Our Road to Walk: Then and Now

Send us Fan Mail What should have been a slam dunk by the Hunt Administration to bury the roadside PCBs in Warren County by March or April of 1979, weather permitting, has been anything but that. Apparently, Governor Hunt had been so confident that he would bury the PCBs in Warren County, that he warned citizens there that public sentiment would not deter the state from burying the PCBs in Warren...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, Ken goes to Johnston County with Wallace Neal in the PCB truck to protest the state’s testing of the Weber plan to see if carbon can be used to treat the roadside PCBs in place. However, it is highly unlikely that the EPA will approve the carbon treatment plan which has only been studied in the lab and that will require perpetually monitoring 270 miles of highway...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, the meeting with Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs delegates  and  EPA Office of Toxic Substances officials continues.  Delegates discuss EPA’s hazardous waste disposal regulations and express their skepticism. They have every reason to believe that Warren County’s future is in peril. Their groundwater is at best about seven feet deep, and now the EPA is...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, a delegation of Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs meets with EPA officials to find out if the rumor is true that the EPA is going to drop the 50 foot required distance between the bottom of a toxic waste landfill to only 5 feet. They learn that the agency does plan to drop this regulation, and they learn much more. Throughout the meeting, delegates expre...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode we are returning to our Warren County PCB landfill narrative as the history is unfolding in January and February, 1979. Why should our listeners care about what happened forty-four years ago? Because the Warren County PCB landfill history is actually a history of the EPA’s war of toxic aggression, and to know this history is to understand (as EPA whistleblower Will...

Send us Fan Mail Nearly two-thousand years ago, the Emperor Nero played music and partied as he watched 70% of Rome burn to the ground. Today, we are metaphorically watching Rome burn as our environment and health are assaulted again and again by pollution from loosely-regulated petrochemical and related industries, causing communities to be poisoned, global temperatures to rise, and climate disas...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we’re pausing our historical narrative of the Warren County PCB history to focus on the horrific February 3, 2023 Norfolk Southern Railroad train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio.  Eleven train cars spilled 115,580 gallons of toxic vinyl chloride and other chemicals, including benzene, on the ground, and the chemicals were then deliberately burned off in order t...

Send us Fan Mail On January 18, 1979, we recorded and later transcribed our meeting with Governor Hunt. This episode is based on the transcript of that recording. In this Part 2 of the Warren County delegation to Governor Hunt, Warren representatives continue to make their case against the PCB landfill perfectly clear to Governor Hunt. Larry Limer queries the Governor hard on the PCB landfill site...

Send us Fan Mail On January 18, 1979, we recorded and later transcribed our meeting with Governor Hunt. This episode is based on the transcript of that recording.  In this episode, Warren County Citizens send representatives to fill the nine chairs the Governor finally agreed to have. Leading the delegation, Deborah presents the 4,500  signatures of citizens who signed petitions against the landfi...

Send us Fan Mail In our last podcast, Episode 12: Now,  we fast-forwarded to the present because of recent testing at the PCB landfill conducted in conjunction with the 2022 40th anniversary of the 1982 PCB protest movement.  We shared the documented evidence from four independent scientists who had studied the PCB landfill over the years and who had reported the problems and failures they had fou...

Send us Fan Mail In this episode, we are pausing our chronological narrative of the origins of the  Warren County environmental justice movement in order to address current issues related to the status of the PCB landfill site. On September 24, 2022, EPA Director Michael Regan and an entourage of EPA officials, civil rights representatives, and fence line community leaders from across the country...

Send us Fan Mail       The Hunt Administration’s “regardless of public sentiment” statement and the threat of becoming a dumping ground for PCBs, and perhaps for an interstate hazardous waste dumping ground as well, have driven an estimated 700-800 Warren County citizens to the January 4, 1979 EPA Public Hearing held at the National Guard Armory in Warrenton, N.C.        In this episode, Part 3 of...

Send us Fan Mail In the last episode, Part 1 of the January 4, 1979 EPA Public Hearing, our listeners hear state and EPA officials describe the conceptual engineering design of landfill technology. As officials argue that the application of this landfill design will transform the geological (soil) and hydrogeological (groundwater) inadequacies of the proposed Afton PCB site into a safe site, Warre...

Send us Fan Mail Warren County Citizens Concerned About PCBs has done the unthinkable. In just two weeks, an executive committee has quickly formed an unprecedented multi-racial grassroots coalition and conducted a hard-driving education and action campaign in order to get the people to the January 4, 1979  EPA Public Hearing where it is critical for them to speak their sentiment concerning the PC...

Send us Fan Mail 1978 is ending on an existential note for Warren County citizens. The county is under attack on two fronts — the PCB landfill in Afton and the 500-acre, multi-state hazardous waste landfill in Inez. Citizens take the dual threat seriously, and an unlikely coalition of citizens begins to form. Representatives of the Afton Gun Club, the NAACP, and the Warren County Board of Educatio...

Send us Fan Mail The county is more than buzzing from the Hunt Administration’s announcement that public sentiment will not deter the state from burying the roadside PCBs in Warren County and from the time-crunch citizens are under with the EPA public hearing just days away.       The steering committee meets and decides that citizens need to hire an independent soil scientist and decides to ask D...

Send us Fan Mail Ken and Deborah’s lives change forever on December 20, 1978, when they hear an announcement on Warrenton’s WVSP NPR radio station that the state plans to buy property in the Afton community of Warren County to bury PCBs that had been spewed along the roadsides of 15 counties that previous summer. Afton is the rural community where they live.  They also learn that a public hearing...

Send us Fan Mail Although citizens are unaware at the time, the fall of 1978 is critical to Warren County’s future. The state manages to pick up a test-mile of roadside PCBs in the county and to temporarily store them on land owned by the Governor’s 1976 campaign manager who is also a member of the Industrial Development Commission. The foot is in the door.   Governor urges community to be “mature...

Send us Fan Mail In early August, 1978, with high hopes, Ken and Deborah leave for a weekend camping trip to Bear Island, NC, but find the broiling temperature, windless air, and nearly invisible teeny carnivorous sand fleas too much. On their ride home, they encounter, mile after mile, large, yellow warning signs that read: “CAUTION PCB CHEMICAL SPILL ALONG HIGHWAY SHOULDERS.”  Their tense ride h...

Send us Fan Mail In this special segment, the Ferruccio's daughter, Kyra Christina Ferruccio Ramírez, explains how she did not seek out environmental activism but learned that pollution is pervasive and comes in many forms and that we all must do our part to help make our environment(s) safer for humans and more-than-humans. She celebrates the Warren County PCB environmental justice movement...

Send us Fan Mail The day was hot, but so were the people. It was September 15, 1982; the time for civil disobedience was at hand. Warren County citizens were fired up because Governor Jim Hunt was using military force to bring in the first of 10,000 truckloads of toxic PCBs to a landfill built just above the county’s  groundwater. The multiracial coalition of citizens and supporters kept up their...

Send us Fan Mail On December 20, 1978, Warren County, North Carolina citizens learn that the state intends to bury PCB-contaminated soil in a landfill in their county regardless of public sentiment. On behalf of citizens, Ken Ferruccio responds that there will be “due process first, then civil disobedience.” These six words are probably the first time in history that a Massachusetts Yankee speakin...

Send us Fan Mail Episode 0:  Is an introduction to Our Road to Walk: Then and Now.   It previews the podcast series hosted by Deborah and Ken Ferruccio and broadcast from Warren County, North Carolina, known as the birthplace of the environmental justice movement. The purpose of the series is to share the inside, untold, documented, forty-four-year PCB landfill history which serves as a roadmap an...