May 1975

Langley-Bath-Clearwater residents had been complaining for years of the sickening odors but didn’t know where to take their complaints. In May 1975, a local daughter who had recently returned to Langley to care for her aging parents took up the fight. She was quoted in the local paper, “I hear the dumping late at night– sometimes at 2 in the morning, and I lie in bed thinking who can I go to and what can I do.” She described “a splashing sound of tons and tons of water around midnight twice a week” and told how, after the dumping, a foul smell hovered over the homes near the creek. “It’s putrid,” she said. “It burns your sinuses and makes you sick.”¹

One neighbor reported having to leave his house, taking his family to stay with relatives whenever the smell was too strong. Another neighbor said the chemicals were peeling the paint from his house. Others complained of nausea, headaches, upset stomach and dizziness. Val-Chem denied they were dumping anything into the creek.

The local DHEC office had reportedly been filing complaints for years but said their hands were tied. For one thing, there was no way to gauge or measure odors. For another, the EPA had previously granted a grace period for Val-Chem and other Horse Creek industries in 1974. Specifically, in exchange for promises to tie into the regional wastewater treatment system, which was expected to be completed in 1978, these industries could not be prosecuted during the interim for dumping into Horse Creek. 

In response to the May 1975 complaints, a DHEC official allowed, however, that if Val-Chem was violating an earlier agreement to haul their wastes in solid form to the landfill, they could be investigated. 

October 1975

During the dark hours on Sunday morning October 12, Langley residents were awakened by firemen and other civil defense officials going from house to house, banging on doors to warn people not to use the water.² The day before, residents had noticed an acrid odor in the air and a foul odor and taste to their tap water. This was not unusual, just worse than usual. By midnight Saturday, DHEC officials were on the scene testing the water. The suspected contaminant was ethyl acrylate.

The ethyl acrylate had somehow gotten into the Val-Chem’s private artesian well and was then pumped into the Langley water system — a shared system between the plant and the town. For two days, residents were supplied water from National Guard trucks parked throughout the area. The water system was flushed and the connection between the two water supplies closed off. The artesian well was shut down until further notice. 

As was later learned, it may have been a series of spills that led to the ethyl acrylate seeping into the ground and contaminating the well. Val-Chem and DHEC officials speculated that, alternately, the contamination could have also come from above, from Langley Pond. According to Val-Chem’s vice-president, the plant was careful to avoid spills and didn’t dump on the grounds at the plant. Further, “any plant waste that could be harmful is sealed in drums and taken to the Langley landfill.”³

February 1976

Local residents were awakened by an acrid odor in the wee hours on February 23. DHEC received their first calls around 3:00 a.m. By morning, dozens more had phoned DHEC.  As would later be learned, Val-Chem had spilled some 200 gallons of ethyl acrylate into Horse Creek. Local reactions to the incident, which affected Bath, Langley and Clearwater residents, were varied. Some people claimed they didn’t smell anything, while others complained the odors made them feel profoundly sickened and nauseated. Some feared losing their jobs if they complained. Others downplayed or denied the smell, with several merchants quipping, “Smells like money.”⁴

Langley Elementary schoolchildren said the fumes from the plant were always present at the school and that, on bad days, they couldn’t go out to recess. They recalled the October incident when the school had been without water for a day. One sixth grader related that the odors were so bad at school, they came through the closed windows. 

In the wake of the February spill, she and another sixth grader got together a petition which was signed by 500 students protesting the earlier contamination of the Langley water system and raising concerns about the long-term effects of the fumes. 

Local resident Mike Duncan, a retired safety engineer, sent certified letters to the governor, members of the state legislature, and various DHEC officials requesting the problem be remedied. 

In the wake of Mr. Duncan’s campaign, DHEC charged Val-Chem with negligence for the February 23 spill of some 200 gallons of ethyl acrylate into Horse Creek and the resulting “noxious vapors and fumes”⁵ that permeated the ambient air in and about Langley. A show-cause hearing was scheduled for May 9 to consider the charges and fines.

