A Big Stink on the Pigeon

By Frank Trippett

From its source on North Carolina's Black Mountain to the town of Canton, 22 miles away, the Pigeon River is a clean and lovely stream, lively with trout and tourists. By the time it leaves Canton (pop. 5,000), flowing toward and finally into Cocke County, Tenn., 50 miles away, the Pigeon has been transmogrified into a sludgy mess that looks like oily coffee and smells as bad as rotten eggs. The cause of this revolting change: industrial wastes that Champion International Corp. has been dumping into the Pigeon since the company opened a paper mill in Canton 80 years ago.

Since then, across the state line, the pollution has provoked indignation that sometimes seems as rank as the river itself. On the Tennessee side, people complain that the river's repugnant color and stench contribute to Cocke County's prolonged economic doldrums by discouraging tourists and development. With an unemployment rate currently averaging 15%, Cocke Countians openly envy the relative prosperity in Haywood County, home of the paper mill (present unemployment average: 6%). Says Cocke County Chamber of Commerce Executive Director Robert Seay, co-founder of the Dead Pigeon River Council, which wants to clean up the stink: "It's completely unfair for one county to use the river and have a ((low)) unemployment rate, and 50 miles downstream here we are with one of the highest unemployment rates in the state." In North Carolina the people of Canton have traditionally defended Champion Corp., pollution and all, for the simplest of economic motives: the company has employed generations of workers and now supports some 2,200 families. It is not surprising that North Carolina, officially and otherwise, has long ignored protests from Tennessee, choosing in 1985 to approve a five- year extension of Champion's waste-water discharge permit, even though residents of Cocke County communities begged to have a say in the matter.

Nor is it surprising that at last the Tennesseans went to court. Their aim was to force the federal Environmental Protection Agency to set standards requiring Champion to lighten the color of the mill's effluents. But North Carolina and Champion continued to resist in court and out. The company bused thousands of employees to public hearings on both sides of the border, at which Vice President Oliver Blackwell warned that the cleanup job would be so expensive that Champion would shut down the mill instead, costing thousands of jobs.

A compromise took shape earlier this year, thanks to the EPA's influence. Under a plan agreed to by all parties, Champion would spend $200 million over the next three years on a bleaching process for its wastes. Its goal would be to change the Pigeon's color to the shade of weak iced tea.

The compromise did not take into account a new, more solemn controversy. Last year a local physician noticed an unusually high number of cancer-related deaths in the tiny riverside hamlet of Hartford (pop. 300), whose people have always been accustomed to eating fish from the Pigeon River. In May, after EPA tests detected tiny traces of cancer-causing dioxin in fish from the Pigeon, the survivors of one husband and wife, who died of cancer within a month of ! each other, filed a $6 million wrongful-death suit against Champion. The dioxin controversy may tempt Cocke County to take a second look at the compromise plan to improve the Pigeon's color. For the moment the Tennesseans are awaiting further EPA tests, due this summer, that might provide some answer to an urgent question: Does the Pigeon not only stink but actually kill?

With reporting by Joseph J. Kane/Hartford