132. The Mix-Up (Velsicol Chemical Company)

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Recognize this gentleman.

In English he is called cockroach, croatenbug, roach, water bug, or black beetle.

The Germans call him Chabin, the French La Blatte, and in Spanish he is known as La Cucoracha.

No matter what the language or country, the cockroach is an unwelcome and disgusting pest in any home.

Scientists have worked for years developing insecticides to control roaches.

DBT proved fairly effective, but later another chemical, chlordane, was developed, and today it is considered to be one of the most effective insecticides for roach control.

1974 marked a crisis for the Belsicole Chemical Corporation of Chicago.

That year, the Environmental Protection Agency initiated proceedings to ban both of the company's flagship products, chloridane and heptachlor, pesticides that had anchored Velsicol's business for decades and accounted for a quarter of its total sales.

The alarm centered on both the health hazards and the environmental persistence of the chemicals.

Studies had begun to tie them to cancer risk and neurological disorders.

And because chloridane and heptachlor were water-insoluble yet lipophilic, they did not wash away but instead accumulated in living tissue, lodging in fat cells and magnifying in concentration as they climbed the food chain.

None of this boded well for Velsico's bottom line.

Fortunately for its stakeholders, the company had already developed a replacement.

In the late 60s, Velsico unveiled a new and improved pesticide.

It was a waxy powder called leptophos, designed to kill insects by crippling their central nervous systems.

While the product crawled through the approval process in the U.S., where it was manufactured, Velsico wasted no time exporting it overseas where it was sold as Phosphel in at least 30 countries.

Egypt was one of Phosphel's earliest and heaviest testing grounds.

In the early 1970s, cotton farmers began coating their fields with the new pesticide.

Within months, reports surfaced of paralysis and tremors among those who handled it.

The damage wasn't limited to people either.

Fosvel was suspected of seeping into nearby watering holes where the lifeless bodies of more than 1,300 water buffalo were soon discovered.

It would be years before these overseas reports reached American regulators who were still weighing the pesticide's approval for domestic use in 1974.

Even after the EPA's own tests confirmed Fazevel's severe environmental and neurotoxic effects, the agency did nothing to halt production.

A federal investigation didn't begin until almost two years later when an EPA insider bypassed the bureaucracy and blew the whistle directly to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health.

When investigators asked Feselcool if there had been any Fosoville-related illnesses at its Texas facility where the chemical was produced, company officials were like, you know what?

Now that you mention it.

Last year, a pesticide plant was closed in Hopewell, Virginia, after more than 70 persons exposed to the pesticide called Capone suffered nerve damage.

Now a similar case is being investigated at a plant near Houston.

At least 10 of the 200 present or former employees at this Bayport, Technical Chemical plant have developed severe nerve disorders and are being described by fellow employees as zombies.

Zombies.

Stiff, staggering, dead-eyed zombies.

That's how workers at Belsico's Bayport plant described colleagues who handled Fawzeville on a daily basis.

They would lurch into the break room caked in the stuff, hands trembling so violently they couldn't light a cigarette.

And later, if you asked them about it, they would stare at you blankly, struggling to remember any any of the day's events.

A big blank.

Total blankness.

I didn't know what I was doing, and I

thought of nothing.

Things so

strange like running into walls.

When employees raised concerns about the obvious neurological symptoms, Felsico management referred them to a company doctor who blamed the symptoms on inner ear infections or vitamin deficiencies.

They were given a pill or or a shot and sent straight back to the Fawesville production line.

Outside, workers sometimes found themselves stepping over the corpses of stray dogs before clocking in.

Inside, they took their places beneath ceilings where stalactites of the waxy pesticide had formed overhead.

It was a nightmare situation, Raymond David, a former supervisor at the Bayport plant, told the New York Times.

Management told me all those guys smoked marijuana.

They said the guys were acid freaks.

David knew better.

His crew wasn't a bunch of burnouts.

Several were former high school athletes, young, healthy, straight-laced kids whose physical capabilities deteriorated to the point of partial paralysis after just a few months on the job.

And I really don't know what it was, but

he just told me, you know, I'd go on and go back to work.

So I believed him and I went on back to work.

And a week later, I couldn't walk.

By the time OSHA inspected Velsicol's Bayport plant in February 1976, 1976, the EPA had already abandoned its review of Fosville, so the company had ceased production.

What remained, some 300,000 gallons of the pesticide, was stashed in warehouses around Houston.

From there, most of it was quietly funneled to places like Costa Rica, Panama, and Indonesia, at least until those governments eventually grew wise to the damage it caused.

Although it had been cleaned out, OSHA found enough hazards at the Bayport plant to site Vesicle for 44 safety violations.

Federal authorities also conducted interviews and provided health screenings to 155 of the 250 Velsicle workers who had been exposed to FOSVEL over the years.

63 of those employees had claimed they had experienced physical symptoms such as dizziness, numbness, blurred vision, weight loss, and impotence.

11 men had suffered severe consequences, including nervous system disorders and spastic paralysis, some of which proved to be permanent.

I don't see why a man would do this to another man.

Why do it to another person?

I get angry at the people who run it, who operated, who should know and should have mentioned the facts, which were not mentioned.

That's how I get angry at those people

and bitter.

Felsical Chemical flatly denied fostering unsafe working conditions.

In its only public statement on the matter, the company insisted it had acted responsibly, quote, As soon as we became aware of the serious potential occupational health problems, we retained independent medical experts to review the health of our employees.

We have reported fully on this matter to the appropriate government agencies.

The Fossville zombies disagreed.

In 1977, a group of them filed a $12 million lawsuit charging that Velsicole failed to warn them about the pesticides' dangers or provide them even the most basic protective equipment.

But the case never reached a courtroom.

A judge ruled that their suffering fell under workers' compensation laws in Texas, dismissing the lawsuit before it was ever heard.

In fact, the harshest penalty Felsico ever faced over Fawzville came not from OSHA or the courts, but from the EPA.

And it didn't even amount to a slap on the wrist for the billion-dollar-a-year company.

Inspectors discovered the pesticide had escaped the Bayport plant and seeped into nearby groundwater.

The punishment?

Just under $90,000.

However, there was was one last chance at justice later that year.

A federal grand jury indicted six Felsicol executives, not for the Fosvelle disaster, but for allegedly conspiring to defraud the United States by hiding data from the EPA.

