“In late September,” Timothy Pratt writes in Capital & Main, “a massive billow of smoke from a chemical fire spread over metro Atlanta, lingering for weeks and prompting national news coverage. The smoke has cleared, but the anger has not dissipated in Conyers, the city of 20,000 where the fire occurred, and in surrounding areas… Smoke from the blaze left some residents with breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness and skin rashes in the days that followed, along with a deepening worry about their community’s safety… The fire was pool-chemical company BioLab’s fourth in the last two decades, a track record that has created what one observer described as “generational rage” among residents.” In this installment of our ongoing series Sacrificed—where we speak to people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s “sacrifice zones”—we speak with Hannah Loyd, Christina O’Connor, and Jeramie Julian: three residents who live near, and have been directly affected by, the September fire at the Conyers BioLab facility.

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Transcript

The following is a rushed transcript and may contain errors. A proofread version will be made available as soon as possible.

Hannah Loyd:

I am Hannah. I’m originally from Conyers, Georgia. I grew up there and went to school there and graduated there. When I graduated, we moved to Oxford, Georgia, and then when I got married, my husband and I moved to Walnut Grove, Georgia, and we have a 3-year-old daughter and we were affected on the day of the fire with the chemical cloud shifting with the weather. And the fire was said to have been put out, but the cloud was said to have shifted and it was coming in our direction. So we knew then that something wasn’t right after we had already planned to just stay inside for the day anyways, we had planned to go to some festivals and stuff, but we saw on social media and on the news about them being on fire again. So we just decided to stay inside and did not know that the cloud was going to shift in our direction until we were made aware on the news that it had shifted.

Christina O’Connor:

My name is Christina and I did not grow up in Conyers, Covington area, but I moved to Covington in about the first week in August. I saw it was going to be a fresh start for me and kind of where I’m at in my life and my rebuild season. And so I found a beautiful seven acre home and was able to rent that and was just living life and enjoying my piece. When on September 29th, the biolab explosion happened and it was just me renting. I had roommates, I had my kitty cat there at the house in Covington, but I had left to go to work had, at the time I owned a cleaning company and I heard about the fire at 5:00 AM I saw something about it and I thought, Biolab, what’s that? I was that a science thing? What is the biolab? I didn’t even know what that was really.

But I went out and I went to work and it was close to Conyers. It was in Covington, but closer to Conyers. But I was still kind of unaware. I was unaware of what happened. And so I went to work and my clients and I left. And on the way home, I stopped at Publix and this was in Covington, and I got out and I could just feel like people were just looking in the sky. And then I got out of the car and I’m like, someone just feel weird. And I got out and I could smell the smell that I couldn’t really place what exactly it was. And I was like, well, that’s odd. And I still didn’t really realize, okay, what is this? What’s going on? And so I went home and my roommates were outside. There were a couple of dogs that were actually lost, and we were walking around the neighborhood trying to find their home.

They were walking around, so we were walking around outside, unbeknownst to us in these chemicals, they were coming because were coming towards the section of Covington, and I’m closer to Hannah over in that area, and I’m probably, I don’t know, 20 miles. So yeah, so after we walked around outside, tried to find the dogs at home, I got back inside and a couple of hours went by and I was hearing things I guess on the news or social media. I don’t really watch the news, but I was hearing about this chemical fire, and then I started hearing people, okay, turn off your air. And so we did that. We turned off our air, but by this point it was very strong outside. The smell was strong and by this point I could taste and feel it inside the home, inside the home. And so I told my roommate, we got to get out of here.

They were telling people shelter in place. They were telling people, I think to evacuate, but my instincts told me, we got to go. This is in the house. I can’t stay here. And so we ended up leaving and it kind of goes from there. I evacuated and I can tell more from my perspective as far as driving through it. I can tell you what happened to my car. I can tell you trying to find a city to escape to because it was kind of like back and forth. I tried to go to McDonough to my daughter’s, but it kind of followed me the way that the chemical plume, the chemical, they moved around. They’re not just contained to Rockdale County. So they moved all around. And so I tried to go back actually, but it was just too bad. I couldn’t stay there.

Jeramie Julian:

Hi, my name is Jeremy. I remember hearing about, I don’t watch the news, but I remember hearing about the fire and I grew up in Rockdale, graduated high school, and all I could think was, oh, well, here we go again. It is something that’s happened three or four times before, and I live far enough away that it didn’t really affect me the day of, but I kept seeing it on social media that I followed the progress of it and people were having to evacuate their homes, and it was just like this horrible scenario. But again, I didn’t live close enough that it affected me at the moment until one morning I was outside when there was a comet that was close enough that you could see it as one of those, see it every 80,000 years from Earth kind of things. And my eyes started burning after a while and I can’t smell from a previous injury that I’ve sustained, I can’t smell, and I didn’t really think too much of it then just dry eyes for whatever reason. But the burn didn’t go away, it just stayed with me. So I wound up digging around on Facebook and one of the Morgan County Facebook pages and started seeing multiple people talking about being able to smell the chemicals and smell the chemicals. And that’s basically where the beginning of my issues, health issues started from it. And I’m a good 40 to 45 mile drive away from Biolab and it got here and it’s affected me

Maximillian Alvarez:

All. Welcome everyone to another episode of Working People, a podcast about the lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles of the working class today, brought to you in partnership within these Times magazine and the Real News Network produced by Jules Taylor and made possible by the support of listeners like You Working People is a proud member of the Labor Radio Podcast network. If you’re hungry for more worker and labor focused shows like ours, follow the link in the show notes and go check out the other great shows in our network and please support the work that we’re doing here at Working People because we can’t keep going without you. Share our episodes with your coworkers and friends and family members. Leave positive reviews of the show on Spotify and Apple Podcasts and reach out to us if you have recommendations for working folks you’d like us to talk to or stories you’d like us to investigate, and please support the work that we do at The Real News by going to the real news.com/donate, especially if you want to see more reporting from the front lines of struggle around the US and across the world.

