In June, Koch Industries, the conglomerate owned by the billionaires Charles and David Koch, launched a new corporate public-relations campaign called “End the Divide,” to advance the notion that Koch Industries is deeply concerned by growing inequality in America. An ad for the campaign urges viewers to “look around,” as an image of an imposing white mansion is replaced by one of blighted urban streets. “America is divided,” an announcer intones, with “government and corporations picking winners and losers, rigging the system against people, creating a two-tiered society with policies that fail our most vulnerable.”
The message was surprising, coming from a company owned by two of the richest men in the world, who have spent millions of dollars pushing political candidates and programs that favor unfettered markets and oppose government intervention on behalf of the poor. But no trouble appeared to have been spared in the commercial’s creation. It features a cast of downtrodden Americans of all colors and creeds. To portray corporate greed, it includes a shot of a Wall Street sign, followed by a smug businessman looking down at the camera, dressed in a flashy suit and tie. But, according to Dickie Guice, who worked as a safety coördinator at a large Koch-owned paper plant in Arkansas, the company need not have gone to such lengths. Instead of scouting America for examples of social neglect, the Kochs could have turned the cameras on their own factory.
This summer, Guice decided to speak out about the paper mill in Crossett, a working-class town of some fifty-two hundred residents ten miles north of the Louisiana border.* The mill is run by the paper giant Georgia-Pacific, which has been owned by Koch Industries since 2005. According to E.P.A. records, it emits more than 1.5 million pounds of toxic chemicals each year, including numerous known carcinogens. Georgia-Pacific says that it has permits to operate the mill as it does, and disputes that it is harming local health and safety. But as far back as the nineteen-nineties, people living near the plant have described noxious odors and corrosive effluents that have forced them to stay indoors, as well as what seems to them unusually high rates of illness and death. Speaking by phone from his home, in Sterlington, Louisiana, Guice pointed the finger directly at the mill’s owners, and described a corporate coverup of air and water pollution that he says is “poisoning” the predominantly African-American community.
Guice made his début as a whistle-blower in a new documentary film, “Company Town,” about the pollution of Crossett, which premièred in June at the L.A. Film Festival. Natalie Kottke-Masocco, the film’s director, and Erica Sardarian, its co-director, spent some five years in Crossett, and over time they coaxed Guice to go on camera. “I was warned that I’d never get hired again,” he told me, when I asked why he was coming forward. “But I thought, What the heck, what are they going to do, kill me? It had to be done.”
As Guice tells it, he started working at the Crossett plant in February, 2011, when Larco Inc., a local heavy-equipment and construction firm, where he worked, was contracted by Georgia-Pacific to handle disposal of the paper plant’s waste. According to Guice, the contract called for his company to spread two hundred thousand cubic yards of “ash” dredged from the Georgia-Pacific paper mill’s sediment ponds across four hundred acres of property that it owned in the town. He says that Georgia-Pacific supervisors told him to spread the waste in layers in pits that were sometimes forty feet deep, and then to cover it with six inches of dirt, “so that it looked like a regular piece of land.” The land often flooded, Guice told me, and runoff would flow into trenches that fed into a local creek, which ran behind a residential area. He said that Georgia-Pacific would also dump “big plastic tanks” of untreated liquid waste. “It looks like brown liquor,” he said. “And steam comes up from it, sometimes all day.” Within a few months of starting at the paper plant, Guice said that he fell ill from exposure to the waste, developing respiratory problems. “My doctor told me to get out of there,” he said. “But I needed that job.”
After a year, Guice, who has a certification from the Occupational Safety & Health Administration in environmental safety, was promoted to the position of safety coördinator, again as a Larco contractor to Georgia-Pacific. In his new post, he was given air-quality monitoring equipment, which he told me showed “deadly levels of hydrogen sulfide,” a foul-smelling, colorless gas that has proven carcinogenic to rats and mice. Guice took measurements in the morning, midday, and evening, and documented them all. When he told the Georgia-Pacific supervisors that he was getting readings so high that they indicated a potential for immediate illness and death, he says the company blamed his equipment. After he protested this, they offered to build a roof over the fields where the waste was being spread, but he told them that this would be like building a toxic gas chamber. “They told me it was my problem. They knew it was dangerous, but their attitude was: keep your mouth shut, do the job, and don’t get in anyone’s business,” according to Guice. Eventually, a company official took her own readings, which he says confirmed his own. At this point, the company decided to build a huge stainless-steel chain-link fence around the perimeter of its property, “so you can’t see where the work is,” he told me. Once he was able to get employment elsewhere, Guice, who had been contacted by the filmmakers behind “Company Town,” decided to blow the whistle.
