NC Health News: “In the summer of 1982, Warren County became ground zero for the environmental justice movement. The community, at the time a relatively sparsely populated county on the Virginia border north of Raleigh, was rocked by six weeks of protests over PCB-laced oil being sprayed on rural county roads.
The incident that sparked the movement that’s now a worldwide phenomenon occurred back in 1978, when the Ward Transformer Company was looking for a low-cost way to dispose of toxic oil that came from electrical insulators. They began spraying the stuff along roadsides under the cover of darkness. In total, a 240-mile area, which stretched across several North Carolina counties, was contaminated.
People in the community, once they learned about it in 1982, weren’t having it.
During a six-week period in 1982, more than 500 protesters were arrested, and their actions drew national attention. It was during the protest that civil rights activist, Ben Chavis, reportedly described what was happening to the community as environmental racism.
The PCB protests, which ignited over placement of a hazardous waste dump in Afton, and the subsequent delivery of nearly 40,000 cubic yards of soil contaminated with polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), resulted from illegal disposal of the chemical along North Carolina roadsides in 1978.”