Jamison, whose booming voice and confident posture belie his health complaints, says he's sure the Kerr-McGee plant in Columbus is responsible for his ailments -- and for the creosote fouling the church property and parts of the community. He says his joints are swollen, and he keeps to a strict diet with plenty of fresh juices to avoid needing dialysis for his damaged kidneys.
Even today, a smell like burnt rubber and tar intensifies the closer a visitor comes to the fenced-off expanse of the abandoned plant. A ditch carries a stream of dark water down a road, under a bridge and across to the Maranatha Faith Center before curling through ball fields and emptying into Luxapalila Creek.
Ruby White and Ethel Toney, sisters in their mid-60s, live in one-story homes on Shady Street, separated from the plant by another row of houses. The women can't afford to move. White, sitting in her sparse living room where an air conditioner blocks a small window, looks decades older as she sucks on oxygen to breathe. Pulmonary fibrosis has scarred her lungs for at least 15 years, and she's had breast cancer for two, she says.
Toxic Blackberries?
Toney attributes the mouth cancer that makes it hard for her to enunciate to her childhood habit of eating blackberries that grew near railroad tracks around the plant.
Others in the town of about 25,000 just west of the Alabama border blame creosote for problems from miscarriages to itchy skin. A Kerr-McGee predecessor called T.J. Moss Tie Co. began producing it in Columbus in 1928, according to court papers. Creosote contains at least 300 chemicals and can cause skin irritation, convulsions, confusion, kidney and liver problems, skin and scrotum cancer and death, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry.
Jamison began his battle long before Kerr-McGee disappeared into Tronox and Anadarko. He sued Kerr-McGee in a Mississippi court in 2000. About 4,400 residents, including White and Toney, settled claims for property damage or personal injury for $50 million, according to lawyer Wilbur Colom, who worked on the case. White says she collected $12,000 of a promised $19,000 and says the money is mostly gone. Jamison and a handful of others held out for more.
People Are Dead
Colom says he faced a big dilemma when he counseled clients whether to settle around 2002. Some were so sick that he advised them to take a payout sooner rather than endure drawn-out court proceedings.
"Ten years later, all of the people who had serious cancers are dead," Colom says, reviewing thousands of names next to such entries as "sarcoidosis with renal involvement," "lung and colon cancer" and "dec'd ovarian cancer," meaning deceased.