DURHAM, N.C.—On a summer afternoon in Burton Park, hip-hop throbs from a car stereo over the backbeat of a basketball slapping on concrete. The sun bakes a grid of identical brick buildings, whose wheezing window air conditioners can barely keep pace with the 96-degree heat. Three young boys laugh and shout as they speed down the sidewalk on their bikes.
They stop and point at a creek. It lies stagnant behind an orange snow fence smothered in kudzu.
“You can’t go in there,” one of the boys blurts. He pulls the collar of his T-shirt over his nose. “It stinks.”
Two years ago, in August 2023, the city fenced off the creek in east Durham after chemical distribution company Brenntag Mid-South detected high levels of acetone, toluene and ethanol in water at its property edge a half-mile upstream.
Early this year, Durham City Manager Bo Ferguson contacted the Environmental Protection Agency’s regional office in Atlanta for help. He wrote on Feb. 12 that “given the long history of industrial uses and contamination of the premises, we believe that the US EPA is best equipped to collaborate with the City and Brenntag Mid-South in improving conditions.”
Initially, the EPA was alarmed by Ferguson’s information. But two days after he sent his letter, EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin announced mass layoffs at the agency. Within a month Zeldin had eliminated the Office of Environmental Justice and External Civil Rights, which was expanded under President Joe Biden.
The goal of the office was to better protect communities like McDougald Terrace, which is bisected by the contaminated creek, from pollution and environmental harms, and to recognize that racism is at the heart of environmental injustice.
Census data show the McDougald Terrace neighborhood is 99 percent Black or Latino, and 46 percent low-income.
It’s unclear if the EPA under the Trump administration will assist Durham in addressing pollution at the Brenntag plant, and if so, to what extent. It will be an important test of the EPA’s willingness to hold polluters accountable under the Trump administration, especially as they impact environmental-justice communities.
An EPA spokesperson told Inside Climate News the agency “is continuing to coordinate with the City of Durham and NCDEQ to understand and evaluate options to address the city’s environmental concerns at the Brenntag Mid-South facility.”
A Brenntag spokesperson told Inside Climate News that the issues affecting the creek “are complex and may be the result of multiple sources that are not yet known with certainty. Brenntag has taken numerous steps in close coordination with the City of Durham to help address these issues.”
“Brenntag has maintained active communication with and to the city—across status reports, meetings and ad-hoc communications—since 2023,” a company spokesperson said. This has included quarterly reports since June 2023, monthly reporting on water sampling, since May 2024, additional ad-hoc groundwater and surface reports, and numerous calls and meetings with city officials.
Corie Hlavaty, a member of the Durham Environmental Affairs Board, which advises the city and county on environmental matters, says state and federal regulators must intervene.
“Durham residents should know this is a serious pollution issue that is beyond the capacity of our local stormwater and water quality agencies,” Hlavaty said.
DEQ also bears some responsibility. For nearly 30 years, the agency failed to regulate stormwater discharge from the site, state emails show, even though it knew about the persistent pollution and risks to the downstream drinking water supply in Jordan Lake.
State officials lost paperwork and at least twice failed to follow up with Brenntag on missing information needed to complete its application.
Meanwhile, city officials pleaded with the state for help. In 2008 John Cox, a water quality director with the city’s stormwater division, told state regulators in an email they “must take a more active role in addressing issues at this site, including contaminated groundwater.”
Residents downstream “have been severely impacted by the odor,” Cox wrote. “This has become an environmental justice issue.”
Smells Like Dead Bodies
The contamination at the Brenntag site has long plagued the neighborhood, even before the company bought its predecessor, Southchem, in 2001.
Since at least the mid-1990s, high levels of at least a dozen chemicals have been detected in the groundwater and in stormwater runoff at the property. Under both owners, there have been spills. Inspectors have found dented, rusted and leaking barrels of chemicals, state records show.
Multiple years of sampling show contaminants have intermittently entered the creek, which runs through Burton Park, and passes by an elementary school, a playground and a community recreation center. It skirts several homes and runs through McDougald Terrace, the oldest and largest public housing community in Durham.
At times—as recently as April, city records show—pollution flowing from Brenntag’s outfalls has turned the water black, as if it were ink.