The suppressed studies suggested that the company's pre-Fosvelle pesticides, heptachlor and chlordane, caused tumors in laboratory animals and could pose a cancer risk for humans.

If convicted, the executives faced prison sentences of up to 50 years.

But any hope of that actually happening was quickly crushed.

The indictments were thrown out after it emerged that the U.S.

attorney leading the case had previously worked at the EPA, where he helped build the original case against Belsicol.

Incredibly, during the grand jury hearings, that attorney served both as an expert witness and as a prosecutor, an obvious conflict of interest that doomed the trial before it even began.

The government re-filed the charges, but the case ended in a quiet settlement.

The executives walked away with nothing more than a $5,000 fine.

It was hardly surprising.

By the 1970s, Felsicol's artful dodging of responsibility had become almost routine.

The company wasn't the biggest player in the chemical industry, nor the most powerful, but it was easily among the sloppiest and most shameless.

We see nothing wrong with helping the hungry world eat, one executive scoffed.

when criticized for blanketing the globe in pesticides.

The truth was harder to spin.

Felsicol had been implicated in more environmental disasters than almost any of its peers.

The Fossvell fiasco was just the latest chapter.

In fact, by the time OSHA inspectors set foot in Bayport, Felsicol was simultaneously at the center of an even greater catastrophe more than a thousand miles away, one that made the chemical zombies of Texas look almost quaint.

This time it wasn't just factory workers at risk, but an entire state's people, environment, industry, and future generations.

A little mix-up spirals into one of the worst chemical disasters in American history on this episode of Swindled.

They bribed government officials to find accounting for clear violations of decades state law earlier in the past.

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There was just no explanation.

It was as though some bolt of lightning had hit the farm and suddenly the animals decided that they weren't going to be cows any longer.

Rick Halbert first noticed a change in his dairy cow's behavior on Thursday, September 20th, 1973.

The animals were very lethargic and had stopped eating for the most part.

Rick summoned his veterinarian like any attentive farmer would.

But after examining the herd, the vet left the Halbert farm, just as baffled as Rick.

There were no symptoms of the usual culprits, no infection, no illness, nothing that fit the textbook explanations.

Maybe there was mold in the corn, Rick wondered.

Maybe something had tainted the soil on his farm in Battle Creek, Michigan.

Had a jealous competitor sabotaged him?

Had a bitter employee poisoned the well?

He tried not to let the paranoia get the best of him.

As Rick Halbert grasped for answers, the condition of his herd grew more concerning.

In a few short weeks, their daily milk yield had dropped to less than 8,000 pounds per day.

A typical haul was closer to 13,000 pounds.

Okay, maybe it was time to panic.

Rick's suspicions soon circled back to the feed.

He had just received the first shipment of a custom formula from the Battle Creek Feed Co-op, owned and operated by the Michigan Farm Bureau, a private company that had served farmers in the area since 1919.

At Rick's request, the new mix included magnesium oxide, an additive known to aid a cow's digestion and boost milk production, especially important given the local soil's deficiency.

As one of the co-op's largest customers, the Halberd Dairy was given every accommodation.

The feed was blended at a central plant five miles south of town to its exact specifications and delivered in the form of green pellets sprinkled as a topper on the cow's daily rations.

Rick called the Battle Creek Co-op with his concerns.

He wanted to find out if any of the other local farmers were experiencing similar issues.

They said that nothing was happening on other farms.

There weren't another complaints specifically, because we had asked, well, isn't someone else complaining that's getting speed?

And the answer was no.

Before he hung up, Rick had another query for the feed mill.

What about X disease?

I'm sorry, X-disease.

Yeah, you remember, like 20 years ago when cattle all over the country started craving those toxic lubricants.

They were licking door hinges and tractor parts like lollipops and slowly poisoning themselves with chlorinated naphthalenes.

Rick had been reading, and the symptoms back then sounded eerily similar to what he was seeing now.

Oh, no, you don't have to worry about that, Rick.

The Battle Creek plant only uses non-toxic lubricants in its machinery.

But I'll tell you what, if you're unsatisfied with the feed, we'd be happy to buy it back.

Rick Halbert declined the offer.

If the problem were related to his custom formula, it would be beneficial to keep it on hand for future analysis.

Speaking of which, Rick had some more phone calls to make.

The veterinary diagnosticians at the Michigan Department of Agriculture offered little help.

The symptoms appeared to be those of a viral infection, they said, but the tests didn't confirm it.

Beyond that, there wasn't much they they could do, Rick was told.

The MDA's facilities weren't equipped to house large farm animals for further study.

The next call Rick made was to Michigan State University's Department of Dairy Science in East Lansing.

They weren't interested in helping either.

They didn't want to get involved in a squabble between a farmer and a feed company.

Rick began to suspect that Michigan State University was reluctant to ruffle feathers at the Michigan Farm Bureau, the very organization that owned the feed mill and underwrote much of the department's research.

His suspicions hardened when an MSU nutritionist later released a Farm Bureau-funded report that, laughably, pinned Halbert's troubles on excessive iodine.

If that had been the real culprit, Rick's cows would have already recovered weeks ago.

Rick Halbert kept reaching out to state labs, to federal scientists, even to the Food and Drug Administration, but every request for help ended in a dead end.

Meanwhile, the health of his herd continued to worsen.

It was around this point that Rick Halbert came to a sobering realization that if this mystery were ever going to be solved, he would have to be the one to do it.

Call it fortune or fate, but whatever was plaguing Rick Halbert's cattle couldn't have happened to a better farmer.

Not only in the sense that Rick was a driven, experienced, and hard-working farmer, but also because Rick had a master's degree in chemical engineering.

Before returning to Battle Creek to join the family business, he had spent several years working for Dow Chemical in Midland.

With his father, he had since transformed the farm into a thriving agribusiness.

Rick, now in his early 30s, approached his herd the way you might think a chemical engineer would, adjusting feed formulas, tweaking nutrients, and tracking variables to squeeze out every last gallon of milk.

which is why watching his prized dairy cows waste away before his eyes was enough to drive him mad.

Rick was determined to isolate what was making them sick.

The first step was obvious: swap out the feed, which he hypothesized was the issue.

Curiously, the cows' appetites returned gradually, but their milk production never did.

So Rick dug deeper.

He paid thousands of dollars to run tests on the custom mix he had stored in his barn.

Not knowing what to look for, he began rolling out the usual suspects.

Molds?

Negative.

Heavy metals?

