The Hydrazine Plant at Saltville

           Calcium carbonate, and magnesium carbonate (the magnesium occurs naturally within the limestone) and various compounds of hydroxide are the natural waste products of these processes.  Taken together, they are nearly as erosive as lye, to which they are related.  This mixture was called ‘sludge’.  The river was rerouted so as to create a large bottom on the north side.  Earthen dams were built there to retain the sludge.  The highest dam was 100 feet high. A group of houses, called Palmertown, was built across the river from this sludge pond dam.  On Christmas Eve 1924 this dam gave way, releasing the sludge through a break 300 feet wide.  Nineteen people died in this wall of lye like sludge.  The valley of the North Fork was whitewashed for miles downstream. 

           In the 1960’s, even as the National Space and Aeronautics Administration of the Federal Government was encouraging Olin to make hydrazine, whose manufacture produced the sludge, another Federal agency, the Environmental Protection Agency, was becoming concerned about mercury.  Mercury had been used for centuries without concern for a wide variety of processes, such as tanning, felt manufacture, laxatives, syphilis treatment, and for thermometers and pressure gauges.  Children played with it, “turning” pennies into silver in the palms of their hands.  But in the 1960’s it was discovered that the simplest of organic molecules, methane, would unite with mercury to make methylmercury, and that this substance was taken in by a wide variety of microscopic organisms, which in their turn were eaten by snails, crawfish, and minnows, which in turn were eaten by fish, which were eaten by humans.  The mercury caused dementia, rashes, and death.   

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