Ignorance is Bliss

The little town of Apexlehem has been in the news quite a bit lately, for a fire at a used chemicals transfer site, as I noted in an earlier blog. Turns out the fire probably could have been a lot worse than it was -- environmental quality experts haven’t found much contamination in the air or water -- and eventually, those folks living right next door will see their housing values climb back up again. But what has been absolutely killing me is reading the daily newspaper interviews with town officials, who have been falling over themselves dissembling that they had no knowledge, no way of knowing, no possible inclination that EQ Industrial Services had harmful chemicals within spitting distance of the residences of the good people of Apex.

As a former reporter whose coverage area consisted primarily of that town, I found their comments quite distasteful. It is possible, technically, that most of them didn’t know what was there, as EQ took over the site three years ago from a different company, EnviroChem Environmental Services, which had been conducting the same type of work since 1987. But what kind of defense is it really, to say that the people elected and appointed to be in charge of the safety of the townspeople were ignorant of what was going on just under their noses? Several also claimed ignorance of EQ’s failed inspections of just six months before.

What they certainly did know was that the area sandwiched between all those new single family homes on Ten-Ten Road, the old downtown district and U.S. 1 is and has been designated for industrial use for many years. The old Pine State milk building is there; as were several other defunct plants and warehouses. That is, until the town’s thinkers got newer, light industrial and strictly commercial companies to move in, turning what was once a kind of a miniature rust belt into a modern business district. All very commendable and very good for the heart of the town. Change is slow, you know, so, since these town leaders clearly have been doing a good job in making lemonade out of this lemonlike district, one can hardly blame them for some of the leftovers still souring parts of the town.

But one can easily blame them for being ignorant of what is doing the souring. Personally, I doubt that town officials really didn’t know what was going on at EQ. I imagine their claims of ignorance were possibly technically true: they might not have known the exact types of chemicals on the site, while still knowing what type of business it was. But it’s possible that the mayor and town board members weren’t fully aware of what was stored on site -- town council meetings tend to deal with zoning issues, and less often with business proposals. Quite possibly, the previous company was there when they all arrived, and as such, the new company, performing the same type of work, might not need to present itself to the town at all, other than for certain permits.

So, while officials might really not have known what was going on under their noses, certainly somebody did. Which is why I have an especially hard time accepting that the town manager’s office was unaware of the situation. It just seems too farfetched.

But a really good mayor, a really quality town council, and of course, any town manager worth his salt (Bill Sutton anyone?) would have known what EQ was doing, which brings me around to my central point: either they were lying about the situation, or truly ignorant. Which one is better?

And so, as all this coverage continues, and the Apex mayor gets compared to Rudy Giuliani in the press for his presence, and the town leaders hold hearings on the issue, and everyone claims they want what’s best for the town so they’ll try to stop EQ from rebuilding, which all sounds fine and dandy. But the reporter in me is thinking of two things.

One is that I am pretty sure that there used to be a business in town that acted as a temporary storage facility for low-level radioactive waste (from hospitals and labs, etc.) before it being shipped off to some dump somewhere. Perhaps my memory serves me wrong on this issue, but certainly there are other businesses inside the town limits (with residential areas within a mile’s radius) which have hazardous materials stored on site. It’s nobody’s fault -- it’s just the town was way back never expected to grow up all around these places. So why can’t anyone admit it to their constituents? Is it truly better to have people think that city life is perfectly safe even if it’s a pipe dream? Is the image of Apex more important than the reality of Apex?

And the other is that all that time we wrote about Carolina Power and Light (now Progress Energy)’s planned expansion of their high-level radioactive waste storage on the site of the nuclear power plant in the rural New Hill area south of town, town leaders (excepting former town board member Doug Meckes) gave the issue the official brush-off. So what if the storage facility was not designed to hold that much waste? So what if shipping the waste to Wake County from nuke plants in Wilmington and South Carolina increased the dangers of a train accident or sabotage resulting in a radiation leak or fire? So what if CP&L wanted to use an existing facility built decades before instead of possibly a safer, but far more expensive storage process? So what if the energy company officials refused to consider the potential danger of a terrorist attack (in 1999) in order to release the radiation into the area? So what?

The town officials seemed to regard the entire issue as an episode of “not my business,” even though the business is truly in the town’s back yard. Should, God forbid, anything bad ever occur at that nuke plant, any environmental and economic impact would affect the nearby towns of Apex and Holly Springs the greatest.

For the record, our newspaper never took the stance that the nuclear waste expansion was a bad idea, but we agreed with the NC WARN protesters that there should have been a full public accounting and review of the plans by qualified non-company experts. This was an accounting we never got, and we certainly never got any help in the asking from the officials in the town of Apex.

So, while I find it entirely possible, and even plausible, that the duly elected and salaried leaders of the pleasant town of Apex, North Carolina didn’t know what was going on under their noses, and therefore can’t possibly be held accountable for a chemical storage facility with a shaky record going up in smoke and sending 17,000 residents fleeing for their lives, maybe, just maybe, that level of ignorance is simply business as usual.