April 1976

Aiken County Civil Defense received 19 calls in yet another middle-of-the-night spill, the odors from which were described by some as “unbearable.” Four DHEC officials kept vigil over the bridge near Langley where “globs of butyl acrylate could be seen floating down Horse Creek.”⁶

The May 1976 Show-Cause hearing

Because Val-Chem was in the EPA’s grace period and couldn’t be prosecuted for contaminating the river, the issue boiled down to air pollution, whose fumes came from water, not smokestacks, and could only be gauged by the words of the citizens who smelled it. The fact that this unmeasurable piece of evidence — odor — dissipated over time and varied from place to place made the evidence all the more difficult to quantify, much less prove. Val-Chem’s attorney challenged witnesses to describe the odor of ethyl acrylate. Points were drawn on the subjective and individual nature of the sense of smell. DHEC officials were likewise challenged by the attorneys to describe the odor and to quantify the term “undesirable level of pollution,”⁵ which was part of the language in DHEC’s charges against Val-Chem. The queue of witnesses for the defense, who denied smelling the odor, outnumbered the witnesses who did smell it.

Val-Chem was ultimately found guilty of negligence, but the company was not fined, as it was determined that DHEC did not have the authority to set a fine on odors. 

The issues of pollution in Horse Creek improved in the wake of the 1975-1976 accidents and spills but were by no means gone. A deeper dive into the topic is beyond the scope of this article. The recollection of a 1979 experience on the creek by a former Burnettown resident is provided for reference:

My brother was a born adventurer and blazed a trail from our place to the nearby Horse Creek. He had a canoe, and his idea was to explore the creek. So we went out one day, intending to travel up to the Langley Pond dam. Horse Creek isn’t a huge stream, but it is somewhat manageable by canoe. I was impressed by the wildness of the stream. The overhanging trees, the many streamside plants and flowers, the lack of human presence. It was shortly after we began our trip that I noticed some kind of white deposits, clinging to the roots and rocks in the stream. It looked like melted mats of plastic, maybe a few inches wide, though I suspected it wasn’t melted plastic. It wasn’t just in a few places, but along the entire stream. There were also areas with some kind of red substance on the white “deposits” and elsewhere and on some of the tree roots. My brother laughed and said that maybe we should steer clear of contact with the water. I laughed, too, but I took serious pains to keep from getting any of that water on my skin. I cannot think of another time when I have had such feelings of exhilaration and repulsiveness, all at the same time. 

A Fire at the Langley Landfill

On Friday, May 16, 1980, a fire of undetermined origin broke out in the industrial waste area of the Langley landfill. On Saturday morning, the fire was still burning. Aiken County Civil Defense reported there were no hazardous chemicals or waste in the dump, and the fire presented no danger to the residents of the Langley, Bath, or Clearwater communities.⁷

Bath Resident Files Suit Against Dixie Clay Company

A suit was filed against Dixie Clay Company and its parent, R.T. Vanderbilt Co., alleging pollution of a stream and damage to residential property along the stream. The plaintiff, a Flint Drive resident in Bath, claimed that, since August 1977 and continuing to the present, the clay company had discharged “extremely heavy amounts of kaolin, other forms of siltation, oil, and other non-native substances”⁸ into a tributary of Horse Creek. The resident claimed that this caused the stream to change color, the fish to die and vegetation to die, and the trees to suffer damage. The plaintiff also alleged that mosquitoes in huge numbers were hatched in the area due to the flooding caused by the silt in the stream.

