From Preachin’ to Meddlin’:

Jefferson County’s Role in Shaping National Environmental Policy

by

Michael E. Fleenor, MD, MPH

Health Officer

Jefferson County, AL

Delivered March 16, 2010

To

The Jefferson County Medical Historical Society

Introduction

I’m not a historian by training and that above anything else in the presentation today that will become abundantly obvious. For that I apologize in advance. I’m sure that you will be gracious enough to listen to this part of our local public health history without viewing it through our usual physician’s “jaundiced eye.”

Some of you who are frequent attendees at these gatherings may recognize some of the basic facts of this episode in our local medical and public health history. Dr. Bayard Tynes summarized these events in his overview of Jefferson County’s public health history last October. Beyond what Bayard has previously shared, what I will do this morning is to amplify considerably on the basic facts with the intent of drawing out some of the unseen and unheard events that would be lost to history altogether as some of us become older, our memories begin to fade, and finally pass from the scene.

With that said, and as a prelude to this talk, I have to say that by thoroughly investigating this subject, a subject which has largely taken on mythical status through the years at the Jefferson County Department of Health, I have a greater appreciation, even respect, for what the best historians do so well. They do not simply recount events of the past but also convey a bit of the drama of the moment and then impute a measure of plausible interpretation and meaning to those events.

I cannot remotely claim a similar skill. And I’ll make an explicit admission from the outset that most of the interpretations you may hear today, other than the most obvious ones, are my own extrapolations from a number of sources. Most of the actual events are distilled from newspaper accounts in the Birmingham News. These reports were supplemented by recent interviews of some of actual participants in the events and in preparation for this lecture, were kind enough to allow me to use their recollections and interpretations as substantiation for some of the conclusions.

As I look at this audience, I see that many of you likely were in Birmingham at the time of these events and know some of the persons in this story, or at least recognize the names of some of the individuals who helped shape this episode of our local history. I also understand that one of the beauties of this venue is that part of what is recorded for this “sliver” of posterity is your own recollections that will enrich my renderings today. I hope you’ll share those at the end of my talk.

The Context of 1971

All historical events have a context and by logical deduction, it is almost a truism that “a text without a context is a pretext”. With that in mind, let me refresh our memories about the context of this momentous event in 1971.

First, our cultic or community memory in Alabama for almost any event, even if not a well-rounded representation of the actual prevailing historical context, is always shaped by sports, and football in particular. Again it is a truism in Alabama that football was and still is so dominant a pre-occupation that it is not surprising that some of the events I’ll recall for us today, if noted at all at the time they occurred, were quickly eclipsed in our memories by some of the athletic events that fall. So, I’d like to do an Alabama version of the “mini mental status exam” and test your long term memory about other likely more memorable events that were also going on in Alabama the fall of 1971:

(1) Alabama and Auburn, were both undefeated and ranked #2 and #5 respectively, when they met in the Iron Bowl. Who won that game? Alabama won that match between Shug Jordan and Bear Bryant that left Auburn with a 9-1 record, and earned Bear Bryant the SEC Coach of the Year Award.

(2) After the Iron Bowl, the University of Alabama football team was on a roll toward a possible national championship. Nebraska (ranked #1 with a record of 12-0) and Alabama (ranked #2 with an 11-0 record) were destined to decide who was # 1 in nation in a post-season match. In which bowl did they compete? And how did that match-up turn out? Nebraska embarrassed AL in the Orange Bowl 38-6 and repeated as national champions.

(3) Pat Sullivan and Jerry Beasley were an almost unbeatable tandem that gave Alabama a run for its money in the Iron Bowl. What award did Pat Sullivan win that year? Sullivan won the Heisman Trophy. By the way, what AL connection did Heisman have to Auburn? He was Auburn’s 1st football coach before spending many years at Georgia Tech.

(4) Bill Battle, who played under Bear Bryant, and later became Head Coach of the University of Tennessee, in an effort to rebuild his rather weak offense in 1971, was eagerly awaiting the arrival of a Huntsville native, who also happened to be the 1st African American quarterback to play for the University of Tennessee. Who was this? Condredge Holloway. Incidentally, I played against Holloway in junior high school basketball and can attest to his athletic prowess in more than football! In fact, he was being recruited to play professional baseball right out of high school as well.

Environmental and Legal Context

Well, given the accuracy of your recollections about these events, which we Alabamians are likely genetically pre-wired to remember, we may have some hope that you will be able to recall elements of this less obvious episode, with its more important consequences for our national, state and local public health, than the importance of the sports events that fall (although, perhaps some of us would be willing to debate even that statement!). Let me set a context for these events that were running parallel to the sports events we just revisited.

Birmingham and Mobile were the two most polluted cities in Alabama. Birmingham with its steel and coke industries qualified as one of the most air polluted cities in the South and in addition, competed well against other industrial cities in the nation for that dubious distinction. Due to the increasingly well-documented links between air pollution and pulmonary disease, including an article by Dr. Ben Branscomb at UAB, helped define the need for the Federal Clean Air Act of 1970. This act empowered the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to promulgate and enforce federal environmental air regulations and forced states to apply the regulations to their own environmental laws.

This federal law clearly and more stringently defined the standards states would have to incorporate into their state environmental laws to bring down levels of particulate matter emitted from industry and utilities.

To its credit, in early 1971, the Legislature of the State of Alabama rather quickly passed Alabama’s own clean air act that complied with these federal requirements. That state act empowered an Air Pollution Control Commission to establish enforceable state regulations that comported with both the state and federal clean air acts. However, the state act required Governor George Wallace to appoint members to this Commission. It was months before this decision was made. In the meantime, AL was left without any enforcement authority.

