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Arjun Singh 0:03
Music from the levers. Reader supported. Newsroom, this is lever time. I'm Arjun Singh, it has been a devastating week for 1000s in the United States. Hurricane Helene, a category four hurricane, landed in the southeastern United States, killing more than 200 people separating families and destroying communities. One of the most hard hit states is North Carolina. In Asheville, North Carolina, one resident said they previously thought an extreme weather event like Helene was unimaginable, that is, until it came to their small North Carolina town. But as climate change worsens. Nowhere appears to be safe from the possible impact of extreme weather, yet some lawmakers still refuse to take the threat seriously. North Carolina was once a model for how a state could adapt to changing weather, but that changed when Republicans took control more than a decade ago, with total control of the state government, North Carolina's GOP dismantle the state's climate adaptation infrastructure to curry favor with wealthy real estate developers, and this week, we saw the consequences of that. But this week also raises another concern, what happens when extreme weather overlaps with corporate malfeasance? That's the story of the town of Conyers, Georgia, where a fire and a chemical plant has made the air intolerable for residents who've been forced to evacuate, residents who are also in Helene's path of destruction. Today, on lever time, we're going to look at how government inaction contributed to these twin crises. I'll sit down with Katya Schwenk, a reporter here at the lever, and our news editor, Lucy Dean Stockton, first, Katya will explain how poor regulations led to Georgia's chemical fire. Then we'll hear from Lucy about how North Carolina Republicans set the stage for the damage of Helene.
Katya Schwenk 2:00
We published a story this week looking at a chemical fire that has over the last few days, sun, you know, the metro area of Atlanta, into a toxic haze
TV Anchor 2:13
tonight, a hazard in the air, thick, gray and orange smoke billows from a chemical facility in Conyers, Georgia, after a fire today, forcing nearby residents to evacuate.
Katya Schwenk 2:24
And you know, the woman I spoke with for this story, Christina Brown, she lives directly, you know, about four miles away from the chemical plant. And I did smell
Christina Brown 2:35
some chlorine. It seemed very faint. So, you know, they're trying to say, if it's faint, it's not going to affect you. We instantly came back in. I mean, I was only out there for maybe 30 seconds. Instant headache. I have a autoimmune disease called MCAS, which is mast cell activation syndrome, and so I get I'm very sensitive to a lot of fumes, my mast cells and my body pretty much go crazy. So I started to break out into hives. Yeah, I started seeing some hives, and my chest, eventually, later in the day, started to feel just tight. I didn't experience any coughing or wheezing, and I could still take deep breaths, but it just felt, just felt very
Katya Schwenk 3:24
Yeah. Christina Brown and her family, her husband and her two dogs and 10s of 1000s of their neighbors in this town, in this county, have been under shelter in place orders all week. Currently,
Christina Brown 3:36
they're only doing a Shelter In Place from 7pm to 7am saying that it's safe to breathe during the day, but between the hours of 7pm and 7am it's not safe to breathe right now, because we have, I have no choice but to let my dogs outside to the potty at least. You know, I'm only letting them go out for a minute at a time, not going to have them sitting out there all day. I did get my headache got worse, and my headache has persisted.
Katya Schwenk 4:07
And you know, Christina told me she learned about this on Sunday on social media. She found out about it in the morning. The chemical fire had been burning at this plant in Conyers, Georgia since early that morning, she quickly fled with her husband and their dogs, while hoping, you know, that the toxic smoke would clear, but has since returned to the town so her husband can go back to work and isn't quite sure when it's all going to be over. You know, there are still ongoing, periodic shelter in place orders that have come down. Wow.
Arjun Singh 4:41
I mean, that sounds really tragic and frightening. What happened exactly at this facility that led to that?
Katya Schwenk 4:50
Yeah, so this facility is owned by a company called biolab. It's a spawning pool chemical processor, so we don't know the full. Percent of what has happened at this chemical plant, but we know so far is that, you know, for some reason, on Sunday morning, you know, sometime around 3am there a fire was started at this facility, and that fire set off the sprinkler system in turn inside the building, and the water from the sprinklers interacted with a large amount of some kind of water, a water reactive chemical, is what local officials have said, sending up this enormous, violent chemical reaction, this huge plume of chemicals. And we know that the chemical, one of the chemicals, is facility processes and large amounts. It's called TCCA, and what it can interact with water and produce large amounts of chlorine gas, which can be very dangerous in high concentrations. Oh, my,
Arjun Singh 5:51
wait. Wait. So this facility safety system kicked in and sprinkled a bunch of water in an area where there was knowably chemicals that could interact with water in such a dangerous manner. Am I getting that right?