Within limits.

Urea?

nitrates?

Nothing unusual.

Growing frustrated, Rick admittedly shoved a handful of the pellets into his own mouth.

They tasted perfectly normal.

Halbert's next move was to conduct his own experiment.

He selected 12 calves and fed them nothing but the custom feed.

Within days, those unlucky souls stopped eating.

Within weeks, they started dying.

grinding their teeth till the bitter end.

These dozen calves were fed only this feed for we intended a period of a month, but after a couple of weeks they wouldn't eat it, so we began to feed them other things.

And about six weeks into the experiment, these calves began to die.

And over the period of the next two months, most of those calves, in fact, died.

It was a small step forward, born out of tragedy.

But Rick persuaded researchers at Michigan State to examine the organs of his dead calves to try to pinpoint what exactly happened.

The results?

Inconclusive.

And the result of that was when they they wrote up the

the report, it said died of starvation.

Died of starvation.

Yeah, no shit.

Of course the calves died of starvation.

They refused to eat.

Rick wanted to know why they stopped eating, but apparently that was not a question Michigan State could answer.

This did not set well with me, he later said.

I thought the laboratory report was an insult to me because it seemed to presume that I didn't know what I was doing.

Further proof of his results led to further insults.

Halbert convinced the Michigan Department of Agriculture to replicate his experiment using mice instead of cows.

As he expected, half of the mice fed the pellets were dead within days.

Rick alerted the Battle Creek feed mill that the formula they made for him was lethal.

The Farm Bureau veterinarian wasn't convinced:

Those mice died because they had eaten cattle feed, not mouse food.

Seven months dragged on without answers.

The Halberd farm bled hundreds of dollars a day just to keep unproductive cows alive.

And without proof that the mysterious illness wasn't his fault, insurance offered no relief.

It was a race against the clock because that mysterious illness had taken a grotesque turn.

The herd began to mutate in ways no farmer had ever seen.

Hooves grew monstrously long, curling upward like corkscrews until every step was an act of agony.

Their coats turned patchy and mangy, hair matted then fell away, exposing thickened skin, marked with oozing abscesses and unexplained hematomas.

Their eyes watered constantly, their bodies wasted away as their appetites remained weak.

And reproduction, the lifeblood of any dairy farm, collapsed.

Cows cycled into heat far too often.

Pregnancies failed as fetuses were reabsorbed, and those that did carry the term produced calves so deformed and frail they died within days.

Some mothers lingered past their delivery dates, forcing stillborns into the world nose-first, feet twisted behind.

Others shrank, milk dried up, and even the rare, surviving offspring trembled and staggered as if the disease had already consumed the next generation.

What stood in the barn was no longer a herd, but a collection of suffering, animals ravaged by an unrecognizable plague with no hope of recovery, silently begging with their expressive eyes to be put out of their misery.

Another curious observation Rick made was that all the rodents on his farm had disappeared, but larger concerns soon engulfed him.

Two of his children had fallen ill, and then his cousin Carl died in a bizarre tractor accident on the property, as if he had blacked out behind the wheel, tumbled off, and been crushed beneath the machine.

It was inexplicable.

Yet through it all, Rick Halbert continued his quest for clarity.

He was put in touch with Dr.

Alvin Furr at the National Animal Diseases Laboratory in Ames, Iowa, who agreed to conduct a pesticide screening on the deadly feed using gas-liquid chromatography.

And in another moment of sheer fortuity, a technician in Dr.

Furr's lab left the analyzer running while out to lunch.

When they returned, the readout revealed an unexpected result that would most likely not have been discovered if the machine had been manned.

Peaks and valleys denoted the presence of a foreign compound in the feed with an unusually heavy molecular weight.

It wasn't a pesticide, at least not the kind they were used to seeing, but it was unmistakably man-made.

Once the results were confirmed, the next step was to identify the contaminant.

That responsibility fell to the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation, armed with an electron capture detector and a mass spectrograph.

Their findings were decisive.

Not a trace of magnesium oxide was present in the feed like it should have been.

Instead, the instruments detected an industrial compound, its signature revealed by the presence of bromine.

That narrowed the possibilities, but Rick Halbert wanted certainty.

In April 1974, he forwarded the results to George Frees, a USDA scientist at the Beltville Agricultural Research Station, who recognized the compound almost immediately.

It's polybrominated biphenyl, or PBB.

It seemed fate had intervened once again.

George Fries was the only researcher in the United States who had studied PBB when it debuted as a flame retardant two years earlier.

And he knew that there was only one place where it was manufactured, the Michigan Chemical Company.

This is the Michigan Chemical Company.

Some of the chemicals processed here are made to be eaten by people and animals.

Others are pure poison.

The Michigan Chemical Company, owned by Belsicole Chemical, a subsidiary of Northwest Industries, was the largest employer in St.

Louis, Michigan, a small town located approximately 100 miles north of Battle Creek.

Its 54-acre plant had operated on the banks of the Pine River since World War II when it produced DDT for the U.S.

military.

By the 1970s, Belsicole was producing more than 250 chemicals at the MCC plant, including Dust Master, a substance for controlling dust on highways, Boilermaster, a product used to clean boilers, and the recently formulated Fire Master, the highly toxic PBB-based fire retardant, which was incorporated into plastic products such as auto parts, telephones, typewriters, and TVs.

The manufacturer of these industrial compounds produced byproducts such as salt and magnesium oxide, which Michigan Chemical repackaged and sold.

Of course, the company stuck to its naming conventions.

Magnesium oxide, for example, was rebranded as Nutramaster, an animal feed supplement, which was shipped to farm cooperatives across Michigan, including Battle Creek, always delivered in heavy brown paper bags, always marked with a blue stripe, until one day it wasn't.

In the winter of 1972, Michigan Chemical's pre-printed Nutrimaster bags were backordered amid a national paper shortage.

When the supply ran out, the company switched to plain brown sacks, the familiar blue stripe replaced by the trade name hastily hand-stenciled across the top.

At the same time, Michigan Chemical was rolling out a new crystallized form of FireMaster.

It hadn't yet been assigned a color-coded bag, so the PBB product, an off-white, powdery substance nearly indistinguishable from magnesium oxide, was shipped in the same plain brown sacks with only a barely visible brand name.

I bet some idiot made a mistake in the warehouse and you got PBB instead, George Freese told Rick Halbert, unaware that his offhand guess was closer to the truth than he realized.

