New Hill, North Carolina is not a city, nor is it even a town. It is one of those places, like so many in our state, where two old roads cross each other, and somewhere along the way a community sprang up. Located in southwestern Wake County, about a 30 minute drive down Highway One from Raleigh, New Hill is a community made up primarily of ethnic and racial minorities. It hosts the scenic American Tobacco Trail, and the historic New Hope Valley Railway, where you can still ride a steam locomotive to Bonsal, another crossroads.
Soon, New Hill will also play host to a new large-scale sewage treatment plant. The community does not currently have access to sewer services, so it seems like the perfect location for new construction. Unfortunately, though, the treatment plant is not for the locals. Western Wake Partners, a partnership between the governments of Cary, Apex, Holly Springs, and Morrisville, has selected the site to serve its own residents, who happen to be predominantly white. In fact, within New Hill, only properties that are directly adjacent to the plant would be connected to it.
Some groups, including the Southern Coalition for Social Justice (SCSJ), are calling this move a case of environmental racism. I have compiled simple demographics on the five communities below, to help illustrate the disparities.
The term “environmental racism” came about in the early 80’s, and one of the earliest incidents to earn the label occurred right here in our state. In 1982, the state of North Carolina sought a location to dump 30,000 cubic yards of highly toxic soil. The soil had come from state roadsides, where a trucking company illegally dumped oil containing PCBs that it could not sell. PCBs were banned in the United States in 1979, due to the chemical’s harmful effects on essentially any living thing. They readily penetrate skin, PVC, and latex, and are almost impossible to destroy. In humans, they can cause a wide range of health problems, from loss of short-term memory to liver cancer. PCBs can readily leach from contaminated soil to underground water supplies, such as those that feed wells and bodies of water.
The site that the state chose to bury this toxic soil was the Afton community, located in Warren County. At the time, Afton was over 69 percent African American, and Warren County was one of the poorest counties in the state. The water table in the county was only five-to-ten feet below the surface, making it highly susceptible to contamination. To compound matters, this shallow water table was the primary water supply for most of the county.
The decision to place the toxic waste dump in Afton triggered massive protests, on a local as well as national scale. Ultimately, around 500 people were arrested during protests, a first as a result of an environmental controversy. The site was nevertheless built. By 1993, the site had already deteriorated and had to undergo years of decontamination.
As a result of the Warren County incident, Congress commissioned an investigation into possible environmental racism in other areas of the country. The General Accounting Office found that, in the southeastern United States, three of the four commercial hazardous waste landfills were in communities where African Americans outnumbered whites.
The United Church of Christ Commission for Racial Justice released a report in 1987 on environmental racism, concluding,
Although socio-economic status appeared to play an important role in the location of commercial hazardous waste facilities, race still proved to be more significant. This remained true after the study controlled for urbanization and regional differences. Incomes and home values were substantially lower when communities with commercial facilities were compared to communities in the surrounding counties without facilities.
As with Afton, New Hill residents and others have been protesting the siting of the Western Wake Partners project, and continue to protest and explore possible legal action. The SCSJ contends that the people of New Hill were not meaningfully included in the decision-making, that there has been no decision as to how the sewage sludge reside from the plant would be managed, and that better sites are available for siting. Nevertheless, at this writing, the water treatment project is going forward as scheduled.
Link: 1987 UCC Report
Link: SCSJ Page on New Hill
