The Waters of the Pigeon River By: Jen Meade
The waters of the Pigeon River have long served as a life-blood for the people that reside along its banks throughout Western North Carolina and East Tennessee. As every river does for the communities living near it, the Pigeon has provided life and livelihood with its waters; it has nourished crops and livestock, fed people with its fish; it has given people a swimming hole, a picnic spot and the serenity that only a river can create. Almost a century ago (1908), the river got a new neighbor named Champion Paper Products, and life for everyone else along the downstream shores quickly changed.
The headwaters of the Pigeon River trickle down from the mountains south of Waynesville, North Carolina. The water is cold, pristine, and as clear as a desert night.
As it passes through Canton, it is transformed into an espresso-looking liquid - warm, dark and frothy. It then continues on through Haywood County N.C. and into Hartford, Tennessee. What was once a river prosperous with fish and a healthy aquatic ecosystem; a river full of local kids, cooling off in the hot summer - became a stream of poison; full of dioxin, a highly carcinogenic by-product of the paper bleaching process. The fish began to die. Downstream of the mill, people bathed mangy dogs in the bleach filled river, and dried up their own poison ivy outbreaks in the waters of the Pigeon. And then people began to get cancer. Throughout the 1970's and 80's, the town of Hartford (population of approximately 500) lost a reported 167 residents to various strains of cancer. There was no conclusive study, or definitive evidence to prove it, but the grieving town pointed their blame towards the river.
Champion Paper Products became the source of employment in Haywood County, N.C. Providing, at one time, 5000 jobs (and now, as Blue Ridge Paper Products, between 1000-1500) for a generally underemployed and low-income population. Presently the mean income of a Blue Ridge employee is over $45,000 - twice the average countywide. The economic growth that the mill created was a positive step for an impoverished, rural community, but the river proved to be far too small to sustain the pollution that a mill of this size produces. (The average flow of the Upper Pigeon is about 400 cubic feet per second (CFS). The average flow of the average river upon which a paper mill may be located, in say - the state of Maine (which has about 10 paper mills operating within it's borders) is in the neighborhood of 2000 CFS.) The dichotomy of the situation has caused tensions to run high between neighboring counties for decades; they're separated by a state line, and a choice: a well paying job or the health of the downstream residents and the sustainability of the environment.
With the passage of the Clean Water Act of 1972 standards were set forth which would eventually clean America's waterways. Polluters were given a NPDES (National Pollutant Discharge ELIMINATION System) permit. The polluters are given a temporary variance on the permit designed to help them gradually improve their discharge output and eventually operate within the set regulations. To this day, Champion/Blue Ridge has never "been able" to meet these standards. The criteria were attainable and within reason: to improve the condition of polluted waterways as to where they are "fishable" and "swimmable." The paper mill claimed that the implementation of the needed pollution control measures and the cost of updating old equipment would put them under. They were noncompliant.
As of February, 2010 BRPP’s NPDES permit was denied by the EPA. One in Ten-thousand permits are denied, and BRPP must rewrite the permit in the next 90 days.
