Breathe free - Dungannon, Virginia

E: The Environmental Magazine, Feb, 1994 by Will Nixon

Unlike most people, Linda Moneyhun Miano can watch her health pass by in the sky outside her window. she lives on a hillside farm overlooking the Clinch River in the Appalachian ridges of western Virginia. She and her husband Craig, a coal miner, moved here in 1980 as refugees from the petro-chemical alley in southern Louisiana where Linda, who is asthmatic and chemically sensitive, couldn't breathe. If these remote mountains were safe enough for moonshiners, she said, they were safe enough her her.

But in 1986, Louisiana-Pacific (L-P) opened a mill by the river that glues wood chips into waferboard, using such potent chemicals as formaldehyde, phenol and MDI, a compound known to induce asthma and allergies in workers. When the wind blows Miano's way, it carries a sickly sweet burnt cookie smell. Her sinuses stuff up, she wheezes, and she sometimes feels nauseous. She retreats indoors, shuts the windows, and turns on the air conditioning. Or she retreats to her grandmother's house six miles away. A few times, weary of hospital visits and heavy medications that make her legally disabled, she has retreated to her mother's home in Wyoming.

Some people wish she would stay away. But instead, she keeps returning and pestering state officials to inspect the plant. She stirs up stories in her local papers and directs the local Health and Environmental Action League (HEAL) which has about 20 members. Last August, about 60 logging trucks caravaned through her county to support the plant. A few wore banners, saying, "Linda Miano. This is L-P Country. Love It of Leave It." She sighs. "I've been through it before. Nothing scares me more than not being able to breathe."

In December 1992, state tests found that the plant was releasing three or four times more MDI than permitted. (In 1989, the state fined the mill $54,000 for grossly underreporting its emissions. Last year, the federal government fined L-P $11.1 million for the same offense at other waferboard plants around the country.) Since then, the plant has narrowly failed two more MDI tests, but Mike Overstreet, a state official, says that these permit violations still fall within the region's overall legal air quality standards. The state has also cut L-P's use of MDI from 700 to 204 pounds an hour, and persuaded the mill to install new pollution equipment in 1995. But Linda doesn't care if the emissions are legal. "They set these standards for healthy young males," she says. "But they should set them for the most vulnerable people - children, the elderly the chronically ill. My asthma is an early warning prevention system alerting us to poisons that may later affect everybody." Contact: HEAL, Route 1, Box 202, Dungannon, VA 24245/(703)467-2388.