 Langley Landfill Supervisor Speaks to County Council

In October 1983, a recently terminated Aiken Country landfill supervisor reported to County Council that 339,000 gallons of butyl latex and 2,000 drums of highly volatile waste had been dumped in the Langley landfill between late summer 1975 and April 1976. The Council chairman responded that SLED had investigated the butyl latex in 1982 and found it not hazardous waste. The chairman added the SLED report also mentioned 17 loads of chemicals dumped in the Langley Landfill from the Exxon Corporation’s Summerville, SC location during 1975-1976, about which the SLED report mentioned no health hazard.⁹ (Note: The author has not examined the 1982 SLED report).

A read of 1982-1984. Aiken County Council meeting minutes finds numerous requests approved by Council for asbestos burial in the Langley Landfill. Among these were requests from Kimberly Clark Corp., Crawford Insulation, Daniel Construction Co., Val-Chem, the Willcox Inn, and the County Engineer with quantities ranging from 180 lbs to 13,827 lbs, and from 75-80 plastic bags to 95 drums filled with asbestos. There was regular debate among Council over the issue of disposing of asbestos in the Langley Landfill, with Councilman Mike Toole opposing the burial in plastic bags and favoring disposal in a Sumter County, SC landfill created for disposal of hazardous waste.

The Hazardous Waste Drums

On March 11, 1986, the local paper reported a story about a large number of drums sitting in the open at the intersection of Dixie Clay Road and Highway 421 in Bath. A concerned local resident reported them to the EPA The drums, approximately 120 of them, had been there for six years but only recently became visible after the old service station that had been housing them was torn down. Some of the drums were stacked helter-skelter at the site; others were lying on their side, some were bulging, others leaking. There were homes nearby, and a child had recently been seen playing in the sand at the site.¹⁰

The new owner of the property, who’d purchased the corner property five months earlier intending to put a convenience store on the lot, had actually reported the drums to the EPA in October 1985. At that time, there was no funding in the EPA’s Superfund program to address the piles of drums.

In March 1986, in the wake of a second complaint, and with funding now available, the EPA investigated the contents and found a number of substances, including polymethylene, polyphenylene, polyisocyanate, fluorocarbons, and methylene chloride. The drums, purchased from the Air Force in Oklahoma by the previous owner, Mr. Reimer, were said to be at risk for catching fire, which could potentially produce deadly toxics. “We’re considering all of the drums as hazardous waste,” said Hagan Thompson, spokesman for EPA.¹¹

On March 25-26, 1986, workers with HAZTECH, the EPA’s Superfund contractor, removed the barrels to a less populated, more secure, “undisclosed place in the county.”¹² According to Mr. Thompson, the drums would be there for two to three weeks. The agency was considering moving them to the closest available approved hazardous waste disposal site, the GSX landfill in Sumter County.

The 1986 Reimer Drum Fire

On May 13, 1986, a chemical fire broke out on Dixie Clay Co. property, where HAZTECH workers and the EPA had moved the drums seven weeks earlier and were now attempting to convert the chemicals into foam. According to various accounts, some 700-800 Bath area residents were evacuated from their homes. The emergency evacuation lasted about 2 hours and affected those southwest of Bath, downwind from the fire. About 50 firefighters from seven fire departments were called to extinguish the blaze which was, according to the Bath Fire Chief, mostly smoke. ¹³

Afterward, EPA officials, who were reportedly mystified to understand the fire,¹⁴ assured local residents that there would be no long-term health effects from it. A different assessment was given by Dietrich Weyel, assistant professor in the University of Pittsburgh’s occupational health department and considered an expert on the burning of these materials. Addressing the possibility of severe harm that could have occurred from this accident, he described Bath residents as “lucky.”¹⁵

On June 6, 1986, local resident Tom King, president of the Aiken County Libertarian Party, delivered a petition with 500 names to U.S. Rep. Butler Derrick. The petitioners made a formal request for a “complete investigation”¹⁶ by the federal government into the toxic waste accident.