Katya Schwenk 6:04
No, you are getting that right. And it's they've sort of said that perhaps that sprinkler was erroneous. In some statements by local officials, like it wasn't meant to have gone off in, you know, by a lot the company's statement, they said that in trying to put out the fire, that was their first priority. And so then water entered. You know, the building is it's not totally clear what happened, but yes, in a facility where there's known water reactive chemicals, a sprinkler system apparently set off this chemical reaction. I'm sorry
Arjun Singh 6:34
that sounds wildly irresponsible, just from my perspective. But what do we know about this company, biolab, this company who owns it, and you know is this company had a history of other accidents like this. And, yeah. I mean, what do we know about this place that allowed this to happen?
Katya Schwenk 6:53
Yeah. So we know that this is not the first time that something like this has happened at a Biola facility. In fact, as far back as 2004 at the same plant in Georgia, we've seen accidents that are really strikingly similar to the one that we saw this week. You know, 20 years ago, there was a similar chemical fire. Chemical reaction also sent a giant plume of chlorine gas up into the sky also cause residents to evacuate. There have been at least two more accidents since that time. You know, there's also. There is a bylab facility in Louisiana that you know, as a result of a hurricane in 2020, Hurricane Laura, rainwater entered the building, the same water reactive chemical also set off a huge chemical accident caused people to evacuate. So this is really, I think, part of a pattern that dates back decades for this company.
Arjun Singh 7:52
Is there any oversight of biolab? Has there been any repercussions? Is there any role that the government, whether state and local or federal, plays in preventing something like that.
Katya Schwenk 8:03
Yeah, so after the chemical fire in 2020, in Louisiana, the one that was a result partly of the hurricane, a federal agency, like a federal a federal agency that investigates specifically chemical disasters, went in and looked at like, how is this allowed to happen? What kind of oversight does there need to be that perhaps is not, does not exist at this point. And what this agency found is that, you know, biolab and the chemicals that it uses at some of these facilities is exempt from a key EPA Environmental Protection Agency rule that is supposed to prevent chemical disasters. So there are all these requirements that many, many chemical facilities that are processing large amounts of dangerous chemicals have to follow, because, you know, the potential for such a catastrophic disaster. And, you know, because of a big loophole, biolab and its facilities do not have to, they don't have to abide by those requirements. And so I think that oversight failure is something environmentalists are once again pointing to in the wake of what's happened in Georgia. You
Arjun Singh 9:18
know, it's interesting that you're bringing up these kind of regulatory loopholes and failures, because this week, we have been witnessing the horrible fallout of hurricane Helene, which also did hit Georgia, but really devastatingly, it hit North Carolina. And I should say, we're joined here by our news editor, Lucy Dean Stockton, who Lucy, you spent this week looking at North Carolina and the fallout of Helene, but you also found out that there were regulatory and policy failures that contributed to how bad the damage in Helene was as well. Right?