The Social Context

Cameron McDonald (Vowell), the President of a student led environmental activist group called, Greater-Birmingham Alliance to Stop Pollution (GASP), remembers, “It was pretty clear that Governor Wallace was in the back pockets of ‘Big Business’ so there was little incentive for him to move quickly to select members of a Commission that would enforce air emissions controls on Alabama’s economic engines.” No Commission was selected for over 6 months after the act became law, leaving particulate matter emitted through industry smoke stacks seriously under-regulated.

During this lack of executive action by Governor Wallace to select a Commission throughout the long hot summer of 1971, GASP, which consisted of a small group of only 15 student leaders and perhaps as many as another 50 others who periodically joined in, literally took to the streets to demonstrate in front of some of the largest air polluters in the area. They wore gas masks and waved posters decrying the impact of the companies’ emissions on the environment and the public’s health. They even took their message into homes by speaking with garden clubs about the impact of air pollution on the community.

Cameron McDonald (Vowell) recalls, “Boy, you wouldn’t think it, but those little ladies were a fairly hostile audience. They had been told by their husbands, who worked in the mills and had apparently been primed by management that our group was threatening their livelihoods and if we got what we wanted they would be out of jobs.” Remember, those were the days when the industrialists proclaimed with undisguised pride that smoky skies were the Magic in the Magic’s City’s booming local economy, one that was disproportionately dependent upon heavy industry for its success.

Expressing a decidedly unique counterpoint of view by the industrialists was Bob Truet, the flamboyant Birmingham Zoo Director and self-proclaimed nudist, who allowed members of GASP to occupy one of the primate cages at the Zoo labeled with a sign that read “Homo sapiens: the only species known to pollute its own environment and wage war.” A showdown was brewing!

The Events of November 15 – 20, 1971

The week of November 15, 1971 brought matters to a head. The entire Southeast was under a high pressure dome that birthed a thermal inversion in Jones Valley, the cradle of Birmingham. Birmingham was experiencing “Indian Summer” as temperatures hovered in the low to mid 80s. Steel plants were operating at full throttle and churning out smoke that due to this thermal pressure “lid” had no place to go. Birmingham was literally being choked in a layer of smog so thick that the cupola on Jefferson Tower could hardly be seen from Vulcan. (Attachment 1 – picture of smog and Jefferson Tower). The air was literally becoming too toxic to breathe.

Since beginning his tenure the year before in 1970, the Jefferson County Department of Health had been led by a young Health Officer from rural west Alabama by the name of Dr. George Hardy (1970-76), A member of his executive team was Guy M. Tate, who had decades of administrative experience in public health and had developed a wily knack for reading the political climate in Birmingham and Alabama, which more than once helped the Health Department negotiate those shallow shoals. Paul Pate, the irascible Environmental Health Director at the Department and as a diplomat, the polar opposite of Tate, was the technical expert about environmental health. The three huddled together to decide how to handle this rapidly evolving environmental emergency. The Alabama Clean Air Commission that George Wallace had held captive for months had finally been appointed on Monday, November 15 but in spite of that fact, the Health Department was left without any active set of enforceable regulations to compel the major polluters to reduce emissions.

The Health Department had only one non-legal alternative: to ask the industrialists to voluntarily reduce emissions. All 23 major emitters of air pollution in the Birmingham area were called and later mailed a letter explaining the situation and asked to moderate furnace output with a goal of attaining a 60% reduction in particulate matter below prevailing and increasingly threatening pollution levels. The response to that request was modest by any measure. Many of the smaller companies complied by cutting back their operations by at least 20% of usual operating capacity to mitigate their contributions to the problem. Some even went so far as cutting 60%. The largest emitters, however, which contributed over 70% of the total air pollution, for all practical purposes, ignored the request. These culprits included the likes of U.S. Steel, Stockham Valve, Connors Steel, U.S. Pipe and ACIPCO. Without reductions by the “Big 5”, air pollution levels were expected to continue to approach seriously unhealthy, even dangerous levels.

What made matters worse was that the weather was not expected to cooperate any time soon: The unseasonably high temperatures and barometric pressure were expected to last throughout the week. Over several days, the Health Department anxiously monitored particulate matter readings which began to increase progressively through several critical thresholds: “alert” (> 375 mcg/m3) and then the “warning” threshold (>625 mcg/m3) was exceeded. On Tuesday, Nov 16, particulate matter counts hit 771 mcg/m3 with concerns that levels would continue to barrel through the highest “emergency” threshold (>875 mcg/m3) unless immediate action was taken.

While waiting for greater voluntary cooperation of industry, the Jefferson County Department of Health had been conferring frequently throughout this emerging health crisis w/the Alabama Department of Public Health and the State Attorney General. They realized that they could not count of voluntary compliance and therefore, began developing a contingency plan if industrial leaders failed to agree with their request. As the “emergency” threshold appeared imminent, they concluded that they had no other alternative but to approach the federal government for assistance.

The regional and national offices of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice had shown increasing interest in this evolving problem. Due to the absence of state and local legal options and after discussing the situation with Dr. Hardy, all parties concurred that the EPA and the U.S. Justice Department should step in.

And they stepped in BIG. For the first time in its early history as a federal agency, EPA made a momentous decision to compel industry to employ active mitigation efforts to reduce harmful air pollution. Documents were prepared for a 10 day temporary restraining order (TRO), and Judge Sam Pointer, Federal Judge for the Northern District of Alabama (who died a little over a year ago), was rousted from sleep at home around 1:45 am Thursday, Nov18 and signed the order compelling compliance by the polluters. In the wee hours of the morning immediately following the signing of this order, federal marshals fanned out throughout Jefferson County to serve the orders on all 23 companies.