The creek often reeks. “Smells have been so bad at times,” a state environmental specialist wrote in 2004, “Durham police have been called in to look for dead bodies.”
The residents of McDougald Terrace, many of them children, are chronically exposed to pollution. They breathe diesel fumes from a major railroad and the Durham Freeway, which flank their neighborhood. They’re exposed to hazardous air pollutants, particulate matter and other harmful emissions from nearby industrial sources, according to state records.
The area ranks among the top 5 percent in the state in terms of proximity to hazardous waste sites, federal data shows. Neighborhood residents live in a vulnerable zone, designated by the EPA as being at risk of harm by a chemical release from facilities that handle extremely hazardous substances.
That includes Brenntag. With around 75 employees, the Pettigrew site in Durham handles approximately 300 types of chemicals and ingredients that are classified as both non-hazardous and hazardous, including those classified as toxic, corrosive, cancer-causing and flammable, state records show.
Until last year, Brenntag had two state permits, one for air and another regulating its groundwater treatment system. It did not have a state stormwater permit, which regulates runoff from the surface of a property. Such a permit contains limits on the types and amounts of chemicals that can be released, among other requirements.
Brenntag didn’t receive one from the state until early 2024, more than two decades after it bought Southchem. Inside Climate News could find no evidence that Southchem ever had such a permit, either.
The reasons why Brenntag and its predecessor got a pass from the state are bewildering. In 1996, someone at the agency lost the application paperwork for a stormwater permit, emails show. In the early to mid-2000s, agency officials disagreed about the type of permit required. The company reapplied for a stormwater permit in 2005, “but heard nothing,” according to state emails.
Brenntag again applied for a stormwater permit in 2011—a requirement of a consent order with the state. But the company didn’t update its application as the state requested; the state didn’t follow up, so the application lay dormant for 12 years.
A Brenntag spokesperson said the company in 2024 sealed off underground pipes that fed the creek and earlier this summer installed a second pump to prevent runoff from entering or leaving the property during heavy rain. Although Brenntag has a state permit to discharge stormwater, it began shipping it offsite in 2023, at the city’s direction.
Until this year, the Division of Water Resources, which regulates the state’s surface waters, including the creek, was “unaware of the history of problems and wanted more information,” according to a city presentation this spring to the Environmental Affairs Board.
A DEQ spokesperson told Inside Climate News that DWR has since opened an investigation into Brenntag. Its staff conducted water quality sampling July 24 at several locations, including immediately upstream of Burton Elementary School and the park for volatile organic compounds and other pollutants. Staff didn’t sample the main stem of the creek in McDougald Terrace, the spokesperson said, because it is fenced off.
Hundreds of Chemicals
Brenntag is about a mile and a half from downtown Durham, across several pairs of railroad tracks from Old East Durham, a historic Black neighborhood. The offices are in a long two-story brick building with arched windows covered in red wood, remnants of its original use as a cotton mill, and then a box factory. On a recent morning, a sign near the gate noted the company had gone 3,696 days without a lost-time injury.
Behind metal gates and about 100 yards off Pettigrew Street lie a stretch of concrete buildings with a few notches for windows, giving the facility the appearance of a prison. A rail spur enters here, where train cars ship millions of pounds of bulk chemicals to and from Brenntag each year, including sulfuric acid, epoxy and solvents.
Brenntag also receives, stores and distributes non-bulk chemicals, such as ammonia and chloroform, via truck.
Because Brenntag routinely handles millions of pounds of hazardous chemicals each year, it must file paperwork with the EPA under the agency’s Risk Management Program, as well as with state and local emergency management officials.
The company’s most recent filing to the state for the 2024 reporting year spans 350 pages and itemizes the chemicals, their quantities and concentrations, as well as potential health effects depending on the level of exposure: cancer, eye and skin irritation, reproductive and respiratory harm, genetic mutations.
Chemicals with those potential health hazards have been found in the groundwater at the Brenntag facility at levels hundreds of times higher than state standards, including cobalt, acetone, lead and benzo(a)pyrene. Concentrations of a likely carcinogen, 1,4-dioxane, has been detected at 770 times what the state considers safe if it were to enter the creek.