Lucy Dean Stockton 9:54
Yes, definitely. Yeah. I mean, so hurricane Helene obviously. Swept the whole Southeast. And I think a lot of attention in these hurricanes is on coastal areas, but we're finding that more and more hurricanes are going inland and proving extremely dangerous. I mean, right now Helene, I think the death count is well over 200 throughout the whole Southeast, and it really swept through the Appalachian Mountains and the Smoky Mountains in a way that I think people weren't expecting, particularly like devastating those mountain towns. One county executive for the county of Asheville, a small city 300 miles from the coast, called called the flooding, biblical devastation. It's wiped out the city. And what we were looking at is that North Carolina has had this, really this major arc, and I would say decline in the 2000s sorry, and a decline largely because of conservative lawmakers trying to stop both climate mitigation and adaptation measures in the state. Climate mitigation measures are aimed at reducing the amount of fossil fuels burned and carbon emissions that are going into the atmosphere, and therefore reducing global warming and its effects. And climate adaptation measures are looking at the reality of our changing climate and changing our infrastructure and processes to adapt to climate change. So whether that's through systems changes, updating emergency response processes, and in a lot of cases, changing our infrastructure, both, I think, really come into play. I mean, North Carolina in the 2000s was a bastion of southern progressivism, and it was considered the new South sheen, yes. And it was considered by many to be like a beacon of climate progress in the south, yeah. In the early 2000s they they had the first renewables portfolio in the southeast, which created major incentives to build solar panels and wind farms. And I think up until recently, North Carolina had some of the most solar panel capacity in the country. At one point, it was second only California, and they also passed all kinds of legislation, like the clean smokestacks act that cleaned up the atmosphere. There, it actually created air pollution standards that went beyond the Clean Air Act. And then in 2010 things really sort of took a turn. Republicans gained the majority in the state's legislature, and a few years later, Pat McCrory, former executive for the state's public utility, major public utility, Duke Energy, was elected as governor that year. Republicans also gained a super majority, which gave them the ability to ram through legislation and in some cases, override a governor's veto, and this is also where climate adaptation comes into play. So in 2011 a state lawmaker proposed a bill that would prohibit communities from using current sea level rise data to adapt to climate change. It was nationally ridiculed as the state that outlawed climate change by Stephen Colbert. This
Stephen Colbert 13:25
is a brilliant solution. If your science gives you a result that you don't like, pass a law saying the result is illegal. Problem solved. In fact, I think we should start applying this method to even more things that we don't want to happen. For example, I don't want to die, but the actuaries at my insurance company are convinced that it will happen sometime in the next 50 years. However, if we consider only historical data, I've been alive my entire life, therefore I always will be. It's
Lucy Dean Stockton 14:03
also important to know, I mean, North Carolina has this huge coastal seashore, and the sea level has been rising and dragging homes into the ocean. In addition, it's been raising the water table, so flooding what was once agrarian land with with salty ocean water. Obviously, nothing can grow there. But I think it's important to know that in 2011 when the Republicans proposed this bill that prohibited the communities in their states from properly planning and adapting to climate change, it was pushed by many of the state's real estate interests, and the legislation was proposed by a representative who was also a real estate agent, because that sort of sea level rise, the accurate sea level rise data would have threatened the industry. Yeah, and adapting to climate change has been like a continual sticking point in the legislature. More recent. Lane in 2023 Republican lawmakers overrode a gubernatorial veto, and they passed legislation barring these things, called home sheathing inspection, inspections outside of coastal areas. So these are building codes, basically that make buildings strong enough so that they can withstand hurricane force winds. The North Carolina Home Builders Association, a trade group. They fought really hard to stop this bill, and they argued that upgrading housing to withstand hurricane force winds wasn't needed in coastal outside of coastal areas, but we've seen, of course, that outside in Asheville, where there was this biblical devastation they faced hurricane force winds. It's the same that same group, actually, that year, also backed Republican lawmakers passing a bill to open millions of acres of the state's wetlands for development despite the state's own climate resiliency plan that mandated they needed to protect wetlands, and that's important because wetlands about one foot deep, can absorb hundreds of 1000s of gallons of water which was enough, which is enough to flood dozens of homes downstream. They're really important flood mitigation techniques, methods and resources. Sorry, they're really important flood mitigation resources, and they were instead, had developers just push through this legislation that allowed them to build more homes while also destroying the very things that would help communities protect themselves from climate change.
Arjun Singh 16:39
So that all sounds especially if you're a resident bad but also, I would imagine if you're a developer and someone who has a stake in owning and creating homes. But I have to say, everything that you're describing right now, it's hard to not feel like there's an intentionality behind it, that these trade groups that Pat McCrory, who's a former energy executive, are the leaders in trying to dismantle these climate regulations and dismantle I want to really hammer that point in, and that it sounded like they were going on a trajectory. These guys came in and just reversed. That. Is that off the mark for me to feel or think Lucy like that. There's an intentionality to this, like did these lawmakers seem aware that what they were doing was essentially sabotaging climate protections? You
Lucy Dean Stockton 17:30
know? I think obviously things are always complex on the ground. There are hundreds of lawmakers in every state, right but Pat McCrory, who was an executive at Duke Energy for 29 years, and continued to receive lobbying money and campaign donations from them while he was in office, also chose many times to protect the utility. He not only helped back plans that didn't accelerate, but protected fossil fuel usage in the state, but he also carved out sweetheart deals that allowed Duke Energy to not remediate major fields that they had contaminated with their coal mining operations. And that's his former employer, right? That's his former employer and other conservative lawmakers they they removed incentives for solar panel generation. They allowed Duke Energy to pay households less for creating their own solar panels, basically making it harder and more expensive for people to switch to renewable energy within their communities. Republican lawmakers also stripped funding from the state's environmental agency in what was one of the steepest cuts in the nation. At the same time, they were criticizing its inefficacy. So in many ways, I think we've seen that climate progress was sabotaged in North Carolina over the past decade.
