By Will Atwater
Two weeks after a fire forced her and her Tobacco Street neighbors to leave their homes on the night of Jan. 31, 2022, a defiant Sabrina Webster stood before a crowd at a community meeting and posed a question.
“How in the world was Weaver Fertilizer allowed to have six hundred tons of ammonia nitrate in my backyard, and I didn’t know anything about it?”
This question still haunts her two years after the Winston Weaver Fertilizer Company’s facility caught fire less than a mile from Webster’s home in the historically Black Piney Grove community, sending clouds of smoke skyward.
Cilistine Douglas, a Tobacco Street resident whose backyard borders train tracks that separate her property from the mini-industrial park with the Weaver Fertilizer building, said she was at home with one of her grandchildren when she received notice about the fire.
“My sister called me from New York. She had more information from CNN in New York than [local station] WXII was giving me from across the street,” Douglass said.
Recently, Webster and Douglas met at Webster’s home to discuss the fire and how the community is coping. The two women were in alignment.
“I’m just as in the dark [now] as [I was] the next day after the fire,” Douglas said.
What we know
On the evening of Jan. 31, 2022, a fire started at the Winston Weaver Fertilizer Company facility, which housed 600 tons of ammonium nitrate. The fire disrupted the lives of 6,500 residents, including students on the nearby Wake Forest University campus.
People living within a two-mile radius of the plant were asked to evacuate their homes to avoid smoke and air quality concerns. Residents report that some stayed with relatives or rented hotel rooms, and a few slept in their cars until it was deemed safe to return.
Luckily, the ammonium nitrate did not explode.
It very well could have. Ammonium nitrate is used in agriculture as a nitrogen fertilizer, but it is also used to make explosives and is the main ingredient in ammonium nitrate/fuel oil. The International Association of Fire Chiefs notes the fuel is “a popular explosive, which accounts for 80 percent of the explosives used in North America.”
The danger of ammonium nitrate is well known. In 1995, Timothy McVeigh used an explosive made of ammonium nitrate and other chemicals to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. Eighteen years later, between 40 and 60 tons of ammonium nitrate at the West Fertilizer Company near Waco, Texas, exploded, an amount less than what was stored in Winston-Salem. Fifteen people died, 300 were injured and more than 500 buildings were damaged or destroyed, according to a report by Fire Rescue1, an industry trade organization.
Webster said the Winston-Salem City Council met with Winston Weaver officials soon after the West Fertilizer Company explosion.
“[The council] wanted to make sure it never happened here.”
Yet, advance warning about the potential risks of storing tons of ammonium nitrate in a residential area was insufficient to prevent what occurred on Jan. 31, 2022.
The building housing the ammonium nitrate didn’t have a sprinkler system.
The National Fire Protection Association, an organization that develops standards for storing, using and handling hazardous materials, publishes a set of Hazardous Materials Codes referred to as NFPA 400.
“The National Fire Protection Association’s Hazardous Materials Code determined fire sprinkler systems in these facilities is a must,” wrote Meghan Housewright, former director of the NFPA & Policy Institute, referring to the West and Weaver fires.
She later added: “Unfortunately, in many places, the laws in place are not this proactive. In the case of Winston-Salem, the North Carolina state fire code does not require facilities like Winston Weaver to meet NFPA 400’s requirements.”
“Ammonium Nitrate would be regulated as a Class 1 Oxidizer and a Class 3 Unstable Reactive for any new storage arrangement based on the fire code,” said Charlie Johnson, chief fire code consultant for the North Carolina Office of State Fire Marshal. “Storage that was in place prior to the adoption of the code should have been in compliance with the building code in effect at the time of construction.”
In 2013, Winston Weaver Fertilizer Company was fined nearly $18,000 for 18 citations, according to Paul Sullivan, assistant deputy commissioner at the North Carolina Department of Labor.
Hard feelings linger
“Winston-Salem treats Piney Grove just like it is — it’s a [Black] and brown community, and we get a [Black] and brown [response],” said Fernell Black, a Piney Grove resident. Black said that the Weaver Fertilizer plant would not have been placed in a more affluent area “because of the color of the community.”
Black’s assessment of Winston-Salem’s treatment of the predominantly Black Piney Grove community is rooted in history.
In 2022, Kirsten Minor, health manager at CleanAIRE NC, a nonprofit that focuses on air pollution and climate change, told NC Health News that redlining played a role in why the Weaver Fertilizer facility was built in the Piney Grove community.