Impossible, Michigan Chemical replied when Rick alerted them to this theory.

PBB was produced and shipped from an entirely different part of the plant than magnesium oxide, they told him.

The chances of that happening were slim to none.

But that is precisely what did happen.

Probably around May 2, 1973, Michigan Chemicals' internal investigation later revealed.

As much as 1,000 pounds of fire master was shipped to the Battle Creek Co-op, where it was mixed into the daily feed that was delivered to Rick Halbert, who fed it to his cows.

Rumors swirled that it was the fault of an illiterate truck driver or an illiterate feedmill worker who couldn't read the bag.

but the who, what, when, why, wheres, and hows were impossible to decipher thanks to Michigan Chemicals' Chemicals' sloppy inventory management and storage practices.

The only certainty is that there was unaccounted-for PBB and a bunch of sick cattle on Rick Halbert's farm.

The FDA provided additional confirmation days later when it discovered a half-empty bag of FireMaster at a feed mill in Minden, Michigan, 20 miles southwest of Halbert's property, where dairy farmers have been complaining about a mysterious illness for months.

Right from the start, everything that they did,

they tried to prove it was something other than

PBB that was causing these problems.

The university was in on it, the Michigan Department of Public Agriculture was in it, the Michigan Department of Public Health was in on it.

It seemed like right from the word go that it was pretty well covered up.

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Bags of the wrong chemical were sent to Farm Bureau Livestock Feed Mills.

Instead of a chemical to help cows grow, the mills got bags of a highly poisonous chemical used as a flame retardant.

Its commercial name, Firemaster.

Its chemical name, polybrownated biphenyl, PBB.

Once it became clear that the contaminated feed from the Battle Creek Co-op had reached far beyond Rick Halbert's farm, the problem shifted from a private misfortune to a public crisis.

Any hope that identifying the source would bring a quick fix proved naive.

In reality, the disaster was only beginning.

Michigan's Department of Agriculture was finally compelled to intervene.

In a news release dated May 13, 1974, agriculture officials acknowledged that an industrial chemical had, quote, found its way into the milk supplies through contamination of cattle feed.

Still, they insisted, the problem was confined to just 15 dairy farms in the southern part of the state.

Those herds, they announced, had been quarantined after exceeding the FDA's new action level of one part per million of PBB in meat and dairy products.

The Battle Creek feed mill at the center of the crisis had been cleaned and sanitized.

They assured the public that at this time, there was no imminent health threat.

In reality, The Michigan Department of Agriculture was either dangerously uninformed, willfully deceptive, or both.

Within months of its reassuring statement, the number of quarantined farms jumped from 15 to more than 100, harboring thousands of contaminated cattle, sheep, and chickens.

It was now clear that the tainted feed hadn't just gone to a few unlucky farms, it had been distributed statewide.

Those who had sounded the alarm early, farmers like Rick Halbert, were dismissed at the time.

and blamed for their own poor husbandry.

At the same time, none were told that others in the state were watching their herds collapse in the same way.

Worse, the recent cleanup was a premature celebration.

The chemical clung to the machinery.

Every subsequent batch mixed at the Battle Creek Mill was polluted, which polluted secondary feed plants that performed additional processing even after the problem was first identified.

PBB isn't something you can simply sweep under the rug.

And the fact that MDA assumed a scrubbed facility meant the danger was over just further underscored how little they understood.

The contamination was deeper, more persistent, and far more widespread than anyone had imagined.

By the time anyone realized this, an estimated 50,000 tons of feed produced between the fall of 1973 and the spring of 1974 had most likely been compromised, which meant that for roughly nine months, the state of Michigan's food chain had been quietly poisoned.

Every glass of milk, every cut of meat traced back to those animals carried a dose of PBB.

This meant nearly every living creature in Michigan had been exposed.

Millions of animals, millions of people.

What were the health consequences?

Nobody knew, especially not the Michigan Department of Agriculture, despite their assurances that there was no threat.

PBB was a relatively new chemical.

There was no data whatsoever on its impact on humans, whether it harmed them, and if so, at what level of exposure.

What little state and federal officials did know came from Dow Chemical and DuPont, two notoriously environmentally cavalier companies that had considered producing PBB a few years earlier, only to abandon the idea after animal tests on related compounds showed bioaccumulation and strong evidence of carcinogenicity, but nothing definitive.

Any meaningful health studies would take months, if not years, which meant the FDA's action level of one part per million wasn't grounded in science at all.

Yet this arbitrary threshold became the basis of the MDA's quarantine policy.

Farms testing under the one-part per million limit were allowed to operate as usual, their milk and meat still entering the food supply.

Those testing above it saw their products pulled from the market and their herds condemned.

It's cruel, actually, to watch them lay here and suffer.

There's nothing you can do for them, but after they die, just drag them away.

Farmers whose livelihoods were wiped out were promised compensation eventually through the insurance carried by Michigan Chemical and the Farm Bureau.

But the two companies were battling it out in court over who should pay.

Relief, if it came at all, would come slowly.

In the meantime, the Department of Natural Resources designated a site in the deep pine forest of Kalkaska County to serve as a mass grave.

Remote, isolated, and miles from water or people.

It was approved for burial use in July 1974.

For liability reasons, the decision to euthanize was left to the farmers themselves.

The Farm Bureau covered the cost and provided transport, while a state veterinarian oversaw the slaughter.

However, the final call rested with the people who had raised the animals as if they were family.

I think the feed agencies are wrong that they

force a farmer to make that kind of a decision to destroy his own cat was wrong.

I mean, it's morally wrong to

place that kind of a burden upon a farmer.

They should have been cared for by the agencies.

This way, it's terrible to do this.

It was a brutal but obvious choice.

Sentence them to death or prolong their suffering while receiving no payout and bleeding the farm dry.

It was the darkest day in my life, Farmer Gary Zoudervane said, reliving it in his head.

Some of the cows were in such poor shape that they collapsed and died on the trucks that carried them north.

Behind those trucks came the farmers, following in their cars, determined to make sure the final moments were at least humane.

At the sight, the cattle were led into holding pens, then ushered forward individually toward the pit.

Many balked, refusing to step down from the trucks.

Their teary-eyed owners gently coaxed them out by calling their names.

A veterinarian from MDA waited with a syringe in hand.

A muscle relaxant slid into the vein.

The animals dropped where they had just struggled to stand before a single rifle shot ended it.

