REPORT FROM CHIPMUNK HOLLOW
Williams, Mary
REPORT FROM CHIPMUNK HOLLOW Why do you need something that will kill you for heat you can't afford?' BY MARY WILLIAMS WHEN Charles White was a small boy living in the southeastern...
...If you'd have told the man who made the first clock there'd ever be one without gears in it, he'd never believe you...
...It was the dual refrain I heard on a recent visit to the towns that ring Sequoyali—Soddy-Daisy...
...I'll always believe it was the DDT...
...But they might as well have been on the other side of the moon...
...But most people still find it more encouraging to listen to the experts with the fancy contraptions...
...And some prosperous Chattanoogans have moved out to the pine-crested ridges near Sequoyah, so that today visitors can get a sense of culture shock going just from house to house, from cedar shingles and evergreen hedges to tarpaper siding and rusted-out cars...
...There were no fines or penalties," went a press release...
...I said I hadn't ever seen a bathtub in a trailer that was big enough to get and lie down in," says Catherine...
...They just sit back and think the Lord will provide for them...
...People are not eager for a lot of changes...
...your neighbors will help you out...
...Unless he or she wants to petition the NRC—often a futile process—the would-be intervenor who misses thedeadlineissimplyoutof luck...
...Gore asked TNS vice president and general manager Robert A. Schell...
...But how wrong they were in judging their new mill hands as easily manipulated "raw" material...
...He worries about the changes that the highway has wrought, but he can't see much point in worrying about the nuclear plant...
...With that, and $33 worth of food stamps, they eat, run the farm, and pay Charles's medical bills...
...It's one of the most long-lasting agonies you can have...
...Handing them out before an accident happened at Sequoyah was his idea, and it put Sequoyah in the limelight...
...You trust your neighbors...
...About the time he first called Legal Services, he began falling behind on his telephone payments...
...With few exceptions, a challenge against a nuclear plant cannot be taken directly to any court...
...Then he would mount whatever the boy came up with in a convincing array on a wooden box, slap on a couple of compasses, and fill the tubing with gunpowder...
...They were working within sight of the Sequoyah cooling towers, within sound of the plant's public address system when the wind blew from the southwest, and a stone's throw from the pylons of a 500,000-volt power-line carrying current out of the region...
...They figure that heating the two trailers they call home would cost an extra $130 in the winter months...
...People commute to jobs in the city by day...
...Those were the Depression years, and the clients always had a lot riding on the gold machine...
...It's a real peaceable community...
...Shoot, he buried that.' And they'd still believe in him...
...The executives were right in their first two expectations of Tennessee...
...Then came the smoking pistol, uncovered by U.S...
...They say, 'What's the use?' They've been beat so many times it's got their morale down...
...Research for this article was assisted by a grant from the Fund for Investigative Journalism...
...The Tennessee Department of Public Health made a two-day inspection and found no concerns of a serious nature...
...take our pills and protect your investment...
...Charles can't stand to see people getting conned about nuclear power today any more than he could stand to see them hoodwinked by the gold machine when he was a boy...
...Pack up and move to the Tennessee backwoods, perhaps...
...Maybe we were naive," said Fowinkle's chagrined assistant, Anne Stringham, as reporters and television crews flocked to the distribution area last fall...
...He found a place he liked, built a log shack, sewed together some sacks full of leaves for a bed—and doused the whole thing with a strong solution of DDT to get rid of the bugs...
...I'm the only one in my family that ever had any kind of cancer...
...By the time the first unit was brought on line in 1980, the plant had fallen seven years behind schedule and gone $1.6 billion over its original budget...
...COURSE I loved him, but I couldn't figure out in my heart how he could do that," Charles White says...
...Not only did the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Union workers know their rights, but they had the guts and conviction to turn down a 25 per cent pay increase last spring and go out, instead, on the first health and safety strike at a nuclear facility...
...I felt kind of sissy—I'd been working in that grease out there and now I had to wear a white shirt in the office...
...Trust us, they say...
...Some way or another, these people just didn't learn...
...You don't have it for twenty-two years and not know what it feels like...
...The ninety-five strikers still don't have their jobs back after the company hired a few replacement workers—about thirty out of more than 1,500 applicants...
...They kindly took my phone out," he says, "so I couldn't call [the lawyer] back...
...Charles asks...