Arjun Singh 18:58
Wow, Katia, you're going to go back to the chemical disaster you were reporting on in Georgia. Did you discover if there is any comparable sort of industry interference that might have contributed to the lack of oversight of that company, bio lab? Like, was there lobbying? Was there cozy relationships within the state legislature? Going back to just that, it feels like that accident in Georgia was the result of an oversight failure. And I do wonder if there was also an industry push to, you know, get those that oversight out of the way. Yeah. I
Katya Schwenk 19:33
mean, I think what we often find is behind an oversight failure. You look a little closer, and you see years, in some cases of industry lobbying, and that was definitely the case here in Georgia. So, you know, as I had mentioned briefly earlier, you know, part of the reason this facility wasn't covered by, you know, this really important EPA oversight, was because this come. Goal was not covered under this under this law. And what we found is that the chemical industry, which is, you know, quite a powerful industry trade groups, has trade groups that are spending 10s of millions of dollars a year lobbying on Washington. The chemical industry has pushed to ensure that the EPA does not add new chemicals to this list of covered substances, therefore excluding facilities that are dealing with dangerous chemicals from this kind of EPA oversight. And you know, we've had even though regulators like, like I mentioned just a year ago, we're saying, you know, this chemical that's being used by bio lab should really be covered by this oversight. And so I think you can really look back and see a direct, you know, line of causation to these years of lobbying by the industry. Also
Arjun Singh 20:58
want to, you know, pause here for a second to talk about the real Fallout, the human Fallout, of what this has been. You know, returning back to Christina Brown, who you had talked about earlier, the resident in Georgia near this facility, I know you've talked to a couple other people in that area too. What is it like for them to have to go back to their home that's now quite literally under a toxic cloud. I mean, what? What is it like psychologically? How does it change the rhythm of their life? What do they tell you about what's been happening to the place that they feel safe and call home?
Katya Schwenk 21:36
Yeah, you know, I think it's been really difficult. It's really been a devastating week. You know, that was something that Christina really emphasized to me, was how difficult it was to feel forced to return to a home but is literally enveloped in a gas that we know is dangerous, but we don't fully understand yet what you know, the potential consequences of exposure from it might be, but she felt that she and her husband felt that they didn't have a choice but to return home, and that's something what I but I've heard from other residents too, and I think there's a real lack, or a real sense of a break in trust, that they don't feel that they can trust the local officials that have you know are telling them different, conflicting things about what's going on. They don't feel like they can trust, you know, the federal officials who have seemingly failed to oversee this facility. And so I think that was another sort of key theme with my conversations with people in Conyers, was a really sense, a real sense of a break in trust and a failure for, you know from the people who are supposed to be protecting them,
Arjun Singh 22:42
Lucy, I'd love to hear from you, just like what you've been reporting on out in North Carolina this week. So I, I have a few friends who live in the Asheville area. I've seen what they've been posting on social media flooded out roads calls for people to be able to go places where they can get food. And that hits incredibly close to home, you know. And I know that's a reality that 1000s of people are experiencing all the time, but you know, from the big picture, from what you've been reporting on, thinking about that idea of a home and habitability, what is the scope of of homes in areas that are at risk and, you know, have kind of been lost because of the damage that we've seen. Asheville.