Instant relief from the pain.

Workers slid open the abdomens to keep them from swelling.

Cranes moved in, hooking the carcasses, hoisting them onto wooden pallets and swinging them over and gently placing the bodies inside the 12-foot deep trench.

Initially, the Kaukaska site was approved for the burial of 5,000 cattle and some additional smaller animals.

By the end, the official number reported by the state of Michigan exceeded 30,000.

800 of those cows belonged to Rick Halbert, the farmer whose persistence had uncovered the scandal.

By late summer of 1974, Rick and others with condemned herds began receiving financial relief.

For some, the payments were enough to rebuild and re-enter the dairy business.

For others, the trauma was too heavy.

They walked away, unwilling to ever risk living through something like that again.

And as the months passed, it became clear that some farmers were still trapped in the nightmare.

Jim Van Heisman says he has been permitted to sell cattle made sick by PBB because tank meat inspectors don't think the beef will make people sick.

The state told me to go ahead and show them that they were okay that they're legal to sell them.

And what did you think of the cows?

I wouldn't eat them myself.

About 18 months had passed since the mix-up first laced Michigan cattle feed with PBB.

The signs were now slower to emerge, subtle, inconsistent, sometimes dismissed as coincidence, but nearly 600 farmers were convinced their herds were still ailing.

In contrast to the cattle condemned at the very start of the crisis, whose feed was so highly contaminated and unpalatable that they preferred to starve to death, These new cases had consumed smaller doses, stretched out over months, but the results were just as horrific.

Lou Trombly, a farmer from Hershey, remembered trudging through his barn with a scoop shovel and a wheelbarrow collecting the daily abortions.

Some calves were born with holes in their skulls.

You could look straight through to the brain, he said.

The few that survived were even worse off.

When Lou placed them in a pin, he said the newborns thrashed wildly, bludgeoning themselves against the walls until they stopped breathing.

The symptoms varied from farm to farm and from herd to herd due to different feeding practices.

But local veterinarians agreed that the cows were obviously sick and ultimately concluded that the culprit was PBB.

The catch

laboratory tests detected only faint traces of the chemical in the animals, levels that fell just under the state's official tolerance of one part per million.

These farmers were left without recourse, and their only path to stave off financial ruin posed quite the moral dilemma.

Keep milking and butchering their poisoned cows.

and feed the tainted products to the people of Michigan.

Many farmers took that path because there was no other way to make a living, but others refused.

They couldn't bear the thought.

They had already seen what eating the contaminated food had done to their own bodies, and they weren't willing to inflict the same on anyone else.

Exhaustion, blackouts, aching joints, open sores, digestive troubles, even strange nail growth.

Farmers and their families who had been unknowingly consuming PBB-tainted meat, eggs, and milk for months, began to develop the same disturbing symptoms they had observed in their cattle.

Bernard Drend is one of those humans.

He unknowingly ate PBB-contaminated food and now suffers from dizziness, memory loss, and general poor health.

His PBB level is nine times higher than some of his animals, which were considered unsafe and killed.

Dr.

Larry Witt and his wife lost their child during early pregnancy.

Physicians, he says, reported the fetus contained no recognizable human tissue.

The low contamination farmers pleaded with the state to implement and lower its own PBB tolerance level, a move that would not only rescue them from an impossible situation, but also protect the public from food they knew wasn't safe.

The Michigan Department of Agriculture, however, was unmoved.

Officials insisted that there was no evidence to suggest that low-level exposure harmed people or animals, and in some cases went further, joining skeptical citizens and accusing the farmers of inflating their troubles just to cash in.

Well, I think they're claiming all these difficulties to get a little money.

Finding a sympathetic ear was nearly impossible.

Neither local nor national media wanted the story.

Rural agricultural scandals didn't sell papers, especially with Watergate dominating the headlines.

The governor of Michigan, William Milligan, was misled by his own agencies, so he never took action.

And the federal government showed even less concern.

This was a man-made, state-level disaster.

and there was no pot of federal money set aside to clean it up.

And behind closed doors at the Michigan Department of Agriculture, that was really the crux of the issue, economic considerations.

Lowering the PBB tolerance could be far more detrimental than just waiting it out.

It would mean quarantining more farms, destroying more food, indemnifying more farmers, and burying more cattle.

It would also risk alarming the public, potentially crippling Michigan's agricultural industry permanently.

And lurking beneath it all was another threat, the legal liability of admitting too late that the health effects were every bit as devastating as farmers had claimed.

In the end, the decision was taken out of Michigan's hands.

In November 1974, the U.S.

Food and Drug Administration dropped its PBB action level from one part per million to 0.3.

Officials claim the change was made possible by advances in testing equipment that now allowed measurements down to 0.3 ppm with reasonable accuracy.

Smelled like bullshit, and a farmer would know.

PBB began as an an accident, a blunder.

At this meeting, citizens were told what little federal and state investigators do know.

They believe PBB in small amounts is not dangerous and have set what they say is a safe standard, 0.3 parts per million.

The new tolerance level still fell short of what many farmers, veterinarians, and medical professionals believed was safe, so the fight dragged on.

Still, The adjustment gave some low-contamination farmers a chance to file claims.

The only problem was that the pool of insurance money, which ultimately amounted to $15 million, was completely depleted, leaving at least 300 newly condemned operations out in the cold.

Their only path to compensation, they were told, was to take Michigan Chemical, or Farm Bureau services, to court.

Until then, the farmers were offered one more chance to be heard.

In May 1975, the Michigan Agriculture Commission, the policymaking arm of the MDA, convened public hearings to consider removing from market any food that contained detectable detectable levels of PBB.

On paper, it sounded like progress.

In practice, the outcome was predictable.

FDA officials who set the tolerance level testified that 0.3 ppm posed no danger to human health and state officials nodded along in agreement.

I have utterly no concern about PBB as a problem in foodstuffs which my wife buys in the supermarkets today.

We have never at any time changed our food buying buying patterns in my home during this situation.

They pointed to a recently completed short-term survey by the Michigan Department of Public Health, which examined families living on quarantined farms and concluded conveniently that no illnesses could be linked to PBB.

The result of that study

was that there was

no symptom or sign of illness or biochemical evidence of illness that could be detected acutely in individuals who had ingested PBBs.

That survey was later criticized by other health professionals and scientists as being, quote, poorly planned, unscientific, possibly biased, and does not conform to the standards of adequate scientific, medical, and epidemiological evaluation.

