Newport, Tennessee
I am about to retire, and came across some photos when I was clearing out a drawer at work. Remember when photos were things you could put in a drawer?
These date from a business trip I took in the late nineties to Newport, Tennessee. Myself and a guy we will call Pete were visiting a company called Flura Corporation.
A US businessman had been given a large quantity of a certain perfluorocarbon in lieu of a debt, and he had approached my company about it. This liquid is used as a coolant, and some of it may have been used for the Manhattan Project (not itself radioactive though!). The businessman approached us as we have experience purifying and marketing the compound, but it was felt it would be better if the work was done in the US. Hence, two of us went to see if Flura Corporation had the capability to do the job.
Back in the day we had no internet; if you wanted to order a fine chemical, you looked in a catalogue. Aldrich was the big one, but Flura Corporation had their own; I had seen it, maybe even used it previously. It seemed perfectly respectable...
Nashville is perhaps the most famous place in Tennessee. Newport is the opposite end of it. Look at it on Google Street View, you feel it would be a great place to film the zombie apocalypse. I do not recall it being that run down then, but it really had nothing to recommend it. We stayed in a motel with the rooms arranged around an inside swimming pool and it stunk of chlorine.
Flura Corporation was a little way out of the town, on top of hill, at the end of a dirt track. This shack was on the left as you drove up the road. Clearly someone's home.
Flura was sited in a large building built in the fifties or sixties. From the front it looked okay, a little impressive even. But after a while you realised there were only about half a dozen people working there in a building designed for maybe a couple of hundred.
But what was most worrying was the hundred of drums of chemicals round the back. Drums rusting away, chemicals leaking...
This is not something I am exaggerating.
EPA CONTINUES TO ADDRESS CONTAMINATION AT THE FLURA CORPORATION IN NEWPORT, COCKE COUNTY, TENNESSEE
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) continues to address contamination at Flura Chemical. During the week of October 23, 2000, EPA will begin the on-site sampling and treatment of approximately 650 cylinders over the next six to nine months. Due to the toxicity of the chemical compounds, the highest level of personal protective equipment will be required. Simultaneous operations will be scheduled for the handling, treatment, and disposal of chemical laboratory containers.
The company was run by a guy called Ed Tyczkowski. He had previously run a company called Armageddon Chemicals... After Flura folded, he became president of Fluoroco. As far as I can tell, each time he starts a new company, he leaves behind a huge mess for someone else to clean up.
... But even he was horrified by what awaited him on that isolated hilltop in Tennessee. The lab contained about 7,000 gas cylinders and other containers — many of them unlabeled and leaking — filled with hundreds of potentially deadly chemicals. Among them were phosgene, the gas responsible for 80 percent of the chemical-warfare casualties during World War I, and PFIB, 10 times more deadly than phosgene. The PFIB, it turned out, had been manufactured for the U.S. Army a decade earlier for chemical-defense research. ...
Looking back, I just did not realised how bad this was. This is me stood in front of one of the outbuildings. There was a reactor inside it, as I recall, with a capacity of a tonne or so.
Deadly gas feared missing, finally found
KNOXVILLE Several pressurized containers of a deadly gas, once feared missing, have been located at a Superfund site near Newport, environmental authorities said.
Cylinders containing perfluoroisobutylene, known as PFIB, recently were found in a nondescript box on the property of the Flura Corp. The containers of poisonous gas were placed in a specialized containment vessel dubbed Kilroy, according to Dean Ullock, on-scene coordinator for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
We discovered the additional canisters in a box that we had probably overlooked, Ullock told The Knoxville News-Sentinel.
Tyczkowski was the only person in the company with any clue about chemistry. The maybe-a-dozen employees seems to be any local he could employee cheaply - though they were certainly friendly.
This is me having a mug of water in the mess area. That looks like two bottles of beer just right of centre.
And me the analytical lab. I was trying to do a standard test method we do routinely at work, in a fume cupboard that had had a sink in it at one time. I had a narrow strip at the front about 4 inches deep to work in, with a gap behind where the sink used to be. I would guess the lab had been put in place by the previous owners of the building, and not maintained since.
I think this was a gas-liquid chromatograph (GC), I guess dating from the sixties.
I have to emphasise that we did NOT use Flura!
We also looked at another company, in South Carolina. I cannot remember their name, but they were a much more professional outfit, a stark contrast to Flura. Unfortunately, their reactors were not suitable for flammable solvents, so we could not use them either.
We had a little time for sight-seeing, but this was, I think, in November, and the weather was not great most of the time. Here I am somewhere in the Smoky Mountains...
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