Acetone might be bypassing a remediation system, according to a publicly available report written in 2023 by a Brenntag environmental consultant. A subsequent report in 2024 emphasized that further analysis was necessary to ensure “offsite groundwater contamination is not spread to other nearby properties.”
This past January, Brenntag consultants posited that the source of the contaminants in the creek are mostly likely stormwater runoff at the facility and groundwater infiltration.
Contractors for the company theorize that some of the contaminated groundwater is a legacy of the textile industry and predates Brenntag. From 1885 to 1937, long before there were federal and state environmental regulations, the Durham Cotton Manufacturing Co. used industrial lagoons and unlined landfills to hold and dispose of its waste.
Removing the source of contamination is a widely accepted method of reducing or eliminating its spread. If Brenntag were to do that, though, it would likely be voluntarily. City officials said DEQ told them the agency can’t legally require Brenntag to “perform extra work to mitigate contamination from buried waste” disposed of by the cotton mill.
There have been several incidents in which Brenntag has mishandled chemicals, which could contribute to the contaminated stormwater runoff. In March 2022, the state inspected the facility to determine whether it needed a stormwater permit. Some barrels that stored chemicals were lying on their side, inspection records show. Others were dented, and “an unknown liquid appeared to be leaking in the containment area.”
“There didn’t appear to be sufficient barriers or precautions to protect each chemical outside from being accidentally punctured, spilled or otherwise released to the stormwater system,” the inspector wrote. “A permit is required and an updated application package should be submitted as soon as possible.”
This past April, state inspectors visited Brenntag again, in response to a complaint. They found old, steel drums with rust that had “compromised the container.” Other drums “weren’t securely fastened or even properly closed.”
State inspectors visited Brenntag’s Durham facility in April and found several violations. One drum was under pressure (left), indicated by a bulging lid, and a barrel of flammable solvents was rusting (right). Credit: N.C. Department of Environmental Quality
The inspector saw “caustic materials” and stains on the asphalt, possibly the result of spills as the chemicals were being transferred via hoses from the rail car. The hoses were stored on the ground with “caustic materials evident inside the ends of the hoses and splashed on the asphalt,” the report said.
Regardless of the source, Brenntag is legally required to prevent or control contaminants from leaving its property. Brenntag retrofitted parts of the plant in 2010 under the consent order with the state.
City officials repeatedly told Brenntag to investigate the discharge and shut off any conduits between the property and the creek. The company finally did so last year.
A Community Burdened by Pollution
One afternoon this July, after 10 days of heat and no rain, the creek in Burton Park was barely more than a series of mosquito-infested puddles disjointed by bars of silt. Empty beer cans littered the creek bed.
During a historic drought in 2007, there was too little rainfall to dilute what was emanating from the plant. “The impacts to the stream and to water quality are unacceptable,” Cox, a water quality director with the city’s stormwater division, wrote at the time to Brenntag.
“The city has previously agreed to a phased approach to addressing this issue. Our patience with this approach is wearing thin, given the lack of progress and the horrible job of [Brenntag] communicating with the public. This has remained unresolved for far too long. It is not going to go away.”
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McDougald Terrace was built from 1954 to 1959, one of two then-new segregated public housing complexes in the city. The community was in a redlined area, so named for the racially discriminatory federal maps that shaded the boundaries of Black, immigrant and poor neighborhoods in red and labeled them “hazardous.”
The Federal Housing Administration would not back loans on properties in Black neighborhoods because government officials believed home values would decline over the term of the mortgage. Although the racist practice was outlawed in 1968, academic studies have shown decades of disinvestment have created inequities that persist today.
Nationwide, residents of formerly redlined neighborhoods are exposed to multiple environmental hazards and more pollution, the consequence of segregationist land-use policies, according to a University of Michigan study released this year.
That trend is true in Durham. The neighborhoods near the Brenntag plant rank among the highest in the state for proximity and exposure to pollution sources: hazardous waste facilities, underground petroleum storage tanks, cars, diesel trucks and more, according to the EPA’s EJScreen tool.
In the census block group containing Brenntag and McDougald Terrace, children’s asthma hospitalization rates are four times the state average, according to public health data. Residents also have lower life expectancy and higher rates of heart disease.