My name is Maximillian Alvarez, and today we’ve got another crucial installment of our ongoing series sacrificed where we speak with people living, working, and fighting for justice in America’s sacrifice zones. Now, sacrifice zones broadly understood are areas where people have been left to live in conditions that threaten life itself from toxic industrial pollution to the deadly intensifying effects of manmade climate change in a more just and less cruel society. The very concept of a sacrifice zone would not exist, and yet in America in the 21st century, after decades of deregulation and public disinvestment, more working class communities are becoming sacrifice zones, and more of us are being set up for sacrifice at the altars of corporate greed and systematized government abandonment. If you’ve been listening to our reporting over the past year and a half, you already know this. You’ve heard it in the interviews that we’ve done with the chemically poisoned residents living in and around East Palestinian, Ohio where a Norfolk southern bomb train derailed two years ago.

You’ve heard it in the stories of working class residents of Curtis Bay and other South Baltimore neighborhoods that have been poisoned for generations by rail giant CSX transportation, as well as dozens of other toxic polluters concentrated in their part of the city. You’ve heard it in the firsthand accounts of people on the ground in Asheville, North Carolina, whose lives have been forever changed by the devastation of Hurricane Helene in September. And in this episode, you’re going to hear it from three folks living near Conyers, Georgia and who have all been affected by the disastrous and frankly, nightmare inducing chemical fire at the Biolab facility in Conyers, which is about a half hour outside of Atlanta. Now, I know you all saw the photos and videos of the fire when it first happened back in September because as soon as the fire broke out on September 29th, so many of you sent me emails and dms about it.

And I just want to say I really appreciate you guys doing that. And please, please continue to send us tips and possible connections so that we can keep reporting on vital stories like this. As always, the most important thing here is that people out there hear directly from affected residents themselves and that we are lifting up their stories and their voices, and we’re going to turn back to our incredible panel of residents in a minute. But before we do that, just to make sure that you have all the background context you need on the fire, I’m going to read at length from a great piece that will link in the show notes that Timothy Pratt recently published in the publication, capital and Maine. Now in the piece, which is titled Chemical Fire at Atlanta Area Plant Sparks Local Movement against Biolab. Pratt writes, in late September, a massive billow of smoke from a chemical fire spread over metro Atlanta lingering for weeks and prompting national news coverage.

The smoke has cleared, but the anger has not dissipated. In Conyers, the city of 20,000 where the fire occurred and in surrounding areas, smoke from the blaze left some residents with breathing difficulties, headaches, dizziness, and skin rashes in the days that followed along with a deepening worry about their community safety. The fire was pool chemical company Biolabs forth in the last two decades, a track record that has created what one observer described as generational rage among residents. Some are now turning to activism for the first time joined by Atlanta area, mostly black led community groups. The population of Coner is nearly two thirds black, causing some in the community to argue that the repeated industrial accidents at the Biolab facility are an example of environmental racism. The result, an unusually fast-growing grassroots movement led by residents fed up with a company that they say has jeopardized their health and the environment for decades.

They also blame local, state, and federal authorities for failing to inform the community about the accident’s cause and impact in a timely or transparent manner. Many residents want to see the Biolab facility, which is one of the largest employers in town permanently shut down. Short of that, they seek to prevent future accidents. Biolab declined to comment directing capital in Maine to its website, which asserted the company’s commitment to supporting affected residents. The cause of the most recent fire was still under investigation as of November 1st. According to the company’s website, the response of the company and environmental regulators to the fire has been cold comfort to residents of Conyers and surrounding areas who are demanding to know if their health is at risk. Locals have been confused about the accidents, reach and immediate and long-term impacts. Rockdale County where Biolab is located, lifted shelter-in-place, orders in mid-October after the US Environmental Protection Agency reported that the accident site had been cleaned and levels of chlorine in the community’s air met federal standards.

In the days following the fire, Sally ing professor at the Georgia Tech School of Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering reported high levels of chlorine and bromine in the air galvanized by the incident. Residents of the small city and surrounding counties have gathered more than 11,000 signatures supporting a shutdown of Biolab, nearly two thirds from the Conyers area, a Facebook group called Stand Against Biolab. In Rockdale County, Georgia has attracted 1600 members. Local farmers are organizing amongst themselves, and residents are connecting with people in other communities affected by industrial disasters, including East Palestine, Ohio, which was exposed to toxic fumes after last year’s Norfolk Southern train wreck. So to talk about all of this, I sat down with Christina, Jeremy and Hannah, three residents living near the side of the Biolab Fire in Georgia. Here’s our conversation, which we recorded on December 1st, 2024.

Well, Hannah, Christina, Jeremy, I can’t thank you three enough for joining us today on the show. And I cannot express enough how truly sorry I am that you, your families and your community are going through this. As I’ve mentioned to you three already, as I mentioned in the intro, the number of people that I am connecting with, who are dealing with circumstances like the horrific circumstances you’re dealing with, the people in East Palestine, Ohio are dealing with the people in South Baltimore are dealing with. It just absolutely breaks my heart. And I just wanted to say from all of us to all of you, we are with you and we are sorry you’re going through this, but our listeners want to know what you’re going through and how they can help. And that’s what we’re going to do here today as we’ve had our listeners asking us about this since it happened in September.

And I’m so grateful to the three of you for joining us on the show and helping our listeners understand what’s really going on over there in and around Conyers, Georgia. And to just sort of extend what y’all were talking about in your introductions at the top of the episode, I wanted to go back around and ask if you could just tell us more about the day of the fire or the week of the fire. I know y’all were saying some of you live closer, some of you live farther away, but just from your vantage point when this was all first going down, could you just sort of narrate for our listeners what it was like to live through this, what you were seeing, feeling, hearing, experiencing? Hannah, let’s go back to you.

