The Whirlpool watch must continue (Updated)

Debbie Keith should not have had to call in reinforcements.

But she did, and now the company of famous environmental activist Erin Brockovich is likely to be in Fort Smith for weeks or months or years to help area residents defend themselves against a corporation with a history that indicates such defense is necessary.

What brought Keith to awareness and Brockovich to Fort Smith began when Benton Harbor, Mich.-based Whirlpool Corp. submitted a request to ban groundwater wells in a neighborhood near Whirlpool’s Fort Smith plant.

By way of background, Whirlpool operated its Fort Smith plant 45 years before officially ceasing production on June 29, 2012.  The Whirlpool plant employed more than 4,600 workers in 2006, and resulted in about 1,000 jobs lost when it closed in 2012.

The groundwater ban was requested by Whirlpool as a response to trichloroethylene (TCE) in the soil in a residential neighborhood near the shuttered plant. TCE had previously been used by the company in Fort Smith from 1967 to 1981, according to information provided by ENVIRON International Corp., the firm paid by Whirlpool to assess environmental impact.

Whirlpool’s request for the ban was supported by city of Fort Smith staff. But that wasn’t good enough for Keith.

Keith, a former Whirlpool worker, wasn’t getting straight answers to her questions. She wanted more answers about the impact, the potential health hazards, the short-term mitigation, the long-term mitigation – you know, basic questions one would have expected to have been asked of Whirlpool by Fort Smith city staff and staffers with the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality (ADEQ).

Clearly, Keith wasn’t going to be well represented by the ADEQ. Ryan Benefield, ADEQ deputy director, told The City Wire in June 2012 there were no significant environmental problems with the site.

“There are no restrictions on, or anything that would affect the property itself. It is safe for industrial use,” Benefield said in this report.

Keith was not going to be well represented by a Fort Smith administration and its legal squad firmly in support of the Whirlpool request. After all, Whirlpool officials had an attorney and an environmental firm tell us this TCE stuff was really no big deal and only dangerous if orally ingested.

“The fact is no health risk exists today and given all of the residents are on city water and we can find no evidence of existing wells, the ban was seen as a prudent step,” noted Jeff Noel, Whirlpool’s corporate vice president of communications and public affairs, noted in a letter in which he graciously requested to remove the groundwater ban request from city consideration.

Noel’s request certainly came courtesy of the aforementioned Debbie Keith, who should not have had to call in reinforcements. When Keith delivered Brockovich and company to Fort Smith, Whirlpool execs were forced to spin up a new strategy – especially when Brockovich and company offered a long list of potential health risks that exist today as a result of the TCE contamination.

We are disappointed in Fort Smith city leadership for not being more proactive. Whirlpool and city officials initially wanted us to believe the ban was the best way to protect area residents. The only thing worse than no protection, is a false sense of protection.

If we had gone along with the recommendation of city staff about the Whirlpool request, we’d never known the extent of the problem. We’d never known the potential for cancer-causing vapors to rise up through home foundations and street-light poles and drainage culverts. We may not have known there is a risk to the children who attend a nearby Boys & Girls Club facility. (By the way, Whirlpool CEO Jeff Fettig serves on the Board of Governors for the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.) In addition to runoff from the plant, we might not have learned about toxic containers shipped to area landfills over the years. We might not have learned of the possibility of ongoing toxic leakage from the facility.

Some have argued about who was responsible to be on top of this. The argument is a distraction because city leadership, employed and elected shouldn’t require an approved procedure and/or codified chain of command to ensure citizens are safe. Fortunately, six of the seven members of the Fort Smith Board of Directors realized that the situation warrants a closer look. They denied Whirlpool’s request and scolded Whirlpool for being a poor corporate citizen.

Keith and several hundred former Whirlpool workers gathered at the March 26 town hall meeting in which Brockovich and company presented the other side of Whirlpool’s shiny story. The former workers had reason to be suspicious of Whirlpool. The company had let them down previously, and, to a large extent, their union wasn’t much help. And many or the workers now wonder about the health problems they have or what they might learn at the next doctor call.

Whirlpool bears watching. They thought they could bully past the city like they did the union. They were well on their way to pushing their multi-national corporate weight around until Erin accepted Debbie’s invitation.

As for what’s next, following are a few things to consider.
• We don’t know what we don’t know about chemicals filtering through our city thanks to Whirlpool.
• The ADEQ is not going to be the watchdog we need.
• The city of Fort Smith may not be the watchdog we need. The Board can be fickle when big-time pressure is applied.
• We’re all going to have to have each other’s back on this one. Why is that? Because Debbie Keith should not have had to call in reinforcements.