According to King, “We were led to believe that the toxic chemicals had been removed from the area last month for proper disposal. Instead, the chemicals were moved to an undisclosed location nearby and improperly handled, resulting in 800 people being evacuated and not told details for several hours, and many more nearby residents not even notified of the accident. We demand to know how this happened, who is responsible, why we weren’t told what was going on until it was too late, and what the lasting effects will be.”¹⁶

Information on the outcome of that request is stubborn to find today, as are the results of the group’s related demands that the Reimer drums and the ashes from that fire not be buried in the Langley Landfill.

In the 1960s-1970s, the use of open dumps and burn pits was phased out across America and replaced with a sanitary landfill system, which involved spreading the daily waste into thin layers, then compacting it and covering it with a layer of soil at the end of each day. Many landfills started as dumps. 

The former City of Aiken landfill on Beaufort Street, for instance, was a dump for most of the century preceding its transformation into a sanitary landfill around 1970. Before and after its transformation, this was the place for disposing of everything from household garbage to business and industrial waste, broken-down appliances and equipment, furniture and mattresses; building materials, tree stumps, leaf mould, and even dead animals. Before 1970, the contents smoldered in open burn piles. With the advent of the EPA in the 1970s, this practice was phased out and replaced with the sanitary landfill system. In 1986, the City of Aiken began phasing out the Beaufort Street landfill entirely, because there was simply no more space on that property to bury trash. 

An aside: Here, it bears mention that the benefactors of the rodents, flies, smoke and stench from Aiken’s City dump were the nearby residents of the predominately working class, lower income, predominantly minority neighborhoods surrounding the dump. As a rule, polluting industries, dumps and landfills are not sited adjacent to middle and upper-class residential areas. Today, the injustice of this dynamic is recognized by the term “environmental justice.” More on that in a moment.

The Langley-Bath-Burnettown and Clearwater stretch of Horse Creek Valley has seen its share of dumps and landfills. The locations of the various, unofficial dumping grounds were primarily a matter of convenience — a nearby vacant lot, a nearly patch of woods, a ditch, a hillside, a pond, a swampy area. Some of the larger dumping areas are remembered by locals today and indicated on the map below.

Click here for larger view.

Two of these dumping areas — Clearwater Swamp and the Huber Pit — became part of the County landfill system during the 1970-era transition from dumps to sanitary landfills.

Clearwater Swamp

The Clearwater Swamp is one of the 9 EPA superfund sites within the 4-mile stretch of Highway 421 that runs between Langley, Bath and Clearwater. The original idea behind this former sand-mining operation-turned-flooded swampland was to use garbage to displace the water. This quickly created an eyesore and heavily polluted swamp. In the mid-1960s, local groups petitioned the governor and South Carolina’s State Pollution Authority to remedy the situation. Change only came with the eventual closure of the Clearwater Swamp by EPA order in 1971.  In the interim, this 40-acre area remained an unregulated dump, and it remained so even after it was designated a sanitary landfill, due to the ongoing difficulty of finding soil to cover the garbage. At days’s end, rather than being covered over with soil, as mandated, the trash would be bulldozed into the swamp by prison labor workers.

In addition to creating a severely polluted swampland, this body of water also became a major breeding ground for mosquitoes. A decision was made to conduct an experimental aerial spraying of what was all but certainly DDT over the swamp and the surrounding lands from Clearwater to Langley to see the effect on mosquitoes and midges. Assurances were made that fish, wildlife and people would be unharmed.¹⁷

The Huber Pit and Others

The Huber Pit suffered similar and ongoing difficulties transitioning to a sanitary landfill. The Huber Pit, which was also referred to as the Langley Landfill in records, opened in 1969, was already in use as a dump for household garbage and industrial waste before being slowly transitioned to sanitary landfill practices. 

A 1973 article in the local paper stated that there were 50-75 tons of garbage received per week at the site and that improvements were being made to improve “health hazards” potentially caused by “uncovered garbage” to be operational by January 1974, the targeted date for all the County’s dumping to be turned over to the Huber Pit.¹⁸

Until 1974, Aiken County had a total of four dump/landfill sites, all of which suffered similar difficulties with consistent compliance with sanitary landfill practices. By 1974, three of these sites had closed — Clearwater Swamp (1971) and Vaucluse and Wire Road (1973), the latter of which was polluting the nearby Shaw’s Creek, Aiken’s municipal water supply. 