Mostly because it was revealed that 70% of the subjects in the study's control group had been exposed to PBB.

It made no difference.

Citing the survey, the Michigan Agriculture Commission voted down the proposal.

The tolerance would remain at 0.3 ppm.

The outcome felt predetermined.

The department, charged with safeguarding both consumers and the agricultural industry, had time and again favored the industry when the two were pitted against one another.

And it was no wonder why.

The Agriculture Commission appointed the director of the Department of Agriculture.

Senior officers at the Department of Agriculture were members of the Farm Bureau.

The Farm Bureau funded political campaigns and research at public universities.

It was complete regulatory capture.

When it comes to economic power and political influence in Michigan, few big corporations have as much as the Farm Bureau, a cooperative that has represented farmers since 1919.

So it has used all the power and influence it can to minimize the seriousness of the PBB problem.

The decision infuriated Michigan State Representative Don Al Bosta, whose unanimously supported bill to provide low-interest loans to low-contamination farmers was vetoed by the governor.

Not long after, Al Bosta was tapped to chair a special House committee to investigate every major player in the PBB disaster.

But as the probe began to expose politically inconvenient truths, the legislator pulled the plug by abruptly cutting off its funding.

Maybe somebody did take vibes.

I don't know.

I've always kind of suspected that somebody did get

something out of it.

I just assumed, always assumed, that that's the only way that they could take those positions.

I don't see how anyone in the right mind could want to poison people all over this state knowing what the effects are.

By the end of 1975, many of the low-contamination farmers had reached their wits' end.

Alvin Green in Chase, Michigan, was among them, stuck with sick, unproductive cattle and no clear path to recompense.

He'd already made the moral choice not to sell poisoned food into the market, but that decision carried a heavy cost.

Now with bills piling up and his herd wasting away, the Green family was on the verge of losing everything.

My dream was to have a beautiful herd of cattle, a beautiful farm, and I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it.

And I could do it on my own.

And I was proving it until this poison came along and took it away from me.

Alvin's bitterness deepened with each passing day.

He watched his family's future crumble.

He felt abandoned by his own government.

And beyond the farm fences, it seemed as if the rest of the world didn't have a clue as to what was even happening.

I just got to the point where that nobody would listen to me, and I sat here one day, and I had a damn good notion to take my rifle and go out here and blow my head off.

So Alvin Green conceived a plan to force the world world to pay attention.

He began digging a pit, and when it was ready, he invited local reporters and television crews to witness what was about to unfold.

Alvin Green was going to execute his herd himself.

On a cold, rainy morning, November 10th, 1975, Green and 25 neighbors and friends gathered on his property and formed a makeshift firing squad.

In between sobs, they eliminated the cows one by one.

Within an hour, it was over.

112 cows and calves lay dead in a ditch.

The images shocked the nation.

Alvin Greene's grim protest captured both the desperation of Michigan's farmers and the staggering scale of the PBB contamination.

His act became one of the most enduring symbols of the disaster, but he would never farm again.

The farmers claim that millions of cattle, sheep, and poultry which ate the tainted feed are sick and dying.

But the government says their tests show these animals have too little PBB in them to make the animals sick or to harm human beings.

And farmers like Lewis Trombly are caught in the middle, according to their attorney.

They're unable to sell their farms, unwilling to sell their products, and they face the threat of financial ruin.

This cow has got an abscess that leaks.

These cows have abscesses all over their bodies.

Now, these cows are low-tolerance cows.

This cow is still alive on my farm today, and I can put it on your dinner table legally, but morally, I will not put it on another person's dinner table.

In March 1976, frustrated by officials' persistent inaction, low-contamination farmers staged a march on the Michigan state capitol in Lansing to publicize the PBB disaster.

Lou Trombly made the group's intention explicit.

We'll take a truckload of dead cows down there, and we'll carry them into the governor's governor's office, he said.

We'll take them these cows with the big old abscesses that's leaking all over the place.

He either buckles up and listens to what we're telling him or he can call out the National Guard.

The protesting farmers also arrived with a clear set of demands.

They called for the PBB tolerance level to be lowered from 0.3 ppm to 0.002 ppm and for every animal to be tested and destroyed if contaminated.

They demanded immediate research into the human health effects of PBB exposure, as well as a full investigation into possible corruption within the departments of agriculture and public health, and they insisted on fair compensation for their losses.

Their livelihoods had been destroyed through no fault of their own.

Farmers want all animals with traces of PBB destroyed, and they want compensation for their losses.

But most of all, they want this continuing environmental disaster to end.

The demonstration worked.

It drew headlines across the state.

After all, it wasn't every day that dead cows were chained to the front of a pickup and paraded through downtown Lansing.

The spectacle forced the issue onto Governor Millikan's desk.

In response, he announced the creation of an independent blue-ribbon advisory panel.

Six internationally recognized experts in toxicology, physiology, pharmacology, cancer research, and more would be tasked with reviewing the evidence on low-level PBB contamination.

I have charged this panel to review all of the available data, all of the knowledge, background information, to receive all of the comments from authorities in the field, and to come back with a report on the various levels which are being discussed in the state and outside the state.

In May 1976, the advisory panel delivered its findings to Governor Milliken.

Citing clear evidence that PBB accumulates in human and animal tissue and its strong potential to cause cancer and birth defects, the panel urged that the tolerance level be reduced to as close to zero as possible.

However, rather than accept the panel's recommendations outright, Governor Millikan scheduled a public review of the report, conveniently on a date when none of the report's authors could attend to defend it.

Predictably, the usual opposition filled the room, the Farm Bureau, the MDA, the FDA, each recycling familiar arguments against lowering the tolerance.

But this time a new voice joined them.

Rick Halbert, representing the high-contamination farmers whose herds had already been replaced, warned that adopting a stricter standard would saddle farmers like him with an impossible burden.

They would have to start all over since by definition, their new cattle undoubtedly still carried low levels of PBB.

Despite the panel's expert warning, the Michigan Agriculture Commission once again refused to alter the action level.

However, despite the best attempts of those in power, reality has a funny way of becoming too real to ignore.

Two years ago, livestock feed in Michigan was accidentally tainted with the industrial chemical PBB, polybrominated bifanol, and thousands of cattle died.

Today, Michigan health officials said the chemical has now been found in the breast milk of a test group of 22 nursing mothers.