Hannah Loyd:

All right, thank you so much for having us on. So the day of the fire, I actually had gotten up kind of early and was just looking on social media and saw people posting about Biolabs on fire. And honestly, I was just thinking kind of Jeremy was like, oh gosh, they’re on fire again. What could be on fire now? So I was just kind of like, okay, this is a little bit bigger than their normal kind of little fires. So we got up and it was a Sunday and we had planned to go and do some kind of, it was the beginning of fall, so there were some fall festivals that were starting that day. And after I saw that, I was just like, we probably need to hold off on that and let’s just stay inside. This seems to be a bigger fire, so I don’t know how far this is going to spread, so we probably should stay inside.

So we stayed inside. That was in the morning, that was around nine or 10, but the fire had started around five, and I had already known about it. And then my daughter, she’s three, she needed milk. So this was around three. I was like, I’m just going to ride to the gas station real quick in Walnut Grove, and we’re about eight or nine miles from Biolab. So I got in the car and I went to the gas station, but when I got to the stop sign, I looked up and I saw the cloud kind of in front of me, and I was like, okay, that’s the chemical cloud. So I knew I needed to get home quick, and I ran in the store, and at that point, I kind of started having some shortness of breath and felt dizzy, but I didn’t think anything about it.

I didn’t want to over stress myself. So I went in the store and I got in the milk and I drove home, which was in a three or four minute drive. So I came back home and I started having a lot of shortness of breath. I started feeling like there was mucus building up in my esophagus and in my throat. And at that point, I was able to look at my husband and kind of show him I needed help, but I couldn’t verbally tell him that I needed help. So at that point, he had already called 9 1 1. So 9 1 1 got there to my house and they came in, I was in my bedroom and they came in there and they took my oxygen and my oxygen was okay, but I was having trouble breathing. So the paramedics came because the firemen came first, and then the paramedics came and they were like, if your breathing treatment isn’t working, you should probably go to the ER room.

So I really didn’t want to because I didn’t think that it was that big of a deal, but I decided at that point it was probably best that I go because I never really had that feeling before where it felt like I was suffocating. So I got to the er and then the ER doctor came over to me and I was just kind of talking to him. They had given me an IV in the ambulance, and it was the IV Benadryl that they gave me. So by the time I got to the emergency room, I was able to talk to the doctor and I was just talking to him. And he told me that he told me at least two of the chemicals that were in that cloud, which was the chlorine and the bromine. And he did say that last one, which is, I can’t think of the name right at this moment, but it’s some kind of acid, some chemical.

And I asked him how he knew exactly what was in the cloud, and he said, because the patients from Piedmont Rockdale were going to be transferred to Piedmont Walton because they were going to have to shut down the hospital. But then they decided this was about four o’clock. So they decided at that point that it wasn’t safe to take the patients out of the hospital in Rockdale and transfer them to Walton, which is Piedmont Walton, which is in, that’s in Monroe, which is the next county kind of up to. They kept saying the cloud went to the northeast. That was the hospital kind of to the no northeast area. So the doctor, I talked to him about the chemicals that were in the cloud, and he treated me. And then I talked to another doctor who’s on the board up there at the hospital, and he’s actually the one that told me they were going to send the patients from the one hospital to that hospital.

And then they sent me home that day because there wasn’t really much they could do for me. And then two days after that, my daughter, who’s three became affected and she started showing signs of having basically what they consider a chemical attack because there’s no real way to diagnose what’s really happening. I mean, he basically told me if you were a person that was having an asthma attack, but refer it to a person who’s having an attack with chemicals. And so since then, it’s been over two months now of us having to go back and forth because tried to leave a couple different times to get away, but every time we come back, we all get sick. And when I say all, I say, me, my husband and my daughter, because I mean just the chemicals they’re on, I just say on our stuff. I mean, they’re all over our stuff. And so basically that night when the cloud set, when it became dark, it kind of sat on top of all of our stuff. And so my daughter who has mild eczema, she became affected two days later because when you have eczema, you’re sensitive to certain stuff. Anyways,

Christina O’Connor:

Okay, so let’s see. Well, so that night, because I was smelling and smelling what was in the air and I was tasting and feeling it in the house, even with the air off and I was getting phone calls from concerned friends, I decided that I needed to evacuate. And so my roommate, I took one of my roommates, she’s younger and she left. We ended up leaving, packing up what we could, and we left and went to my daughter’s in McDonough, which is south. It’s probably, I don’t know, maybe an hour south of that location. And my eyes by that point, they were burning. They were burning and itching, and I could just feel it, I could taste it. It’s just almost undescribable, these chemicals and this chemical burn. And so we were driving, we had to drive kind of through Conyers to get down there, and I was just getting a headache.

It developed that night, and I had that headache for days and days after, and my eyes burned for days after I kept washing my eyes out and I just couldn’t get relief, couldn’t get relief. And I just started feeling I kind of dizzy, just kind of bad, just feeling fatigue and just I knew it was just a bad feeling. But the next morning I just started getting fearful and I was I having some car trouble? So I was like, well, let me run out and get some breakfast tan. Maybe I just need to go trade in my car. I don’t know what’s going to happen. So I drove down Terra Boulevard in McDonough and I could see the chemical cloud and it was terrifying because I thought, I’m trying to get away from this, and it’s followed me to my daughter’s house, and it was terrifying.

And so I just began, it just was very anxiety producing to know that, okay, where do you go to escape this? First of all, I can’t go home or is it safe to go back home? Do I stay here? Where do I go? How do you run from a chemical plume because you don’t know which way the wind blows. And so at some point, I think the following day we went back home, but again, we had to drive kind of through Conyers and the smell just absolutely overpowering. And I believe that driving through there, that’s when the chemicals got into my car, my hvac, because we didn’t have the air on or anything, but I think that my HVAC system, I think that’s when it got exposed. And it was just even with masks on, it was just over overpowering just to be around that.