In the coming years, a series of other Huber clay pits would be pressed into service for Aiken County landfills. This arrangement was a win-win for both the clay company and the County. South Carolina mining operations are required to restore former mine sites to a natural state. The reclamation process involves filling the quarries and pits, (which is accomplished through landfill operations), then covering them with soil and planting them with grasses and/or trees.

From about 1969 to 1998, the Huber Clay Company leased its clay pits to Aiken County for $1 per year to use as dumps and landfills. The Huber pit was the first to be used by the County. This was expanded in 1973, Over the next 25 years, other areas of the clay company property were utilized.

The Langley Landfill closed in 1998 after the opening of the Three Rivers Landfill, a regional solid waste facility on Savannah River Site property,

The largest concentration of Horse Creek Valley’s pollution was in the Langley-Burnettown-Bath-Clearwater area, with Langley Pond at the epicenter. The advent of the EPA in 1970, then the Clean Water Act in 1972, brought teeth to enforce pollution control efforts that had been ongoing for more than a decade. The opening of the Horse Creek Waste Water Treatment Plant in 1979 ended the dumpling of raw sewage and industrial waste into the creek. With this, the recovery began in earnest. 

By 1984, the biologically dead pond was coming back to life. However, it still retained its legacy of heavy metals and PCBs. These pollutants do not degrade but persist in soil and silt. There were a number of possible remedies considered in the late 1980s, including a prohibitively costly draining and dredging of the pond. Ultimately, recovery was accomplished through self-healing, with time and sediments covering over the contamination.

In 1994, the first rowing events were held at the pond. Before long, these grew to more events, with international teams, including Olympic rowers, coming to Langley Pond to train and practice. In 2004 — twenty-five years after the Horse Creek Wastewater Treatment Plant opened — the pond was tested and deemed safe for swimming. Step by step, the park’s popularity and amenities grew. 

No stranger to hardship, Langley Pond had yet another hurdle to overcome — a leaking dam discovered in 2014 that required draining the pond and a 5-year closure while the County found the means and methods to repair the problem. 

Two years into the closure, the Aiken County Parks, Recreation and Tourist director gave a presentation to City Council in which he enumerated some of the economic losses from the closure.  Most shocking was the nearly $23 million losses to the local economy from events that were canceled or couldn’t be scheduled, among them the Augusta Invitational Regatta, the U.S. Rowing S.E. Youth Regional Regatta, the U.S. Rowing Masters National Championship, and the Southern Intercollegiate Rowing Championships and Scholastic National Championship.¹⁹

Today, Langley Pond has reopened and features a swimming area and beach, a disc golf course, a covered picnic shelter and a playground. The pond is also part the 9-mile Horse Creek Water Trail for canoes and paddlers. As Aiken County Council chairman Gary Bunker said in 2022, Langley Park is, “the crown jewel of Aiken County’s park system.”²⁰

Dumps, landfills and polluting industries have historically been sited near marginalized communities, whose residents are given no choice but to bear the brunt of the variously chronic, acute, and epigenetic repercussions to health from these sites, along with the lost quality of life, devalued property, and lack of opportunity or ability to move away. 

Environmental injustice has been a running refrain in Horse Creek Valley and, in particular, in the Langley-Bath-Clearwater area — the location of 9 of Horse Creek Valley’s 14 EPA Superfund sites — and the place upon which the City of Aiken and County have been relying to bear the almost the entire burden of waste.

