Unbeknownst to local residents, foreign and domestic PCBs will be shipped, burned and/or packaged for disposal here.

News of the shipments shocked elected officials from City Hall to Capitol Hill, who said they were kept in the dark about the plan.

The tainted equipment, owned by the U.S. military and stored in Japan and Wake Island, also has become an international issue. That helped prompt the planning of a complex military operation that quietly was prepared to begin bringing the materials to a private Pell City facility for cleaning and dismantling.

Pell City is only 25 miles west of Anniston, where emotions already run high over industrial PCB pollution and the planned destruction of an Army chemical weapons stockpile.

The first shipment is scheduled to leave Japan by air Thursday, The Anniston Star learned in its investigation. The Star's inquiries also gave stunned officials their first notice of the shipments, leading to a flurry of political activity over the weekend to learn more about the project.

A nonstop flight

The obsolete electrical transformers, capacitors and other tainted items are straining diplomatic relations and becoming increasingly hazardous.

Japan wants the tainted equipment deported. But there have been no foreign takers, and the military says it is running out of options. It must bring the hazardous wastes home, a 1999 Department of Defense report says.

The Environmental Protection Agency must lift a ban on the import of foreign-produced polychlorinated biphenyls before most of the contaminated equipment and containers can arrive. Without the exemption, the military can ship only a third of the total equipment, the portion containing PCBs produced here in the United States.

Public outcry in 2001 stopped attempts to bring the waste to a treatment plant in Canada, after it already had arrived aboard a ship. Then the government docked it in Seattle but fell short of unloading it. Environmentalists filed a lawsuit, dock workers refused to handle the freight, and the ship eventually returned to Japan.

PCBs are an odorless fluid that was used to insulate electrical equipment. PCBs have been linked to cancer and a host of other medical problems in humans. Before they were banned they were mass-produced in the U.S. and abroad.

Workers in Japan soon will begin trucking tons of transformers, capacitors and PCB-filled containers to Yokota Air Base near Tokyo.

The first shipments will be loaded into Air Force C-17 cargo planes for nonstop flights to Maxwell Air Force Base in Montgomery, according to a military official. The planes will be refueled in midair to avoid interruptions in their flights to Alabama.

From Montgomery, the cargo will be trucked to Trans-Cycle Industries, a hazardous waste disposal facility in Pell City that people here know little about. TCI has had a contract to destroy PCBs for the military since 1999.

Though military officials would not confirm it, an internal Defense Department document obtained by The Star confirmed that the first airlift is scheduled to leave Japan on Thursday.

Diplomatic tensions

Backlash was waiting for the boat when it pulled into harbor in Japan.

A hundred outraged protesters lined the docks at the port of Yokohama. They boarded the Wanhe after its return from Seattle and unfurled a banner that read, "USA - Toxic Criminal."

The Japanese press reported that the "problematical rubbish" was adrift in a sea of diplomatic inner wrangling. Local officials in Japan accused U.S. and Japanese national leaders of keeping them in the dark about the toxic wastes, where they were going, when they would leave.

The Japanese have a legitimate historic basis for fearing the toxin.

One of the most notorious PCB poisoning incidents in the world occurred there. In Yusho, Japan, in 1968, 22 people died and more than 1,000 were sickened after eating PCB-contaminated cooking oil.

"The Japanese public is concerned about PCBs," the U.S. Defense Logistics Agency's environmental assessment said. "Storage of PCBs at the U.S. Military facilities in Japan is contrary to the Japanese Government's wishes, strains relations at the national government level, and causes tension between U.S. installations and local Japanese communities."

In its assessment, which evaluated transporting the waste from Japan to Pell City, the Defense Department stressed that removing the hazardous waste was an "urgent" mission.

Military analysts say it's impractical to destroy the waste in Japan. Until recently, PCBs could not legally be treated there, so no facilities are in place and the expense would be prohibitive.

In addition to the diplomatic pressures, space on the crowded island is at a premium. "The problem of lack of available storage will only be exacerbated as more equipment reaches the end of its useful life," the military's report says. And they say the longer it's stored, the greater the chance of an accident or spill.

Less than half of the 7 million pounds of equipment is in storage. The remaining 4.3 million pounds still is being used but will be scrapped over the next several years.

The equipment represents a persistent menace. If released, PCBs can remain in the environment for decades. Finding a place to dump them without causing a public stir has proved impossible.

Caught unaware

Ironically, PCBs were first developed in 1929 in nearby Anniston.

They were miracle fluids with heat-resistant qualities that revolutionized an electric age. Before PCBs, poorly insulated electrical equipment sparked deadly fires.

But the miracle carried a hefty price - an environmental legacy that makes PCBs as emotional an issue here as in Japan.

Though the government banned PCBs in the late 1970s, the chemicals persist in Anniston and Pell City, in creeks and lakes, in soil and blood.

Only one company, Monsanto, produced PCBs in the United States. It had two PCB plants, one here in Anniston.

The chemicals were made here from 1929 to 1971. Over the decades, PCBs washed off the plant site into ditches and waterways, including Choccolocco Creek, a tributary of Logan Martin Lake.

It is as if the lakeside town of Pell City is a magnet for the contamination, which drained there over decades. Even pollutants that were sent halfway across the world are finding their way home, only this time to die.

"Can't they find an island in the middle of nowhere to do this?" said Frank Davis, a Birmingham attorney who represented thousands of lake- and creek-side property owners in a lawsuit against Monsanto. The residents "obviously had their share of PCBs."