...Back in 1968, the year plans to build Sequoyah were announced, he was given a job dispatching trucks for a rental company and quit it almost immediately when he found he had to wear a starched white shirt every day...
...If people could just get a little hope...
...Because of his small income, he qualified for help from the Legal Services Corporation...
...Management relied on lenient state reports...
...People still don't have to lock their doors, for the area has one of the state's lowest crime rates, but since last summer they have had to live with emergency sirens on the hillsides and evacuation markers along the roads...
...And by the time I was through talking with them, it was clear that the battle over tradition and progress, belief and science, popular understanding and expertise, has never really ended in the Tennessee Valley...
...But now"—he nodded toward the cooling towers—"why do you need something that will kill you for heat you can't afford...
...But they've emerged from the dust with their claims validated and their Ph.D...
...But Charles and the lawyer soon found out what other anti-nuclear activists who have gone to the courts know: Fighting nuclear power through the legal system is just about impossible...
...But the experts would like Sequoyah's neighbors to ignore all that and have faith...
...To the sparkling land of lax enforcement, cheap and abundant labor, and, best of all, workers who couldn't possibly know their rights...
...Lakesite, Hixson, Birchwood, Grasshopper...
...But, partly because the cancer set Charles to thinking about the health of his children and grandchildren, partly because he still hates to see people conned, he has been doing as much as a lone fifty-two-year-old subsistence farmer who "went to the third grade, but not through the third grade" can to fight nuclear power: reading, distributing literature, hounding plant and TVA officials, even attempting to file suit...
...I wish the pro-nukers could hear the three of them talk: "People aren't educated to the dangers of nuclear power," says Catherine...
...The Food and Drug Administration certified potassium iodide for such use in 1979, just in time for the accident at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania...
...The news stories, like the scientific literature, provided no answers to the questions about potassium iodide...
...TNS had hired its own consultant, Radiation Management Corporation of Lor-ton, Virginia, to inspect the plant, and the consultant was ungrateful enough to return a scathing report...
...One man poses no great danger to the Sequoyah nuclear plant...
...And things have been going wrong at Sequoyah...
...What Aerojet hoped no one knew was that the department has no power to levy fines or penalties...
...Once, when Catherine fell and threw her back out, she called an emergency health official to find out what would happen in a nuclear emergency to a woman who couldn't stand up and a man who couldn't sit down...
...Snake-handling, which more than once proved fatal, has long since been outlawed by the state...
...For one thing, Chattanooga is growing, bridging the fifteen-odd miles from downtown to the cooling towers, changing the character of the small towns it overtakes along the way...
...That thing danged near aggravated me to death," he says...
...More than anything else, it was the nagging fear that a mass exodus would leave him behind which moved Charles to try filing suit against officials at Sequoyah...
...Do you know what they told her...
...TOSHA didn't label the violation "serious" because only two weeks before the inspection the company began to require workers to wear respirators...
...My brother took a lightbulb out of the socket and pulled the chain, and it nearly scared her to death...
...Since 1959, he has fought three bouts with cancer...
...Electric rates in the Valley, while lower than in most private utility districts, have risen sharply in the past few years...
...Charles and Catherine receive $340 in disability benefits from Social Security every month...
...I put my life into this old place, and I don't got anyplace else to go except my grave...
...A former radioactive waste disposal technician reported that Aerojet managers spoke longingly of these Tennessee "attractions" when they shifted production to TNS, Inc., formerly Tennessee Nuclear Specialties, in the Appalachiairlown of Jonesboro...
...Anyone who lived within five miles of Sequoyah, the Tennessee Valley Authority's only operating nuclear plant in the state, received a vial, along with instructions to take the medication at first word of a serious accident at the plant...
...We know toxic chemicals go through here all the time, and we hear about derailments in other places on the news...
...bosses floundering in the backwoods...
...One hundred miles...
...charles, Catherine, and Bill are the sort of folks that people who accept nuclear power like to think of as backward...
...Most of the people accept that...
...The people ought to decide, not some guys siting up there [in Knoxville, at TV A corporate headquarters] who don't have to get out in these woods and these fields and work here...
...Most of the people have embraced the changes recent years have brought, but clumsily, for they are still trying, at the same time, to cling to the past...
...He owns three pairs of overalls and often does his farm chores standing up, riding on the running boards of his tractor...
...I slept in it that same night," he says...
