Toxic Town: Cancer and Birth Defects in Somerville

The Press spent six weeks interviewing more than three dozen Somerville residents and reviewing tens of thousands of pages of railway company documents, environmental reports and medical records, as well as depositions, affidavits, sworn statements and other court documents collected from legal discovery and federal and state open-records requests with the TCEQ and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.

• Failing to provide employees with proper safety equipment when handling hazardous materials

• Spraying toxic pesticides such as creosote and pentachlorophenol throughout the facility to kill weeds and control dust

• Burning creosote-treated wood in boiler stacks at night to limit complaints from townspeople regarding the intense odor and black smoke it produced

• Destroying several truckloads of key company documents in an attempt to cover up environmental abuses.

Koppers and BNSF have denied all allegations; spokesmen for both companies declined interview requests for this story, citing the pending litigation. "...It is our position that there is no reliable scientific evidence to support their claims," BNSF spokesman Joseph Faust e-mailed the Press in a statement. "BNSF does not believe the plant is responsible for harming anyone..."

Dahlgren says there is no doubt that toxic emissions from the tie plant have directly caused numerous health problems in Somerville residents. (To view a cross-section of victims in the community, click here.)

His recommendation: shut down the schools immediately and evacuate the entire town.
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Dennis Davis worked at the Somerville tie plant for 24 years, starting in 1971 as a junior in high school. Hired on as a roustabout, he drained ditches, cleaned industrial spills and stacked 150-pound railroad ties, as needed. The work was hard but the money was good.

It was something of a family tradition. His grandfather, father, uncle and older brother all had worked there. "During the Great Depression," he says, "my grandfather used to sit under a tree outside the tie plant with a horse and mule every day just waiting for someone to get hurt so he could take his place."

Many current Somerville residents can trace their family histories back several generations to the small town and its one-time largest employer — the two are inextricably linked.

The area known today as Somerville began as a railroad boom town. It's named for Albert Somerville, a two-term Galveston mayor and first president of the ­Chicago-based Gulf, Colorado and Santa Fe Railway Company.

In the late 1880s, the GCSF extended its tracks north from Brenham, building a railroad yard, train depot and roundhouse repair shop. Somerville became a busy stop on the main line linking Chicago to Galveston and a rail spur extending through East Texas to Beaumont. The area's population grew from fewer than 100 in 1880 to more than 2,000 by 1930.

According to local lore, the railway company initially sought to base a wood-treatment plant in nearby towns such as Brenham, Lyons and Caldwell, but none of those cities wanted it. Texas Tie and Lumber Preserving Company constructed the facility in 1897 — 16 years before Somerville became incorporated as a city.

The tie plant treated materials under contract for the railway company, which bought it in 1905, changed the name to Santa Fe Tie and Lumber Preserving Company and moved operations about a mile north to its current digs along Texas State Highway 36.

The facility handled materials exclusively for its parent railway company and performed no outside business. It remained a subsidiary of the GCSF — which in 1965 merged into parent company Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe Railway, then merged again into Burlington Northern and Santa Fe Railway and was later named BNSF Railway — until Koppers Inc. purchased it in March 1995.

The Somerville tie plant today operates on 115 acres, employs 90 workers and manufactures more than one million railroad ties per year. For about three decades, from the mid-1940s to the mid-1970s, it was the nation's largest wood-treatment facility, operating on 300 acres, employing 350 and producing nearly two million ties annually.

Koppers, a publicly traded Fortune 500 company that specializes in manufacturing carbon chemicals from coal tar, had been the tie plant's main supplier of creosote. Today it sells 90 percent of the materials treated at the site to BNSF, which remains responsible for existing environmental contamination issues on the land.

The railway company for years had disposed of wastewater in unlined pits, contaminating the aquifer, says TCEQ spokesman Clawson. The state agency has overseen ongoing remediation at the facility since the early 1980s; the land beneath the plant remains listed as a federal hazardous waste site under the Resource Conservation and Recovery Act, according to Clawson.
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In the mid-1980s, when Linda Faust worked the graveyard shift as manager of the Handy Dandy convenience store, she'd duck outside for a cigarette every hour or so and watch the thick, dark clouds billow from the smokestacks at the nearby tie plant where her husband Donnie worked. The black smoke against the black sky appeared ominous, but she thought nothing of it.