“Redlining, it’s a systemic process in which communities of color were prevented from accessing housing, particularly loans, which led to Black communities and other communities of color over time being concentrated in areas where they had more exposure to environmentally polluting industries,” Minor said. “So it isn’t a story that happened overnight. This is a systemic issue that has been taking place over decades.”
Recently, Crystal Dixon, an associate professor at Wake Forest who studies racial equity and environmental justice, arrived at the same conclusion.
“You’re consistently seeing [that], every time there’s some kind of catastrophic environmental injustice, it’s always impacting low-income Black communities. And we know that’s related to redlining,” Dixon told the Old Gold & Black, the Wake Forest University student newspaper, in a recent interview about the fire.
The evacuation process remains a bone of contention for some residents. The Old Gold & Black reported that the city established a $1 million fund to help those displaced by the fire. However, the paper said that only about 10 percent of the 6,500 residents eligible applied for and received compensation.
Jacques Holiday, whose father lived on Tobacco Street when the fire occurred, said poor communication complicated the reimbursement process.
“When [officials] set up the fund, they said you wouldn’t have to [show] receipts for food or anything like that. But once they set up the fund, people had to have receipts […].”
Holiday said it “wasn’t worth the trouble” because his father moved in with him temporarily.
‘This should never have happened’
When Webster spoke at the community center two weeks after the fire, she told the audience, “We [hold] Weaver Fertilizer, the city and the state responsible because this should never have happened in a residential area.”
Environmental groups concur.
“Companies should be required to disclose the presence of ammonium nitrate at their facilities and have approved risk management plans in place to protect workers and surrounding communities,” read part of a report written by Coming Clean and the Environmental Justice Health Alliance for Chemical Policy Reform, cited in the Winston-Salem Journal in 2022.
The Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Management Program “requires facilities that use hazardous substances to develop a risk management plan,” according its website.
There are nearly 12,000 Risk Management Program facilities nationwide, but despite the risk posed by the chemical, companies storing ammonium nitrate are not required to file with the program’s registry.
When asked if ammonium nitrate should be added to the registry — especially after the deadly West Fertilizer explosion and the Winston Weaver fire — an EPA representative said the agency was “evaluating the feasibility” of including ammonium nitrate fertilizer in the registry.
The EPA had looked at the possibility of requiring registration of the chemical after the West Fertilizer explosion in 2013 and solicited public comment but “at that time, we did not propose listing ammonium nitrate,” the spokesman wrote.
Establishing trust
Callie Brown, associate professor of pediatrics at WFU School of Medicine and pediatrician at Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist, and community partners have established a multiyear research project to investigate the short- and long-term health consequences of the fertilizer plant fire on nearby residents.
The study consists of three components — an environmental assessment of the air, ground and water within a one- to two-mile radius of the fertilizer plant.
The second is “interviews with 40 residents of the community evaluating residents’ experience during and after the fire, their sense of safety, and their physical, mental and financial health after the fire,” Brown said.
The third component is a long-term study of residents using electronic health record data from Atrium Health Wake Forest Baptist.
The study will compare people living near the former plant location with two other groups — those living in comparable neighborhoods and with similar income levels and people with similar characteristics, such as age, race, ethnicity and insurance status. The research involves tracking “participants’ health and care utilization over time — before and after the fire,” Brown said.
Kyana Young, an assistant professor at the WFU Department of Engineering, is conducting the environmental assessment. Young said that during the summer of 2023, she and her graduate assistant collected soil samples from eight Piney Grove residences looking for evidence of ammonia, nitrate, phosphorus and several heavy metals.
The test results showed the levels were within standards established by the EPA.
Young plans to move forward with a long-term environmental study using the 2023 results as the baseline, sampling the soil every six months for the next three to five years. The goal is to see whether the heavy metals in the soil are increasing or decreasing over time, Young said.
She will also collect water samples from two private wells located in the community in March.
When asked how the community is doing two years after the fire, Karen Blue, a Piney Grove Baptist Church assistant pastor, was cautiously optimistic.
“Time usually is a great healer, and I think that people are healing from it,” she said. But she said there are more questions being raised.
“People that I talked to are concerned about the future and the effect [the fire] will have on generations to come. Is the ground contaminated? Is the water contaminated? How does it affect the drinking water?”
KEEP UP WITH THE LATEST
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