...It seems clear, though, that the chief contribution of the medication will probably be the reassurance it has given to the people who live near the plant...
...In the case of Sequoyah, that petitioning period ran out back in 1970...
...But I'm going to blab till I die, and I don't care what they say about it, because this is my home...
...And, the firm proclaimed triumphantly, "The Tennessee Occupational Safety and Health Administration (TOSHA) reported the only violation of a serious nature was excessive noise...
...The workers lost no time in figuring out that the plant posed health threats, what with uranium metal dust so thick their clothes were black by the end of the day...
...I wouldn't live anywhere else...
...A man that's got cancer is a dangerous man...
...Bill had driven down from nearby Birchwood for a load of firewood...
...I mean, it nearly drove me crazy...
...Because of his disability, Charles would be more or less stuck here in Chipmunk Hollow if the yellow warning sirens ever blew for an evacuation...
...The consultants'] observations were based on a one-shot, one-day inspection," Schell said...
...Don't you think maybe in another fifty or a hundred years you'll be able to carry [a reactor] around in your pocket, plug it in whenever you want some juice...
...Thousands of doses were rushed to Harrisburg but were never distributed...
...Representative Al Gore of Tennessee, in subcommittee hearings which left the TNS executives squirming in their seats...
...Calling the Chattanooga office, he found a sympathetic lawyer who thought the Sequoyah evacuation plan might provide the basis for litigation...
...Then there's the new highway, bringing, as ambulance driver Barry Penny says with pride, "two stoplights—we didn't even used to have one...
...Riding in a car is agony for him, and even if he could do it, his old station wagon, bought from a junk dealer for $65 in change, probably wouldn't get very far down the corduroy road leading out to the highway...
...But you don't need snake-handlers or moonshiners to transport you back in time as you pass through the padlocked gate into Chipmunk Hollow...
...That's what Aerojet Ordnance Corporation of Downey, California, did— prudently hitting the road before its West Coast operation was shut down a second time for mishandling radioactive waste...
...A lack of management commitment to a radiation safety program," an "unacceptable" timetable for correcting the problem of poisonous airborne uranium dust, and a history of overexposures were among the reasons that RMC advised the company to take worker protection seriously...
...And I'm already on a banana peel right on the edge of that...
...You could heat with it, and it was good...
...The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) delayed licensing because of a serious weakness the regulators call "eggshell containment": Unit 1 was not designed to withstand the intense pressure that developed during Three Mile Island's partial meltdown and might have ruptured in such a crisis...
...These people, if they put up a fight, they might have a heart attack tomorrow and die from that...
...Most people I met knew someone who had helped build Sequoyah and could rattle off chilling, unverifiable stories of fissures and leaks—but they would always assure me that nobody questioned the overall safety of nuclear power...
...I told him we'd be just as safe out of the water as in it," she says...
...Together they make up the nation's largest single commitment to nuclear power —and they show up in the region's electric bills...
...Would enough radioactive iodine be released to warrant use of the medication anywhere...
...They've got no hope...
...he asks, his question punctuated by a burst of electronic clatter from a video game across the room...
...Catherine, his wife, spent her girlhood here catching rattlers and copperheads for services at nearby Dolly Pond Church of God, where the pious used to act on a verse from Mark's gospel implying that "those who believe" could handle snakes without danger...
...Grand-daddy White would walk back into the woods and go into his routine, circling through the brush with his gold machine, using a lodestone to send the compass needles into a crazy spin...
...A few people pointed out with hometown pride that this was the place—well, almost the place...
...The tablets are supposed to saturate the thyroid with harmless iodine and prevent the absorption of cancer-causing radioactive iodine that might be leaking from Sequoyah...
...A pause...
...Boy, I know what cancer feels like, and I'll tell you, that's one of the sufferingest things you've had in your life," he says...
...But a circus it became: Suddenly, Soddy-Daisy, Tennessee, was a dateline on the evening news and in papers around the country...
...Raylene Howard, Soddy-Daisy's clerk and treasurer and a lifetime resident, captures the region's split personality: "Our town is not as progressive as some...
...Next year, interest on loans for TVA's nuclear plants will top $1 billion, and become the largest factor in determining user rates...
...The old man—a sometime blacksmith, barber, and herb doctor—had acquired a reputation in those parts as a hunter of lost treasure...
...they said to get in the bathtub and wait...