The EPA defines Environmental Justice as:

“The just treatment and meaningful involvement of all people, regardless of income, race, color, national origin, tribal affiliation, or disability, in agency decision-making and other federal activities that affect human health and the environment so that people:

(i) are fully protected from disproportionate and adverse human health and environmental effects (including risks) and hazards, including those related to climate change, the cumulative impacts of environmental and other burdens, and the legacy of racism or other structural or systemic barriers; and

(ii) have equitable access to a healthy, sustainable, and resilient environment in which to live, play, work, learn, grow, worship, and engage in cultural and subsistence practices.”

– Executive Order 14096 – Revitalizing Our Nation’s Commitment to Environmental Justice for All

DHEC also factors environmental justice as part of decision-making processes. First on DHEC’s list of Environmental Justice Principles, which are part of their “mission of “improving the quality of life for all South Carolinians,” is this:

“Ensure that Environmental Justice Communities are Meaningfully Involved and Routinely Considered Throughout Decision-Making Processes.”

The specific demographics of the residents who would live proximate to the Rabbit Hill Class 2 Landfill are difficult to parse, because (as discussed in Part 1) the U.S. census no longer counts the unincorporated community of Bath as a discrete population. For most intents and purposes, the residents of Bath, Langley, and Clearwater are increasingly lumped in with Warrenville and, in some places, Beech Island.

Lacking census data, adequate inferences can be drawn from the local elementary schools in Gloverville, Bath and Clearwater, where 100% of the students in these schools are counted as low income.

For more reading:
Environmental Working Group: ’Forever Chemicals’ at landfills threaten environmental justice communities
StoryMaps: The Link Between Environmental Injustice and Landfills
North Carolina Environmental Justice Network: Landfills

The science of subterranean or underground landfill fires is still in its infancy. The learning curve on this is growing as more communities find themselves living next door to old landfills. There are an estimated ~400 of these per year, according to the article, “How Do You Put Out a Subterranean Fire Beneath a Mountain of Trash?” (see below), with some of them burning for months. Will this be the future of some of these poorly constructed dumps in the Valley? 

For More Reading
Waste Advantage Magazine: Subterranean Landfill Fires: The Cause and Solution
USA Today USA Today: “Landfills catch fire, briefly, all over America. Why did one in Alabama burn for months?”
FiveThirtyEight: How Do You Put Out A Subterranean Fire Beneath A Mountain Of Trash?
LA Times: Uncontrolled Chemical Reactions Fuel Crises at L.A. County’s Two Largest Landfills

The causes of the fires are often a mystery, started underground by unknown chemical reactions. These fires can happen in old limestone mines, and they can happen in landfills with special composite liners. These are not really fires as much as smoldering heat pockets that lack the oxygen to turn into full-fledged flames, so they merely smolder, emitting a stench-filled smoke that pervades throughout the area. Residents have no choice but to close up their houses and avoid going outdoors. For obvious reasons, selling their houses and moving isn’t an option. 

There are a number of factors that can increase the risk for an underground landfill fire: inadequately compacted layers; inadequate layering of soil; settling in the landfill site; water percolating to a particular spot and triggering bacterial processes or a chemical reaction of the contents. 

As has been shown in histories of the 1970s and 1980s, the old Huber pit dump (also an EPA superfund site) and the various iterations of Langley Landfills contain both unknown and questionable contents. What risk factors exist at this site for underground fires?

The questions regarding potential fires and other hazards are many, among them:

• Questions about the visibly discolored pool (see photo earlier in the article) in one area of the landfill adjacent and the potential role of leaching as the cause.
• Questions about the stability of hillsides and berms have drawn concern from one local engineer.
• Questions, long asked and unanswered, on the landfill’s contents from the 1970s-1980s and the allegations of illegal dumping.
• Questions on the potential for underground fires in the older landfills, given the specifics of this site’s history.
• Questions on the fairness of subjecting this small community to such a preponderance of waste storage, diesel engine traffic, methane emissions, and other accompanying hazards and risks, including fires, of living near a landfill.
• Questions on the effects and the risks to the school children at the nearby Jefferson Elementary School.