Most of the homes in the neighborhood were built before 1978, when the EPA outlawed lead-based paint for residential use. In the McDougald Terrace neighborhood, not only could children be exposed to lead indoors, but also from the bed of the contaminated creek.
Sampling from 2023 showed creek sediment contained lead. Although the levels were below the EPA’s residential standards, there is no safe threshold for lead exposure; the EPA has set a goal of zero.
After World War II and until 1985, Durham’s predominantly white leadership enacted zoning policies to steer hazardous or polluting industries to the city’s predominantly Black east side, according to an analysis by Andrew Whittemore, an associate professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.
“The city council may have only been favoring industry’s return to sections of the city where textile mills had long stood vacant,” Whittemore wrote. “However, the new industries, unlike the mills, employed smaller workforces and were involved in hazardous uses, including chemical storage and manufacture.”
Within a mile of McDougald Terrace are two concrete plants, two scrap yards, at least five hazardous waste sites, including the remnants of now-shuttered chemical companies, and a half-dozen areas where oil or gasoline tanks have leaked or spilled, state data shows.
Several chemical accidents have occurred in the neighborhood. In 2020, sulfuric acid from a railcar parked at Brenntag sprayed on vehicles on the nearby Durham Freeway. One person had her window open and was hit in the face. The next year, a forklift driver at the plant accidentally hit a plastic container and spilled five to 10 gallons of hydrochloric acid.
In 1983, a barrel of butyl acetate ruptured at Armageddon Chemicals, just across the tracks from the current Brenntag site, prompting an evacuation of hundreds of people.
Three years later, one of the most serious chemical accidents in the city occurred at Brenntag’s predecessor, Southchem. Three tractor-trailers carrying industrial chemicals exploded, according to media reports. Six hundred families had to flee the immediate area, and a chemical cloud drifted over downtown.
Small Fines, Big Profits
In early August, rain swelled the creek. Its current surged across the rocks, washed through an abandoned bicycle and carried the empty beer cans downstream. Behind the snow fence and along the banks, a feral tangle of invasive plants—lady’s thumb, mimosas and tree of heaven—glistened with raindrops.
When the city initially cordoned off the creek, officials posted signs in Spanish and English warning parkgoers not to wade or play in the water. But after two years, the placards are gone.
At the McDougald Terrace office, people behind the service counter said they weren’t aware of the contamination. One person didn’t even know a creek existed.
The city is still awaiting word from the EPA. Meanwhile, city officials cited Brenntag in June for illegally discharging an excess flow of stormwater and failing to complete corrective actions from violations issued three years ago.
A city spokesperson told Inside Climate News that “we are exploring all legal and regulatory options.”
Since 2022, the state and city have fined Brenntag just $3,500 for its discharges; last year the company recorded gross profits of more than $4 billion, according to investor statements.
“Brenntag needs to be held more accountable for the pollution associated with this facility,” said Hlavaty of the Environmental Affairs Board.
On Aug. 4, Durham City Council approved spending up to $400,000 on a consultant to track pollutants in two creeks, including the one in Burton Park, to their source. The money would also cover expenses for public outreach, according to the contract.
“Residents living around Burton Park have lived with decades of underinvestment, environmental injustices and industrial encroachment,” City Councilman Nate Baker told Inside Climate News. “We cannot tolerate this any longer. The leak of toxins into the creek running through the park must stop and the creek must be remediated as quickly as possible with those responsible paying for the costs they have already levied on the community.”
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Lisa Sorg is the North Carolina reporter for Inside Climate News. A journalist for 30 years, Sorg covers energy, climate environment and agriculture, as well as the social justice impacts of pollution and corporate malfeasance.
She has won dozens of awards for her news, public service and investigative reporting. In 2022, she received the Stokes Award from the National Press Foundation for her two-part story about the environmental damage from a former missile plant on a Black and Latinx neighborhood in Burlington. Sorg was previously an environmental investigative reporter at NC Newsline, a nonprofit media outlet based in Raleigh. She has also worked at alt-weeklies, dailies and magazines. Originally from rural Indiana, she lives in Durham, N.C.
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