But we went back home and my sister at one point, my sister came and she spent the night and she’s like, no, you’re not crazy. Not, I can definitely tell this is in this house. I can feel it. I can taste it. At that point, I’m like, okay, maybe I’m just being paranoid, maybe I’m not really, it’s not really as bad in the house. But she confirmed to me that yes, it was. And so from there, we just had to leave. I just had to leave again, and I packed up what I could, but I left some belongings. I couldn’t take everything. And so at that point, I just had to leave and find fresher air. And so I came up to Cherokee County area, but by that point I was very sick. I had to end up going to the ER because I was dizzy and I was fatigued.

Some of the same systems symptoms, my eyes were burning and I was passing out, actually passed out at one point and then I was hospitalized after that because after I went to the er, they didn’t really know how to treat that. She didn’t really know what to give me. So she prescribed me an anxiety pill and she prescribed me a steroid at the urgent care. And then I just had some trouble with my insurance getting the prescriptions. And by that point I was just very anxious and very upset. And then no one really would take it seriously because I was in another county and they didn’t experience that. So the fact of walking through that alone basically because besides my sister, she knew, yeah, this is really what’s going on, but to explain to somebody that’s not really experiencing that or walking through that, they don’t really understand what you’re going through.

And so I kept feeling bad, kept feeling bad, and finally I was like, I need to go to the emergency room. I need to go to the hospital. Something is not right. These headaches, they won’t stop. And so my sister took me to the hospital and when I got there, they thought that I was having a stroke. And so they ended up keeping me for three days. And of course the MRI didn’t show a stroke, but they still did not really, they didn’t really do anything for me. They were like, okay, you’re not dying. You didn’t have a stroke. You might’ve had an exposure to the chemicals or whatever, but they didn’t really helpful. And so they discharged me and at that point I had to figure out, all right, where am I going to live, first of all, and I had nowhere to go.

And so I was able to stay with family, luckily until I wasn’t, and then I just had to scramble and figure out, okay, where am I going to live? And it affected my work because I didn’t know I was trying to work, but I was sick and I didn’t know where am I going to live. And so it was just a nightmare to walk through. When I was having PTSD, I was having nightmares about chemical plumes and it was terrible. It was honestly the worst thing to have to go through. And so I still am not able to go home. I’m still temporarily homeless, displaced. I have another family member that I’m staying with currently, but I just had to decide that I can’t stay there. So I told my landlord, I put in my notice and I went back for my things, and that was a couple weeks ago.

And like Hannah was talking about the chemicals, they’re floating around and if they’re floating around, they’re in your clothes, they’re on your things. So when I went there to move them, I was even itching when I picked up these things that had been sitting there since September 29th and they were making me itch. They made a rash. I remember my arms having a rash on them when I was just even moving my things out. I ended up having to throw away a lot of things. I ended up just leaving some things because it just affected, it affected me, but I don’t right here, I want to go into the fact that it didn’t affect some people. And I don’t know if you guys, Hannah guys experienced that too because it didn’t affect everybody that way. They might’ve had some symptoms, but for other people it affected people way worse.

Jeramie Julian:

I was affected a week or so after the initial fire there, which never seemed to go out magically, and I was overexposed because I can’t smell, and it was dark outside the morning that I was out there and I was looking for this comment and I was just breathing this stuff in, and because it was dark, I couldn’t see what would look like a normal fog, but it obviously was the chemicals in the air until I started really, really getting concerned about my eyes burning so bad. And then I started looking around on Facebook, saw in a Morgan County group, there was multiple people talking about it and the sun comes out and boom, you can see it. It’s obvious that it’s there. It’s just floating like a fog. And that lasted for half the day, and later that day, the sensation never really went away. I noticed that my breathing started getting worse throughout the day. I have asthma, but it doesn’t really bother me that bad, but just really, it was really hard for me to catch my breath. And eventually I wound up having to go to the emergency room from what felt like an anaphylactic shock sensation. I couldn’t even swallow as my throat was so raw. I had eaten some crushed glass kind of sensation, and they gave me the Benadryl steroid shot and the IV

Speaker 5:

Drip for dehydration and sent me home

Jeramie Julian:

With, they all recognized at the hospital here in Morgan County what was going on, and they were all very familiar with the fire and they sent me home. I had some prednisone to take, and then was it the next day or the day after that, I went right back to the hospital because my blood pressure in my heart rate worked head shot through the roof. I saw a different doctor there in the emergency room, but they were all, again, very familiar with what’s going on and the side effects from all these things. They let me go. Then after everything had calmed back down, let me go home. And I looked at my release form and it said anxiety attack, and I couldn’t help but just laugh. And I went and found the doctor that we had just had this conversation about all these side effects from the chemicals in the atmosphere and cardiac dysrhythmia is a side effect. And he said, oh, well, I’ll change it in the system. So it’s almost like they didn’t want to admit it or talk about it or just act like it didn’t exist, even though I just spent the last few hours there talking to them about it

Speaker 5:

And they were all in agreement with it. Then

Jeramie Julian:

I came home and luckily I live far enough away where it didn’t affect me continuously. It was amazing that the wind was able to blow it after that far out from the date of the fire, that there was still enough of it and the atmosphere that it was able to come 45 ish miles away and affect me that day. And that was basically just kind of the beginning of the problems. There was the itchiness, the dry eyes, which leading to vision issues, the heart issues, random rapid heart rate and blood pressure issues, shortness of breath, blood in my nose. It’s just been this crazy debilitating thing. And like Christina was saying, it doesn’t affect everybody because people obviously still live in Con and they’re doing okay-ish for the most part. I mean, I do know some person that’s slightly homeless living in a little shed, and she’s saying her skin is on fire

Speaker 5:

All the time, but it’s been

Jeramie Julian:

