much about how hydrogen sulfide impacts the human body. She says the most recent studies are two decades old — and she can’t ignore her family’s experience with Agent Orange.

“You wake up, with the nose [tingling], you're trying to grab your gas mask at this point,” Rankin says about “attacks” in the middle of the night, “And you can't see, because you’ve got wavy lines and the dots and the flashing lights, and then you have this black spot and a whole row of colors around it. It doesn't last that long, but again, if it's happening to you, it feels like an eternity.”

About the author: Sean Rayford is a freelance photojournalist and documentary photographer in Columbia, SC