...I know a lot of people...
...They have a lot invested in nuclear technology—their lives, their families, their homes, their jobs...
...Granddaddy White would send Charles out to dumps and excavation sites to scavenge for bits of glass tubing, broken dials, metal gadgets, and coils of colored wire...
...I've gnawed pillowcases and chewed holes in them and everything else...
...We ought to have a say about it," says Charles...
...he was left with a pink piece of exposed tissue at his waist that requires the application of special dressings every day...
...ready smiles...
...Don't you think it's just another step into something else...
...A study by the watchdog group Critical Mass found the plant had more "licensee event reports" in 1980 than any other in the country, even though it operated only 11 per cent of the year...
...When he could see that his client's hunger for silver was getting the better of his judgment, he would scratch from the ground a coin he had hidden beforehand, set off the powder, and exclaim, as the smoke drifted up through the trees, "Oh Lord, that's a big lode...
...In addition to the twin units, across from where Bill and Charles were working, TVA has fifteen nuclear reactors at various stages of planning and construction...
...I care about it...
...Charles's most recent cancer surgery disabled him...
...She thought the electricity was running out all over the floor...
...Carolyn Shoulders (Carolyn Shoulders is a reporter for The Tennessean in Nashville...
...Before long, someone would hire him to find lost loot—say, an old crock of silver coins that was believed buried on family land...
...It's just a way of life...
...For now, as Bill Clingan says, the con is just a way of life, m Take Two Six-packs and Call Me in the Morning What would you do if you didn't want to spend what it would take to protect the health of employes at your uranium munitions plant that California enforcement agencies had already shut down once for violations...
...We really didn't want to make a circus out of it...
...Since it started generating power, the plant has been plagued with shutdowns, occasional releases of radiation, and even a phony bomb threat...
...Passers-through won't see believers draped in serpent coils stopping traffic on the roads outside the Hollow any more, the way they could in Catherine and Bill's younger days...
...I love my country and I hate to say this, but that's the way it is...
...there were too many unanswered questions: Should people ten miles from the plant take pills...
...The firewood heaped alongside every dwelling is another piece of the past: People here cannot afford to heat or cook with the TVA electricity that hums through the wires across their land...
...If people had known back when they started building that thing what they know now, they would have rebelled, I believe...
...But as if that legal hurdle were not high enough, Charles's own poverty took him out of the running before the race even began...
...Again, they had to hope no one would realize that there was no history of violations because there was no history of TOSHA inspections in the plant's eleven years of operations...
...If you're climbing out of a well and you can't get no handhold, and you just try and try, after a while you're just going to fall down and give up...
...The report was promptly tucked away in May, a month after workers walked out on strike, while company officials continued to insist publicly there were no health or safety threats at the plant...
...CHATSLE^WhiteTiaTli fighting side, though his fights rarely seem to end in victory...
...There's nothing you can do about it, really...
...He can neither sit comfortably nor wear trousers...
...The people here are struggling over whether to move ahead into the 1980s or stay behind in the 1930s...
...I think you've got to accept progress...
...by night, forbidden by local ordinance to buy liquor where they live, they carouse in the Chattanooga taverns...
...People who branded Sequoyah's opponents as backward old-timers were just as quick to praise the old-time quality of their own lives...
...This was back when they first had electricity...
...Chattanooga's push northward notwithstanding, Chipmunk Hollow has not changed much since 1948, when Charles bought the first ten acres from his father-in-law for $12 and a powersaw chain...
...Catherine may have been used to snakes in her younger days, but she wants no part of them now, or of this bizarre plan...
...But she also says, "We have a railroad that runs right through town, north and south...
...If it were, wouldn't other forms of radiation be released too—and what was to protect people against those other forms...
...He believes they can be traced back to his fourteenth year, when he moved out of the house to escape what he calls his father's grumbling...
...I found Charles and Bill sawing logs at the end of a dirt track cutting through the forty gravelly acres they call Chipmunk Hollow...
...I tried to discourage the people...
...They said to fill up the bathtub and get down in it and wait until they come out and find us...
...The blacks proved that...
...They have a lot to lose if anything goes wrong...
...Their yearning for prosperity, sharpened Mary Williams is an associate editor of The Progressive...
...And He will, but He also gives people the sense to look after themselves...
...The furthest thing from my mind is beating somebody...