Incredibly debilitating and every time I go back to Conyers or even Covington to church or the doctors there, the gastroenterologist, that was another thing. I was just feeling really sick a lot, sick to my stomach, fatigue, muscle fatigue, tired, drunk, the drunk sensation. It’s very disorienting, kind of a vertigo sensation that I get and a weakness where I feel like I’m walking through water. I feel weighted down hard to lift my legs or even lift my hands while I’m sitting in a chair and

Speaker 5:

Is just been really, really bad. And

Jeramie Julian:

None of the doctors really want to dig into it or take it seriously again or do the right tests for anything. They just, oh, well, here, you’ll be fine. Try

Speaker 5:

This, that or the other. And I don’t know what to

Jeramie Julian:

Do. I don’t know how to make these symptoms go away. Like I said, every time I go back anywhere near there, it kind of magnifies the symptoms all over again. And I just feel like I’m constantly starting over from ground zero,

Maximillian Alvarez:

Man. Man, first of all, I want to thank you all for being so honest and open and sharing all that with us. It’s really hard to hear, and for everyone out there listening who’s having as hard a time as I am listening to it, just try to imagine what it’s like living through it and no one should be subjected to this. This kind of thing should be a chapter in worst case scenarios in our history. And yet it feels like a recurring segment in American history where we’re like, we’re hearing these kinds of stories over and over again. And I want to be careful not to equate every situation, every community’s different, every source of contamination is different as we’ve been trying to cover on this show, but I’m sure everyone listening to you guys is hearing the same echoes that I am of what folks in East Palestine and around East Palestine, Ohio have told us over the past year and a half, right?

All the way down to that last point, Jeremy, that you brought up Christina, about people experiencing symptoms differently. This is a thousand percent what has also happened in and around East Palestine. Some people can smell the chemicals. Some people, some people are experiencing all kinds of symptoms. Some people appear to be fine. And that’s really played into a lot of the division, a lot that the company has helped sow in the town itself because it’s like you’re pitting people who feel fine against people who don’t, and then people who don’t feel fine are bullied by their neighbors even for faking it. I mean,

Christina O’Connor:

Sometimes their family also have to throw that in there.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah, I mean, I hope and pray that out of these constant catastrophes that we as a society, as a people can start to understand that human beings are different. That’s what makes us beautiful and complex. But that’s what also makes situations like these so tough because I mean, it was like covid for some people. Covid was a small cold. For some people it was the thing that killed them. We know this.

Jeramie Julian:

My mom got it, and they sent her home basically with vitamin CD and zinc and said, here, boost your immune system. She coughed for a day and then that was it. And then other people, according to the media, I don’t personally know anybody myself that has died from it, but apparently it was really, really bad for some people. Covid was,

Maximillian Alvarez:

And I bring this up to just because what you guys are describing that creates a powder cake situation where folks who are experiencing symptoms like you are really in a difficult position, not just because of what you are feeling and trying to get answers from your doctor, but also because some people are not feeling it. I have just seen in so many of these different instances where the companies that are at fault are going to try to leverage that against you.

Jeramie Julian:

Oh yeah, the minority now or the black sheep. And it’s not just that, and it’s not just the physical ailments, but the financial ailments as well. Those who can’t work because of it, who basically can’t lost their houses temporarily because of it. The multiple doctors hospital trips I’m taking was prescribed something from the neuro-ophthalmologist called X dvy, I believe is what it’s called. And it’s over $700 for a little bottle of eye drops to help my eyes not be dry anymore. And it’s an experimental drug. I can’t just go down the street to the pharmacy and get it. I had to wait, and then they would ship it in the mail after I go through this process and this process.

Christina O’Connor:

Jeremy, I have a question for you. Have you tried any type of holistic treatment that actually worked for me? I did activated charcoal and some other supplements and things like that, that actually made me feel better. Eventually,

Jeramie Julian:

I’ve just been using the normal little eye drops from Walgreens and stuff, but it’s like that worked for about five minutes. And even these things, I’m supposed to use these for six weeks, these eyedrops, and I’m in about week one and a half, and I’m really not telling all that much progress, honestly. And like I said, every time that I go back towards Conyers Covington, it just, and I went to Honey Baked Ham in Coner to get Thanksgiving stuff, and my eyes have just continuously gotten worse since then. My vision has just been getting worse and drier and more of a tunnel vision kind aspect and very grainy.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Yeah. Can I ask if I could bring the rest of y’all in here and let’s keep kind of filling this in for listeners. Could you say a bit more what’s happened or not happened since the original fire in late September? I guess, what have you been told by government agencies, by the company itself? How are you and others in your community doing after this? Are people trying to put it in their rear view mirror? Are they dealing with health effects? I just wanted to ask you if you could say a little more, and Hannah, let’s jump back to you and kind of go back around the table, but anything else that you guys want to let listeners know about what the fall at has been since the fire was in our newsfeeds and in the headlines in September, it kind of faded away, but obviously the reality has not faded away and you guys are still living through it,

Hannah Loyd:

So they really aren’t talking about it much anymore. In our local media that I’ve seen or heard, I mean they talked about it for probably the first couple of weeks maybe, and then they just quit talking about it. I would say primarily I’ve gone over and seen more about it on TikTok more than anything and just where people are starting to post their personal experiences of it because it has just gone back to business as usual. There ain’t nothing. There’s nothing to see. Everything’s okay, which it’s not and it’s not okay. We had to leave the area at least three times, three different weekends we left the area and I would say just coming back each time within the hour, I could personally tell a difference. My daughter, she’s three, so she can’t really tell me. I have to kind of just go by her actions and how she’s acting. I can definitely tell that when we are away from the area she acts, she feels better. But when we get close to the area, she’s kind of irritated, I guess you would say. But there’s not really much I can do because I can only leave town so many times.