In 1999, Monsanto settled the lawsuit for $43 million.

There have been no new protests in Pell City, but perhaps because no one knew what is coming.

"What!" asked Pell City Mayor Guin Robinson when interviewed. "I had no knowledge."

TCI notified him of the shipment only hours after The Star began making inquiries, Robinson said. He received no notice from the federal government.

The military briefed key members of the Alabama Congressional delegation and high-ranking Senate committee chairs only Thursday, just after The Star first questioned military officials, sources in Washington said.

"When you do things and don't inform people until the last minute, it seems like you are trying to sneak something by the people," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Tuscaloosa. "You shouldn't try to sneak things this important by the people."

Gov.-elect Bob Riley, R-Ashland, knew nothing of the plans, said spokesman David Azbell. He, Shelby and others are trying to learn more about the project.

Local environmentalists also were surprised.

"I just don't know what else they can bring to us," said David Baker, president of local activist group Community Against Pollution. "If you don't want it in your community, 'send it to Alabama and they'll take it.' "

Jack Hooper, a spokesman for the military's Defense Logistics Agency, said ample warning was given. When asked how, he said it was written about in the Federal Register and in documents posted at the defense agency's Web site. EPA officials agreed that was enough under regulations.

"We have done everything asked of us by EPA," Hooper said.

Somebody's got to do it

The trucks file in one after another, a dust-raising procession, to the back entrance of a generic building sided with corrugated steel. A security guard slouches beneath a sign that reads: "Safety is not an option, it's a way of life." Without attracting much attention, TCI has been handling PCB waste in Pell City for more than a decade.

"We like to think we're the business who's getting the PCBs out of the environment," said Jerry Habib, chief operating officer.

And, he said, they're doing it safely.

Everything at TCI is done indoors. Workers drain the insulating fluids from the machines, and then dismantle them piece by piece. They sort the recyclable metal parts, clean them with solvent, and resell them to smelters. Liquid PCBs are sent off to other companies that destroy them by incineration, and the solids that can't be recycled are buried in a hazardous waste landfill in Emelle.

Company officials say the Pell City facility has an unblemished environmental record. EPA spokesman Carl Terry said he could find no violations in the last five years, the farthest back he could check.

"TCI runs a pretty tight ship," Terry said. "They probably get inspected more frequently than most disposal facilities."

Company officials claim their clients - 275 a year, including universities and utilities - have higher standards than regulators require.

"Nothing is released into the environment in any way," said Habib. "No PCBs of any kind are discharged."

The privately owned company has 68 employees, many of whom have been with the company for years.

"We're a long-term, stable employer," Habib said. "We've been a good neighbor."

TCI has disposed of 160,000 pounds of PCB-tainted material for the Department of Defense under its contract, which is up in February. The military is reviewing bids for a new contract that it hopes to award in March, military spokesman Hooper said.

The military waste, Habib said, is "a normal, everyday material. It's the same type we get from everywhere else."

In some ways, the military goes beyond what the law requires in transporting the wastes. Equipment is placed in two containers that have drip pans in case it springs a leak. The containers are then overpacked, molded and strapped down to palletized base.

"It's a pretty darn insulated item that gets transported at that point," Hooper said. "We do everything conceivably possible to ensure that we are not going to have any adverse effect during transport."

Some of what the company says about its business seems to conflict with what regulators and the military say.

Habib insists the facility does not incinerate PCBs. But EPA, ADEM and military officials say the company has a power-generating boiler that is permitted to burn low-level PCBs.

Craig Brown, of the EPA, said the company is the largest decontamination and decommissioning facility in the nation. He said the company burns low concentrations of PCBs in its boiler, as well as in a metal parts furnace that burns PCB-contaminated paper off metal.

Because the levels are so low, it's not considered waste disposal," Brown said.

Regulatory hurdles

The only obstacle to the military continuing delivery of the foreign-made PCBs from Japan to TCI is an environmental law that Pentagon officials are trying to backdoor.

The 1979 Toxic Substances and Control Act, or TSCA, banned the manufacture or import of PCBs, even if the chemical is being imported for destruction.

The military has stores of the aging PCB-contaminated equipment in Belgium, Germany, Italy, Japan, Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United Kingdom.

Some of that hazardous material is being shipped to other countries for disposal, but they are increasingly reluctant to take it. Compounding the problem is the fact that the U.S. hasn't ratified the Basel Convention, a treaty among 155 countries that governs the movement of hazardous wastes across national boundaries.

To date, the U.S. still has not joined the agreement because of domestic political and industrial wrangling, and the TSCA import ban remains in effect.

In 1999, the military asked Congress to build it a passage around the law.

Doing so would "avoid exposing the United States to criticism for not accepting its own PCB waste while disposing of it in other countries," the Under Secretary of Defense for Acquisitions and Technology wrote to the EPA and a half-dozen chairing legislators. Congress did not change the law. The military can still import it if the EPA grants two special one-year waivers - one for Japan, the other for Wake Island, an American territory in the Pacific Ocean. Those waivers, applied for in 2001, could come any day, EPA officials said Friday.

"It's a headquarters decision," said Carl Terry, of the EPA. "It hasn't been made yet, but it is pretty close."

"We would like to accept the responsibility for our excess equipment from foreign countries," Hooper said. "It's our equipment and we have that obligation." Regardless of the EPA's decision, in four days the first shipments to Pell City from Yokota Air Base will begin, and in an ironic circle of events, America's PCBs will return to where they were born.