...Communities like Soddy-Daisy, once thought to be little more than pockets of outlaws, moonshiners, and car thieves, are now bedroom suburbs...
...We're all susceptible to being conned," says Charles's friend, Bill Clingan...
...I had an aunt," he continues...
...And it was difficult to have much faith in the management when the health and safety director told an employe whose urinalysis showed an excessive uranium content to "drink lots of beer to flush it out...
...It used to be you could afford the electricity," Charles says...
...There is not much else to do...
...Was the trauma worth the benefit...
...Kindly," he says—he uses the word the way some people pepper their speech with "you know"—"with that thing peeping up over there, it's kindly just like having a little headache with no aspirin or nothing...
...John Doub, a machinist who lives about a quarter mile from Sequoyah, says when he's asked to characterize his region, "It's struggling...
...But the company felt compelled to put out one public warning: "The one real health and safety problem is the violent actions of the union members...
...TNS has no history of TOSHA violations," officials said...
...LAST November, crews of public health workers went door to door in the small towns north of Chattanooga, handing out tablets of potassium iodide to the local residents...
...In the light of this document, how could you continue to insist there were no health and safety problems...
...thin, worn clothing layered against the December chill...
...REPORT FROM CHIPMUNK HOLLOW Why do you need something that will kill you for heat you can't afford?' BY MARY WILLIAMS WHEN Charles White was a small boy living in the southeastern Tennessee town of Monteagle, he helped his grandfather build a gold machine...
...Even though scientists are still at odds about the answers to those questions, Tennessee Public Health Commissioner Eugene Fowinkle, who worked on a sub-panel of the President's Commission on Three Mile Island, took an interest in the pills...
...In fact, TOSHA found levels of uranium dust—inhalation can lead to kidney damage—up to thirteen times the Federal limit...
...Two years later, that stuff was so strong, I was still finding dead waspers in there...
...We claim to be scared of the Russians, but right here in America we have to put up signs for our own evacuation," says Bill...
...The way of life in the small towns and hollows that line the Tennessee River banks near Sequoyah has been changing for a couple of decades...
...But the bypass has also shut down countless Ma-and-Pa businesses, according to Paul Rogers, an affable, aging pool hustler who runs a game room and paperback swap shop on the old Dayton Pike in Soddy-Daisy...
...That was how Aerojet hoped to distract attention from urinalysis data showing that 95 per cent of the workers have had concentrations of uranium in urinalysis results beyond the Nuclear Regulatory Commission guidelines for "safe" exposure...
...by the sight of a carefully placed coin, would never let Granddaddy White down...
...For every dollar a ratepayer now shells out, about thirty cents goes to pay interest on loans for such nuclear construction projects as Sequoyah...
...That blowed my mercury up...
...They looked like the kind of people Walker Evans photographed during the Depression: lean, lined Scotch-Irish faces...
...If you just accept the inevitable and be peaceful instead of trying to fight everything all the time, maybe you'll live longer...
...Dayton is fifteen miles up the road— where William Jennings Bryan and Clarence Darrow slugged it out over bibles and monkeys fifty-seven years ago...
...The NRC will only accept such complaints during a one-time, limited period before construction begins...
...He asked if we had a large body of water, and I said we've got a big pond by the house but there's turtles and things in there and snakes...
...Aversion to progress, acceptance of progress...
...It danged near killed me...
...You don't think for a minute people around here won't con you...
...It was a reputation built around some old maps, a few worn coins, and an uncanny ability to con the poor and the hopeful...
...Most of the time it takes some sort of violence to accomplish anything with the Government...
...So the company took its argument a step further...
...Finding the rest of the treasure meant fixing the machine first, he'd say, and repairs would cost at least three hundred dollars...
...The TOSHA director said it wouldn't matter if the dust concentration was 1,000 times the limit—the violation would still be listed "non-serious" no matter how effective the respirators were...
...We never planned on following all of their recommendations...
...The clannishness of the place will do the trick: Everyone who lives in the half-dozen trailers and campers along the dirt road is a son, daughter, in-law, or grandchild to Charles and Catherine...
...I'd tell their kids, 'That money he found...
...it must first be heard and decided by the NRC, then appealed...
...People who spoke one minute of all-night bluegrass jams up the hollow spoke fervently of the impending arrival of industrial parks and cable television the next...
Vol. 46 • February 1982 • No. 2