And when you were saying earlier about just things being said about by your neighbors and stuff like that, I’ve definitely had things said about me by my neighbors. I know for a fact, which is really sad. People you don’t even know, just saying things that they don’t know the full circumstance about why I had to call 9 1 1 that day, or why I had to call 9 1 1 a couple days later. It shouldn’t be anybody’s real concern unless they’re really actually concerned. My parents live eight minutes from me and only eight miles from Biolab, but the way that the chemical cloud went and then it shifted, it kind of went up and around their area, so their area isn’t as affected. So it’s kind of different over there, if that even makes sense. So when you have a chemical cloud that’s going in a certain area and it’s going in that area, when the day is ending, those chemicals are going to start to set to the ground.

So then when you wake up the next day, those chemicals are going to be right there on top of the ground. And then there’s going to be people that understand it and people that don’t understand it. People in my family don’t understand it as much as I understand it because I actually have been through it. So it’s a hard thing to try to navigate through because you yourself are going through it, but you have someone else in your family that lives only eight minutes up the road and they’re not going through it as much as you’re going through it because of the way that the cloud went and the way that it didn’t go over their house as much as it went over your house. So like I said, we’ve left the area just three different times, three different weekends just to try to get away to try to get some kind of relief in a sense.

But that was in the beginning, that was, it’s been about two months now since the actual fire. So that was in the beginning. So the first couple of weekends we left town, but since then we’ve been back and now it’s getting cold. And it seems like for some reason, as it’s getting colder, it’s making things worse. Our symptoms are getting worse, our breathing is getting worse, things are getting worse. And I don’t know the scientific meaning behind that. I’m sure there’s a scientist that could come on here and say, Hey, this is why that’s happening. And if there’s someone out there that could tell me that, that would be great because it’s something when the climate changes, things are different. When it’s hotter outside, its things are worse as far as symptoms. When it’s cold outside, things are worse. So there’s no real happy medium, I guess. And when I say things are worse, things are kind of worse in a different way. And I don’t know, it’s something to do with the time of day and the way I guess the chemicals set in certain areas. I’m not sure. But it’s been about two months going over two months now, and things are still the same in my area. I know for sure. So I know things are different for different people.

Christina O’Connor:

So what’s happened since, okay, so I mean for me initially the bad feelings that I was having, the eyes and just the headaches, a lot of that subsided. I think that treating it holistically and naturally, I think that that helped me. I still have a little bit of tingly and a little bit of dizziness, but I do follow with my doctor on that. But I know so many people that are still suffering, that are still sick that I talked to that live down there. And Hannah was talking about how some people are affected and some aren’t. I know I had other roommates that lived in the same house that were like, we’re fine. We’re not affected. What are you talking about? Not. And they were younger, and I’m a little bit older, but it’s so crazy until you actually experience that yourself to walk through that.

So just the anxiety and just the PTSD from the whole experience and then not being able to go back to your home, the home that you love and that you found so much peace in that just ripped away from you. It’s just been hard. And to have to just rebuild and start over and your work is affected. So then your bills start piling up and those chemicals that are in your car, you don’t have to drive around with a mask on and my car and my window’s down and it’s like, this is insane. And I talked to a lawyer and they’re like, well, go rent a car. Well, I can’t do that because that’s expensive. How long would I have to rent a car for? That’s crazy. And I don’t know if we’re talking about lawsuits or whatever, I know some people are doing the class actions and all of that because I see a lot of people, they’re jumping on the class actions and that’s fine, whatever, to each his own, whatever you feel like you need to do.

I have contacted one, I have contacted a lawyer and I’ll be pursuing what I can, but really it’s not about money for me. Yes, I have suffered so much. I’ve had a lot of loss. I lost the place that I live. There’s cost and car repairs. I’ve replaced my air filter, I’ve replaced cabin filters. I have to go get a quote to figure out, okay, how do I remediate these chemicals out of my car so that I can drive around and not be subjected to more toxic chemicals? That’s making myself even sicker. It’s like there’s cost in that. I would love to go get another car, but I can’t afford that.

So yes, I’ve contacted a lawyer, yes, I got sick. I’m not about the money though. It’s not for me about the money. It’s just about raising awareness and the fact that maybe you don’t have symptoms now, but who knows down the road you might have symptoms. And yeah, our friends in East Palestine, I’ve made friends with people in East Palestine, probably we know some of the same people. I know Christina has been a very big support for me walking through that. And she’s still suffering a year or over a year later, she’s still suffering. So I’m saying that to say just because you’re sick now doesn’t mean that you’re not going to be sick down the road. And I think that the media has downplayed and downplayed. They didn’t even tell us what the chemicals were for. I mean, it took Scott investigating and coming on the ground like he did in East Palestine to tell us like, okay, this is actually what we’re dealing with. Let’s not cover that up. And the whole EPA thing, it’s like, I guess so deep. It really goes so deep and it’s like I’m just so tired of these companies putting profits over people. It’s just not right. And so I’m honored and I’m happy to be a part of bringing awareness to this tragedy and it’s happening all over. So I just have to say that,

Jeramie Julian:

And I’m in agreement. Thank you for the opportunity to bring awareness to stuff. And I always try to, the half glass full thing, there’s always a silver lining and I always try to look for the good in something, even if it’s bad. And that’s what this could be, could turn into is some way to stop companies like this from just bulldozing over

Speaker 5:

The common people who are the ones that are really suffering. It

Jeramie Julian:

Is been crazy. Luckily, like I said, I live far enough away where me and the people around me aren’t really, don’t seem to be affected anymore. I need to get my water tested because I have well water and there’s a possibility that there’s some slight trace minerals in something that could just kind of be underlying or prolonging condition. And yes, definitely going to be looking for a lawyer. I’m not trying to get rich. I don’t think anybody’s going to get a million dollars out of it, but it is a financial burden on those who were seriously affected by it and who continue to be. And that’s the thing is we don’t know how long out into the future or these symptoms going to last. How bad can they get? How bad is this really for your heart or your eyes or your lungs? Who knows what it could turn into in the future.