But they said that despite its potential for harm, they don't have enough evidence to recommend against breastfeeding.

By early 1977, Governor William Milliken finally conceded he had been misled.

He pushed through legislation to lower the PBB tolerance from 0.3 ppm to 0.1, still far higher than what experts and farmers had demanded, but enough to trigger compensation for hundreds more farmers, and at least on paper, a greater measure of public safety.

The change also meant thousands of additional animals would have to be destroyed.

We're going to need a bigger grave.

When the contaminated cattle arrived in Mayo, two women protesters tried to block their slaughter and burial.

The residents here are angry and afraid.

They believe PBB from the dead cows will seep into their groundwater.

Michigan officials say that's impossible because the animal carcasses are being buried in a pit lined with clay 20 feet thick.

Last week, a judge agreed, and today these cows were killed.

The cows killed here today are among the last of the animals originally contaminated with PBB, but their death does not mark the end of the PBB controversy nor the contamination.

The official estimates were staggering.

1.5 million farm animals dead, 5 million eggs tainted, 18,000 pounds of cheese destroyed, and untold quantities of contaminated milk and beef consumed.

In all, more than 8.5 million Michiganders, nearly the entire state, were exposed to PBB.

Three years later, there was still no clear answer about what that exposure meant for their short-term or long-term health.

In late 1976, the state of Michigan turned to Dr.

Irving Selikoff of Mount Sinai Hospital in New York to lead a comprehensive health study of more than a thousand volunteers.

Selikoff was already renowned for exposing the lethal dangers of asbestos a decade earlier.

At a press conference in January 1977, Selikoff and his team shared the study's preliminary findings.

He cautioned that it was too soon to determine whether PBB should be classified as a carcinogen, but urged Michigan's leaders to reduce exposure to the lowest possible levels.

Quote, We found health problems that we did not anticipate and would not anticipate among people in general.

For example, one of the highest blood levels we've so far seen of PPB

was in a man who did not live on a quarantine farm, but ate 21 eggs a week.

So it may turn out to be that what

you ate and thereby what you were exposed to will turn out to be the most important

problem.

In February 1977, Michigan State Senator Francis Bus Spagniola seized on the momentum from the early results of the Selikoff study.

to push through legislation lowering the PBB tolerance to 0.02 ppm.

This bill also set aside funds for new health studies and provided low-interest loans to struggling farmers.

But for many, the relief came too late.

Unable to keep their poisoned herds alive long enough to serve as evidence, they had little left to claim.

Their last hope of being made whole now hinged on the first lawsuit against Michigan Chemical and the Farm Bureau to go to trial, which began later that same month.

And it is that issue, economic loss caused by PBB contamination, which is on trial here.

A farmer who contends he lost 150 cows to PBB contamination is suing the manufacturer of PBB, the Michigan Chemical Company, and the distributor of contaminated feed, the Michigan Farm Bureau Services.

His attorney says the company has attempted to cover up an environmental catastrophe that placed the highly toxic PBB into the human food chain.

Roy Takama, a Michigan dairy farmer, claimed his cattle suffered lingering effects of PBB contamination.

He had been denied state compensation because his herd tested under the official level at the time.

So, as instructed, Takama turned to the courts.

He sued the companies he believed to be responsible for not only crippling his farm through negligence, but for orchestrating a cover-up which caused financial losses so severe he would never recover.

Most farmers in Takama's position had already settled.

Takama wanted to ensure he was repaid what he deserved.

What then?

I've lost a lot of money.

I mean, a tremendous amount of money.

You think the day that I walked out here and sorted out all the cows were bad and shot all the young cattle, that day right there cost me $50,000.

And I haven't got a dime out of that.

Not a dime.

Defense attorneys denied any cover-up, but went further, insisting that PBB was not responsible for the collapse of Michigan's livestock industry.

Yes, the chemical might cause vague symptoms, they argued, but there was still no credible proof that low-level exposure exposure could actually damage cattle or reduce milk production.

The case was deliberately narrow in scope, confined only to agricultural losses, not the broader health effects on farm families or consumers.

Even so, the Takama trial became the longest and most expensive litigation in Michigan's history.

It stretched on for 16 months, heard testimony from 63 witnesses, and generated more than 25,000 pages of transcripts.

It was a bench trial, decided without a jury.

In October 1978, Circuit Court Judge William R.

Peterson issued his ruling.

It was devastating.

Peterson dismissed all of Takama's claims against Michigan Chemical and the Farm Bureau.

He found that the plaintiffs had failed to prove any measurable harm to the health of the dairy cows or any decline in milk production attributable to low-level PBB contamination.

Even more surprising, he ordered Takama to pay the defendants' court costs.

The opinion was scathing and vitriolic.

Peterson described Takama as a man whom the court believes to be fundamentally honest and God-fearing, but then accused him of, quote, telling a number of inconsistent and untrue stories.

He declared there was not a shred of credible evidence to support the farmer's claims and went further, calling the allegations of corporate cover-up, gross neglect, and collusion with state officials, quote, flagrantly irresponsible in view of proofs to the contrary.

In Judge Peterson's view, the true tragedy of the PBB disaster was not the poisoning itself, but the needless destruction of animals exposed to low levels of polybrominated biphenyl, and even of animals that never received PBB.

He confidently insisted that, in small amounts, PBB is non-toxic and suggested that many of Takama's herd problems were the result of his own poor farming practices.

Even the defense was surprised by the venom and Peterson's decision.

But for low-contamination farmers still awaiting settlements, the effect was crushing.

Takama had been publicly branded a liar.

His case had been thrown out with prejudice, and now lawyers across the state became reluctant to touch similar suits.

Farm Bureau and Michigan Chemical felt less urgency to resolve pending claims.

Critics blasted the ruling as spiteful and politically motivated, influenced less by evidence than by fear of what a verdict against the companies might mean for Michigan agriculture.

To many, it seemed the court had decided it was in the state's greater good to act as if PBB had happened.

Soon after, Michigan Chemical and the Farm Bureau settled all remaining claims for $3.7 million.

On average, each farmer received about $32,000, along with a requirement to waive any future personal injury claims tied to PBB-related health problems.

Surprisingly, criminal charges were filed against several employees of Michigan Chemical and the Farm Bureau for concealing material facts about how PBB was made, packaged, and stored, and for gross negligence and adulterating food.

However, the employees pleaded no contest and were fined just $4,000 each.

Add to that another surprise.

