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.Sitting at the Peebles's kitchen table one October morning during thetrial, the soft-spoken Diane suddenly burst into tears.Scotty sat silent, hishand gripping a coffee cup."It's hard," she blurted out.The strain on thefamily was sometimes overwhelming, Diane said.Several scientists,including Dr.Mullenix, had testified about the serious and often long-termhealth risks from fluoride."The kids want to know, `Are you sickmom are you and Dad gonna die?' We tell them we are not goinganywhere.I hate having to lie to my children, because I don't know myself.I want to make sure that they are taken care of.That is my biggestfear because if we are not able to take care of our kids, who is going to?"Reynolds Metals had hired big-time lawyers to fight the HurricaneCreek workers' claim.Attorney Pete Johnson was from the Virginia-basedfirm of Hunton &Williams, who since 1910 had defended Standard Oil,Phillip Morris, and a host of banking, electric utility, and railroadcompanies.Supreme Court Justice Lewis Powell Jr.had once been apartner, and the firm had a reputation in the legal world of having aSouthern "old boy" culture.Pete Johnson fitted the mold.The University ofVirginia law school graduate was one of Hunton & Williams's youngermembers, but he had already defended clients in "toxic tort" cases ofasbestos and lead poisoning.As Johnson approached the bench and openedhis files, Phyllis Mullenix closed her eyes.She smiled, bracing herself,while recalling the words of her husband, Rick, when she had left Boston. HURRICANE CREEK 205The Reynolds lawyers, he had warned, "are going to chew on your assa while, but you've got more ass than they've got teeth."The duel between Mullenix and Johnson over one of the mostcritical legal issues that had ever faced U.S.industry fluoride dam-age to human health was being fought, fittingly enough, near one ofthe most historic industrial sites in the United States.Only four milesfrom the Benton courthouse, Hurricane Creek's red earth oncecontained some of the nation's richest deposits of bauxite, the rawmineral needed to make aluminum.The Aluminum Company ofAmerica had built the nearby company town of Bauxite in the early19005 to house migrant miners.A National Park Service plaque at theBauxite museum commemorates the region's vital role in makingaluminum for aircraft during World War II.In October 2000 Benton was ready to make history again.The court casefiled by the Hurricane Creek workers was closely linked to what EPAofficials call the largest and most environmentally significant wastedisposal issue facing aluminum producers in the United States.'The material Scotty Peebles had been burying at Hurricane Creek was atoxic by-product of making aluminum, a waste known as treated spentpotliner.The EPA had taken an intense interest in the waste.Each yearabout 120,000 tons of spent potliner are produced by the aluminumindustry in the United States.' The waste is impregnated with a witch's brewof fluoride, arsenic, and cyanide.Disposing of it has long been a financialheadache for manufacturers and a flashpoint for conflict with"environmental regulators.There is so much of it and it is somewhatawkward to treat," noted Steve Silverman of the EPA's Office of GeneralCounsel.Once, ugly black mountains of waste potliner literally, the wastelining of the steel pots in which the aluminum is smelted had been storedon site or buried in pits, leaching fluoride and other poisons intogroundwater, and winning toxic Superfund status for several aluminumplants across the country, a federal designation that targets the hazardoussite for clean-up.' But by the early 1990s Reynolds told the EPA that thecompany had solved the potliner problem.It had invented a process at theHurricane Creek site to "treat" the waste, heating it with sand and lime ingiant furnaces at temperatures of over 1,100 degrees, driving off thecyanide, and then binding the 206 CHAPTER SIXTEENfluoride to the sand and limestone as calcium fluoride.Hurricane Creek workers Jerry Jones and Alan Williams helped todevelop that Reynolds treatment process becoming, they now believe,two more unwitting victims of industrial fluoride poisoning.In 1988 thetwo laborers had been part of a work crew of several hundred men thatgreeted a mighty procession of loo-ton railroad "hopper" cars arriving inArkansas, hauling potliner waste from aluminum companies in New York,Oregon, and Canada.The experimental treatment plant ran day and night,coiling a plume of black smoke across Saline County.Jerry Jones wouldclimb into the railroad cars, smashing a sledgehammer to loosen thefoul-smelling material while wearing only a bandana across his face forprotection from the billowing dust."We knew we were dealing withsomething awful," he added."Your sweat would burn, and the stuffsmelled just horrendous."Safety questions drew blunt responses from the Reynolds s contractors,the men recalled.Recession was biting Arkansas hard in the early 1990s,and both Jerry Jones and Alan Williams had young children to feed."I wastold to either god-dammed do it, or hit the fucking gate,' because they hadover a thousand applications at the office of people waiting to take ourjobs," said Jones."They did not tell us one thing [about safety]."Alan Williams is a thick-necked former U.S.Marine with a collegedegree.He became a foreman at Hurricane Creek.He had always been"super physical," he said, but the forty-five-year-old quickly ran into healthtroubles while at the Reynolds site."I wasn't sure what the problem was,"he said."My gums had begun to shrink.I quit smoking.I was having chestpains and rashes all over my body.I looked like an alcoholic and I don'thardly drink.It was covering my legs anti arms and I was having joint pain.My sex is gone.I'm impotent.It just wasted me away," he said.'By December 1991 the new treatment process was ready.Reynoldsassured the EPA the "treated" spent potliner waste would not leach fluorideinto ground water at levels the EPA deemed unsafe.That year the treatedpotliner was removed from the agency's list of toxic materials and "lost itshazardous waste stigma," according to Michelle Peace, an EPAenvironmental engineer who handled the delisting" process. HURRICANE CREEK 207The EPA ruling that the treated potliner was not hazardous was afinancial windfall for Reynolds Metals
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