I’m thankful for the doctors that I’ve seen. I’m thankful for the medication and trying to get well, but it just doesn’t stop though. From my point of view, it’s just this ever occurring thing because it’s still in the atmosphere. There’s still something there. And who knows what all there was, who knows? How does that ever get out of the atmosphere, out of the air? Hannah, like you’re talking about, that’s I think they did the curfew at nights was because during the day when it was warmer, it all rose into all the chemicals and everything rose up into the atmosphere. Then at night when it cooled down, they all lowered back down. It’s just a tragedy on so many different levels, but everybody want to act like it didn’t happen. There’s petitions to have the place closed down. Well, obviously hasn’t worked yet. What do we have to do to force these incredibly dangerous companies to shut down or to move to a much, much safer location that’s close enough to Atlanta where it could affect millions of peaks of people probably, or possibly.

Speaker 5:

It’s really sad

Jeramie Julian:

For us, for the ones who have to suffer and we don’t have a voice so much in the big scheme of things. I’m not trying to sound political, but the buddy buddy thing, I won’t say government’s involved in any of it, but I don’t know. I mean, what do you do? What can you do against something like this to prevent it from happening again or the suffering of other people?

Maximillian Alvarez:

And it’s like we mentioned already, this is not the first fire that has happened at this one facility. They’ve had multiple fires as we mentioned in the introduction. Same way that after East Palestine, people are realizing there are over a thousand train derailments every year, just like they could happen in a major population center.

Jeramie Julian:

This, we need the need to start talking about it to continuously bring light to it and bring awareness to it because for people who don’t know somebody personally involved, it’s just kind of, oh, that stinks for them. Out of sight, out of mind.

Maximillian Alvarez:

Well, and I really can’t thank you three enough for after all you’ve gone through and all you continue to go through for being willing to come on, talk to us, share your story so openly and vulnerably. And like I said in the beginning, like we are sending nothing but love and solidarity to you all and everyone down there, and we’re not going to give up on y’all. And so I want to assure listeners that this is not the last time that we’re going to be talking with Hannah, Christina, and Jeremy talking about Conyers and the bio lab fire. We want to do more follow-ups on this. And I know I got to let you guys go here in a minute and there’s still so much to talk about. So I want to save some more for the next time that we have you on. And I want to make that sooner rather than later.

But for this kind of final round in the last few minutes that I’ve got you three, I wanted to ask kind of two questions. One, as we try to do with every episode of this show, we want to tell folks who are listening what they can do to help. We don’t want people to just listen to a sad story, feel bad, and then move on. We are trying to get our fellow workers off the sidelines and get involved and be part of the solution because it’s us. It’s the working people who are being impacted by all this crap in communities around the country and around the world who are going to need to stand up to the companies, to their bought off officials and the government. I mean, we’re going up against Goliath here, and it’s going to take solidarity among working people who are on the front lines of this corporate malfeasance, this government malfeasance, this media silence.

We need to band together and stick together and fight for one another. And so I wanted to ask if we could end by just, if there’s anything folks can do to help, even if it’s just continuing to spread the word or anything that you guys in your community need that they can act on. I wanted to ask if we could end on that note and also wrapping a second question into this final section, which is really important for me, and I imagine for all of you, but whenever we do a new investigation into another sacrifice zone or another industrial accident or something horrific that has put our fellow workers in the kind of hell that you guys are living through, we don’t want to reduce you and your communities to this awful tragedy that happened to you. We want to remind folks, this is a whole community.

These are lives, these are generations that have been turned upside down because of something that was not your fault. And so I wanted to ask in this final round, if you could a start by just telling listeners a little bit about your life, the community there, what you want folks to know about your community that they’re not hearing when we are only talking about this horrible chemical fire. What do you want people to know about your life there in and around Conyers? And then as a kind of final note, what can folks listening do to help? So Hannah, let’s start back with you. Christina. Jeremy round us out.

Hannah Loyd:

So I mean, just the community around here. We’re small town people. We’re just, every weekend there’s usually some kind of small festival going on, or with the holidays now, there’s a bunch of probably parades and stuff like that going on. So I mean, there’s people that are able to attend those things and be okay, but then there’s people like me that cannot partake in stuff like that because of the risk of just being outside. And to be honest, it just sucks. So I mean, the holidays, I’m trying to make the best of it because supposed to be a good time and a fun time and all that, but it’s just having to deal with the, we’re still having effects from everything we’re still having right now as I’m talking. I’m itching. So we’re still having side effects and we’re still having issues because of the fire as we go into a holiday season. But we’re all trying to move on and make sure that life goes on as it should. But as Christina said, we had Scott down here testing, and I actually had Scott at my house doing testing on my pool water. He took one of my pool floats that basically melted almost. And

Maximillian Alvarez:

This is Scott Smith, correct?

Hannah Loyd:

Scott Smith, yeah, Scott Smith. Sorry. This is Scott Smith. So he tested my pool water. He tested my soil. He took one of my pool floats that, like I said, basically melted, which those are made to withstand these chemicals. So when it melted, and I didn’t even know who Scott Smith was until I saw a post of him at the local VFW pond testing the pond water, which he already brought back the preliminary results of it being chloroform and chlorine, and it has a whole list of stuff. So I can only imagine what just my preliminary results are going to be when he gets those back. So I just contacted him via Facebook and he just happened to message me back. And he came out here and he tested that and he took my pull foot with him and he told me he’d get back in touch with me when he got the results.

And that was probably the end of October-ish. So it takes a while to get those back because those tests just by themselves, those cost a lot of money. So for someone to come down here and just be willing to voluntarily test our stuff is just amazing. So as far as what people can do now, I really honestly, I don’t know, I guess just spread, share this out, spread the news. There’s a lot of different groups that have tried to come together and there’s a lot of division that has been made, like you said, max, a lot of division in the community that has been made because of this catastrophic event. And that’s okay because at the end of the day, I’m only here to spread awareness. I’m not here to try to create any kind of chaos or any kind of drama or anything like that.