In 1978, PBB was back.

Although truthfully, it never went away.

It is feared that the waste from PBB-contaminated animals deposited in pastures as long as five years ago is the source for the current recontamination of livestock.

Because the chemical is tenacious and not easily broken down by nature, some of Michigan's farms may be permanently polluted.

Felsicol and its subsidiary Michigan Chemical never restored their reputations after the PBB disaster.

Their credibility was further eroded as other scandals unfolded simultaneously.

Fosvel, a pesticide, was wreaking havoc in Texas and abroad, while another of their products, Triss, a flame retardant used in children's sleepwear, was banned after tests revealed it was 100 times more carcinogenic than smoking.

Delsicole closed the Michigan chemical plant in St.

Louis in 1977.

The company then demolished and buried it where it sat a year later and were allowed to walk away from the state of Michigan with no further liability.

Almost.

It was then discovered that Delsicole, via Michigan Chemical, for years had been dumping tons of chemicals, including PBB and DDT, into the nearby landfills in Pine River.

All of these areas were were irreparably contaminated.

The incident resulted in a flurry of legal suits by state and federal authorities.

But today, after years of negotiations, government officials announced that Velsicol Chemical Corporation has agreed to pay $38.5 million to clean up the polluted dump site, work that has already begun.

Velsicole reached a consent agreement with the EPA and the state of Michigan in 1982 to assure proper remediation of the site.

The company agreed to excavate contaminated soils from nearby areas and consolidate them at the main plant, surround the site with a slurry wall to contain further spread, and seal it all beneath a clay cap.

In 1984, Belsico announced, Mission accomplished.

The new Superfund site was marked with a granite tombstone that read, Warning, do not enter.

We cleaned it up, and we didn't wait to be hit over the head by the state or the federal government.

A year later, Belsico and its parent company, Northwest Industries, were acquired by Fruit of the Loom.

Yes, the underwear company, which suddenly inherited all of their toxic baggage.

When Fruit of the Loom declared bankruptcy in 1999, it shed responsibility for contaminated sites like the former Michigan chemical plant in St.

Louis.

The timing could not have been more convenient.

Just two years earlier, in 1997, An inspection of that plant revealed that the slurry wall and clay cap Belsico had built were failing.

More than 11 million gallons of contaminated wastewater had seeped into the Pine River.

Testing of fish and sediment showed the highest levels of DDT ever recorded in the United States.

Today, more than 50 years after the PBB disaster, the land around the former chemical plant in St.

Louis, Michigan remains poisoned.

Birds still drop dead from the trees.

The fish in the Pine River are too toxic to eat.

What was once expected to take years has stretched into decades, consuming hundreds of millions of dollars.

Money secured only because a citizens task force refused to stop fighting for every single penny.

Ed Lorenz, a professor at Alma College and vice chair of the Pine River Superfund Citizen Task Force, told Michigan Public Radio that the cleanup will likely cost more than half a billion dollars when it's all said and done, while the companies responsible will escape with paying barely 10% of the bill.

All the current costs are coming from tax money.

We call this an orphan site.

It It has no parent.

And this orphan is expensive.

It's going to cost $45 million to build a new water system that's not contaminated.

It cost $100 million to dig up a bunch of DDT-laden sediment from the Pine River, $23 million to clean another area where Velsko used to burn and dump waste.

and $150 million to redo the cleanup the company botched the first time around.

How this massive contamination and exposure has affected the health of the local population has only recently become more clear.

Dr.

Selikoff's study in the late 70s concluded that Michigan farm people had unusually high incidence of physical and neurological ailments, but the jury was still out on long-term effects.

Four years later, an American Medical Association report stated that 97% of Michigan residents showed measurable levels of PBB in their blood.

In the decades since, additional studies have only amplified the alarm.

Well, depending on who you ask.

It's been estimated that the fire retardant chemical, PBB, got into the blood of nine out of ten Michigan residents after being accidentally mixed with livestock feed eight years ago.

And today, a federal study for the first time definitively labeled PBB as a cancer-causing agent in animals.

The National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences based its two-year study on rats and mice, but warned that the chemical agent might be hazardous to people.

A spokesman for the governor cautioned against heightened concern, saying, so far there's no evidence that cancer in the lab means cancer in people.

A 1981 federal report labeled PBB a cancer-causing agent in animals.

And in 2016, the U.S.

Department of Health and Human Services concluded that PBBs may reasonably be anticipated to cause cancer in humans.

Emory University researchers, led by Dr.

Michelle Marcus, picked up the work after the state stopped monitoring residents, finding evidence that PBBs interfere with the endocrine system and may pass damage down through multiple generations.

In 2013 and 2014, Emery collected blood samples from more than 800 Michigan volunteers.

Their findings suggested elevated rates of thyroid disorders, reproductive problems, miscarriages, and cancers, not only in those directly exposed in the 1970s, but in their children and grandchildren as well.

And we are seeing health effects, particularly reproductive health effects like the miscarriages.

Now, that's affecting the third generation.

The second generation would be

children of the people who ate the contaminated food.

And we know from animal studies that, in fact, some of these endocrine-disrupting chemicals, that

they can affect multiple generations,

you know, up to four and five generations down the line.

For many, the consequences have been lifelong.

Families describe a litany of ailments, everything from cancer to heart defects, resulting in shortened lives.

Jim Hall, a utility worker, tested at PBB levels seven times higher than people who worked at Michigan Chemical decades before.

and suspects the exposure cost the lives of both his brother and young daughter.

Others, like Lori Morris and Jane Ann Crowley, have endured devastating reproductive health issues they trace back to contaminated food from their childhood farms.

Today, there's still no medical treatment to remove PBB from the human body.

Its half-life is measured in decades.

Suffice it to say, many of the study participants today, years after their original exposure, still have circulating PBB in their blood.

As long as PBB is still in you, then the threat, if you will, of what it might mean is still there and needs to be evaluated.

As Marcus Cheatham of the Mid-Michigan Health Department put it: the contamination left St.

Louis, Michigan with more than poisoned blood.

It left behind a toxic town where residents felt betrayed by the very institutions meant to protect them.

Quote: We really have let this community down, and it's really tragic.

Swindled is written, researched, produced, and hosted by me, a concerned citizen, with original music by Trevor Howard, aka the former, aka Fire Master.

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Hello, my name is Cameron from Louisiana.

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And I'm a concerned citizen value business.

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