Lucy Dean Stockton 23:23
It's a small city, but it's 100,000 people tucked into the state smoking mountains, and it the, I mean, it was hit by truly historic floods. The river had never risen so high it destroyed the city's water system, so it's left many people without water, but it's also left residents cut off from a lot of outside access due to mudslides and washed out roads in Buncombe County, where Asheville is located, the death toll has reached 57 people as of yesterday, and I think, I think it is just going to be really devastating. I mean, FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, is already warning that they're running out of money. And hurricane season is certainly not over. It goes all through the fall, and it's getting more intense and worse. But I think also the human toll is quite devastating. I mean, in addition to the many people who have lost their lives, entire small towns outside of Asheville have been washed away, and one advocate that I spoke to, Dan Crawford, who's with the state's League of Conservation Voters. He's from the area, and he got emotional in our call, said he's gotten teary eyed multiple times because he is lucky that his family survived. He has seen his neighbor to homes just destroyed, and I can only imagine emotional and psychological toll that would take, especially knowing that I. Lawmakers in the state have sabotaged things that would have made those areas stronger and more resilient, but also would have helped stem the source of climate change, which will have untold impacts on everyone on this planet.
Arjun Singh 25:17
Yeah, I mean what you've laid out about the timeline of particularly Republican dismantling of these climate protections is astonishing, especially in light of what we've seen this week. You know, I'd be curious to hear from you, especially as extreme weather seems to be occurring more and more, and especially it's happening in places that did not think that they would experience these extreme weather events, you know, I'd love to hear from both of you, as this week played out, what were some of the takeaways of you know, putting out these two stories kind of simultaneously. And I'll start with you, Lucy, because you're, you know, you're our news editor, and so you've really been seeing both of these kind of play out at the same time, and working on both of them. What was that like?
Lucy Dean Stockton 26:01
Well, first of all, it was great to work with Katya on her story. It is kind of a bombshell report, but I think in the broader arc, I mean, so much of our reporting is Regulatory Accountability, and I think what we see again and again and facing this huge, untenable problem like climate change, I think it can sometimes be hard to find where things stem from and where they end. And I think following climate mitigation and adaptation efforts to their source and what happens when they're introduced and they fail, is a really interesting way to assign responsibility to the many, many power players who are letting, yeah, are letting powerful corporate interests have their way and forget about safety restrictions and just continue polluting as normal. I also think that what we've seen is like regulatory failure at a federal level, in the case of Conyers and regulatory failure at a state level, which made the disaster in North Carolina potentially even worse. And I think what we find in our reporting is that lot of this regulatory failure is driven by corporate interest and corporate greed and the lawmakers to enable
Arjun Singh 27:42
it. What about you? Katya,
Katya Schwenk 27:44
yeah, no. I mean, I definitely second all of that and, and, you know, I think it was particularly striking to cover, you know, this chemical disaster in Georgia, while we had in the wake of the devastation of the hurricane. And I sort of learned, as I spoke with environmentalists and advocates, that you know these kinds of, you know chemical accidents, they expect them to occur alongside, occur alongside climate disasters, extreme weather, and they expect them to be compounded by this kind of extreme weather, as we saw this week, where, you know, emergency responders in Georgia were responding to both this hurricane and the fallout and this massive chemical fire at the same time. And I really think it shows, yeah, it was just a striking, a striking image to watch these two events play out at the same time. But, you know, I was also inspired by the people I spoke with in Georgia who I really think are fighting for resiliency and fighting now for, you know, for greater protection and for accountability. In the wake of all of this,
Lucy Dean Stockton 28:59
I feel also, I had seen some reporting, and I think this is directly relevant, is there were people in Conyers who may have fled for the hurricane and then came back and were instructed to shelter in place because of the toxic cloud of gas, and may not have even gotten emergency alerts Because infrastructure communication infrastructure was down because of the hurricane. I mean, there are so many ways that I think infrastructure is failing and people are being shuffled around between disasters. So
Arjun Singh 29:32
yeah, it raises the specter of climate migration and how we we mitigate from all of that. Well, Katya and Lucy, it was great to have you on lever time this week. Thank you both for your reporting and for sharing it with us today.
Lucy Dean Stockton 29:46
Thank you, Arjun.
Katya Schwenk 29:47
Thank you Arjun.
Arjun Singh 29:53
Thanks for listening to another episode of lever time. This episode was produced by me, Arjun Singh, with editing support from Joel Warner. And Lucy Dean Stockton. Our theme music was composed by Nick Campbell. We'll be back next week with another episode of lever. Time you