I’m here to share what I’ve been through. I’m here to share what’s helping me. I’m here basically what they call DIY, do it yourself stuff that has helped my kid with, well, her doctor says she has mild eczema, but he doesn’t really know if she does or doesn’t. So he’s just treating it as that. So just different things that I’ve done to try to help my kid get through it, which it’s more of an emotional thing than it is. There’s a lot of physical that goes to it, but it’s a lot of more emotional stuff than it is actual physical. So I mean, this isn’t over, and it’s a long way from being over, especially like I said, when I knew that there was possibly still offgassing going on. And then I saw a video of it actually going on a couple days, either before or after Thanksgiving. So they still have the chemicals on site and they’re still trying to get rid of them, and there’s a lot of them that they have to get rid of. So I mean, basically just keep listening for updates. Hopefully we’ll have more better information next time. Don’t know. I hope it’s not worse information. I don’t know.

Christina O’Connor:

I just wanted to say it starts with just understanding and raising that awareness and just educating people. I know people right now that are still having symptoms. They’re still suffering and they don’t even really know what to do. I don’t know, doctors, they don’t know. So just educating. We’ve got two come together as people and just have some understanding and some compassion. I don’t know what that looks like exactly, but educating, do the research. If you’re a doctor to determine how do I treat these people or the mental health side of it, like Hannah mentioned, it was traumatic to go through these things. Traumatic and people don’t even realize the trauma that they went through. They don’t even know, and so just really educating people and just bringing awareness to the situation, just being the change you want to see. I don’t know what that looks like across the board, but I just think we need to stop putting profits before people and just be kind human beings.

It just starts with kindness. I don’t know what that looks like as far as organizing things that we could do, just like social media pages that we’ve organized and just ways that we can speak out. Hannah mentioned TikTok. I’ve started speaking out on TikTok actually, and I would love to do YouTube. I would love to learn any way that I can to help be an advocate for people and speak for people that can’t speak up. I’m very blessed that I had family to help me and take me in because if not, I would be on the street somewhere because I couldn’t stay in those chemicals. It was killing me literally. And so I don’t know the long-term effects of what that exposure is going to do to me.

Hopefully I pray that that’s, I’m not going to get sick. I’m not going to have long-term exposure and side effects, but a lot of people do. A lot of people are. A lot of people are still going through it, so just raising awareness like Hannah was talking about, just pushing it out to as many people as we can to make, to change, to reach. I don’t know if our senators, some of that’s been organized a little bit, so who are the people that we need to get in front of to talk to that’s going to listen to us? That’s what needs to happen.

Jeramie Julian:

It needs to get out there. It needs to get out there. Call your local politicians. I live in a small rural town. There’s a ton of farmers around me. There’s no telling what effect that this has had on the cattle. There’s a ton of testing that needs to be done on more than just humans at this point. Is it somehow going to be leached into the meat after they’re processed in the big picture? How broad is the harm or destruction from this one chemical fire? There’s a whole lot of stuff that needs to be done.

Speaker 5:

Oh, yeah. I need

Jeramie Julian:

To send Scott some of my well water. I need to get some bottles for that, but yeah, that’s all I can say is call your local politicians. Sign the petitions, share your stories and make your voice heard on any outlet that you can.

Christina O’Connor:

I don’t want to induce fear, but with people speaking out, I know friends of people in East Palestine and sometimes people that are speaking out, I don’t know. I have a bit of fear about being so vocal about it because I see people being shut down and sometimes alive, and so it’s kind of scary, but I’m ready to sign up for that because I believe in standing up for this cause and yeah, like Jeremy said, what are the other effects of the livestock and the frogs that are dying in the pond that Scott was testing? Well, it’s in the water and we’re drinking. It is just like, it goes so deep. It goes so deeply. People need to stand up. Stand up, stand up.

Maximillian Alvarez:

All right, gang, that’s going to wrap things up for us this week. Once again, I want to thank our guests, Christina, Jeremy and Hannah for trusting us and our listeners with their heartbreaking and enraging stories and for sharing their experiences so openly with us. Please, I’m begging you all, don’t forget about them. Don’t forget about East Palestine. Don’t forget about South Baltimore. Don’t forget about Asheville and other areas impacted by this year’s hurricanes. Don’t forget, don’t wait for something like this to happen in your community and it may already be happening. Don’t roll over and accept this unacceptable status quo. Fight back. We have to fight back because we are the only ones who can stop this. And as always, I want to thank you all for listening and I want to thank you for caring and I want to thank you for being the change that we are all waiting for.

We’ll see y’all back here next week for another episode of Working People, and if you can’t wait that long, then go explore all the great work that we’re doing at the Real News Network where we do grassroots journalism that lifts up the voices and stories from the front lines of struggle. Sign up for the real new newsletter so you never miss a story and help us do more work like this by going to the real news.com/donate and becoming a supporter today. I promise you it really makes a difference. I’m Maximillian Alvarez. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. Solidarity forever.

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Editor-in-Chief
Ten years ago, I was working 12-hour days as a warehouse temp in Southern California while my family, like millions of others, struggled to stay afloat in the wake of the Great Recession. Eventually, we lost everything, including the house I grew up in. It was in the years that followed, when hope seemed irrevocably lost and help from above seemed impossibly absent, that I realized the life-saving importance of everyday workers coming together, sharing our stories, showing our scars, and reminding one another that we are not alone. Since then, from starting the podcast Working People—where I interview workers about their lives, jobs, dreams, and struggles—to working as Associate Editor at the Chronicle Review and now as Editor-in-Chief at The Real News Network, I have dedicated my life to lifting up the voices and honoring the humanity of our fellow workers.
 
Email: max@therealnews.com
 
Follow: @maximillian_alv