Reached for comment, Kelly Ferguson, the director of public affairs for Georgia-Pacific, said that the company has not seen the documentary, but, from what it has heard about Guice’s statements, “we disagree” with his “claims and misrepresentations.” Ferguson wrote in an e-mail, “Mr. Guice was never an employee of Georgia-Pacific. He only worked for the contractor that hauled and spread the wood ash and paper fiber sludge.” Ferguson also stressed that the company’s disposal of its waste is “permitted and has been inspected by state and federal regulatory agencies.” “I don’t know where Mr. Guice’s information comes from,” he said.
To dispute the claim that the mill was harming the health of residents, Ferguson cited a report released in June by the Arkansas Department of Health, in conjunction with the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, that found no evidence that the drinking water in Crossett posed a public-health hazard. An accompanying study of the air is pending. A state study showed that the county in which Crossett is located did not have a higher cancer rate than the rest of Arkansas. But Kottke-Masocco says that the water study tested only the public water system, not wells used by families on streets closest to the mill, where clusters of illness have caused local alarm. On one short street, South Penn Road, eleven of the fifteen houses have been stricken with fatal cases of cancer, as I reported in my book “Dark Money.”
Guice may be the first eyewitness to speak out and on the record, but he is not the first to raise concerns about the Koch-owned factory in Crossett. In 2014, the left-leaning documentary maker Robert Greenwald released the muckraking film “Koch Brothers Exposed,” which showed the human toll of the pollution in Crossett. Greenwald interviewed David Bouie, a black pastor who lives on Penn Road, and who has organized community action, who asked, “Why is the cancer rate so high? Does the paper plant have anything to do with it?” (Kottke-Masocco, the “Company Town” co-director, worked with Greenwald on this segment of his film, and decided to stay on in Crossett to dig deeper.) Last April, Newsweek published an article titled, “How a Paper Plant in Arkansas Is Allegedly Poisoning the People of Crossett,” which included an interview with a local man named Leroy Patton, who had seen almost his entire family die of cancer. A Georgia-Pacific spokesman assured the magazine that the plant was operating legally, and in compliance with a permit issued to it by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality, but Newsweek noted that an E.P.A. inspection last year found thirty-three areas in which “Georgia-Pacific was noncompliant with federal laws and dozens of other ‘areas of concern.’ ” Jennifer King, a public-affairs manager with Georgia-Pacific, told Newsweek that the company was working to address these issues.
Guice says that another paper mill owned by Georgia-Pacific that he worked for, in Port Hudson, Louisiana, met high environmental standards. “It can be done,” he said. But Guice noted that Crossett residents have limited political and economic leverage. Georgia-Pacific accounts for much of the town’s employment. “If Georgia-Pacific were to die, Crossett would die. Georgia-Pacific is a big taxpayer in Arkansas, too. That’s why everybody turns their back on this,” he told me.
Slowly, however, with pressure building from Bouie and others, Crossett’s plight has begun to attract more attention. In May, with legal assistance from the Environmental Law Clinic at Tulane University, two environmental groups, the Ouachita Riverkeeper and Louisiana Environmental Action Network, filed petitions with the E.P.A. under Title VI of the 1964 Civil Rights Act demanding that it take action against the plant; they argue that its waste disposal disproportionately affects nearby African-American neighborhoods.
The images of Crossett’s African-American residents wheezing as they struggle with industrial pollution in their own back yards, as captured in “Company Town,” could have aptly illustrated the Kochs’ “End the Divide” campaign. But, of course, these particular disadvantaged Americans were omitted from the commercial. “It really disturbed me,” Kottke-Masocco said, recalling how she felt when she first saw the new Koch ad. “The two-tiered, winner-take-all, divided system that the Kochs say they want to end has been directly created by the financial influence of corporations like theirs on politics.”
“Crossett, Arkansas,” she said, “is the perfect example.”
_*Owing to a typographical error, an earlier version of this sentence misstated Crossett’s population.
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