Photo by Ant Rozetsky / Unsplash
Ninety-five years after Monsanto began contaminating Choccolocco Creek, the EPA has a plan. It will take another ten to forty years. The community education grant that was supposed to help residents understand the remediation was terminated seven months after it was funded.
There is a woman in West Anniston who grew up knowing the creek was wrong. Not from any pamphlet. Not from a federal notice. From the way adults went quiet when children mentioned it. From the fish that looked fine but weren't. From her mother's phrase, repeated through summers: don't eat anything from that water. She didn't know the word PCB until she was in her thirties. By then she had already stopped letting her own children near the bank.
Choccolocco Creek cuts through Calhoun and Talladega counties in northeastern Alabama, running from the hills above Anniston down to Logan Martin Lake on the Coosa River. From the road it looks like any other Southern waterway — shaded in places, a little muddy after rain, herons working the shallows in early morning. There is nothing visible that says the sediment at the bottom has been classified as a Superfund hazard. Nothing that explains why the State of Alabama has maintained a standing advisory against eating the fish for decades.
West Anniston sits adjacent to what used to be 702 Clydesdale Avenue, the former Monsanto plant. The plant manufactured polychlorinated biphenyls — PCBs — from 1929 until 1971. The neighborhood that grew up around it was predominantly Black, working-class, and for much of that history had no meaningful political leverage over what the plant discharged into Snow Creek, which flows into Choccolocco. People worked at the plant. People fished in the creek. The company knew, from its own internal documents, that PCBs posed health risks. It continued operating for forty-two years.
Today, the woman's grandchildren have never caught a fish from that creek, never eaten one, and — because the Community Change grant that was supposed to teach them why was terminated in July 2025 before it could reach all 250 households — may not fully know what they're missing or why. The cleanup plan was signed in December 2024. The education was defunded seven months later. The creek still carries PCBs in its sediment. The children still ask what's wrong with the water. The answer still takes too long to explain.
The structural mechanism at work in Anniston is not negligence. It is a specific legal architecture designed to substitute negotiated timelines for enforceable ones. In 2000, Solutia Inc. — the chemical subsidiary Monsanto spun off in 1997, absorbing the PCB liability in the process — signed a consent decree with the EPA. This agreement avoided formal National Priorities List designation under Superfund, which would have subjected the cleanup to stronger statutory enforcement provisions. Instead, it created a private-federal remediation partnership governed by negotiated milestones, property owner agreements, and corporate timelines.
The result is that the Anniston PCB site has been divided into four Operable Units, each with its own Record of Decision, its own design phase, its own access negotiation process with private landowners. OU1 and OU2 — the former plant site and immediate adjacent soils — got a final ROD in 2017. OU3, covering other on-site areas, received an interim ROD in 2011. OU4 — Choccolocco Creek itself, the waterway that carries the contamination downstream through two counties to Logan Martin Lake — only received its final Record of Decision on December 20, 2024. That is twenty-four years after the consent decree, and ninety-five years after contamination began.
The "Superfund Alternative Site" designation Solutia obtained in 2000 means West Anniston's community does not hold the same statutory enforcement leverage as a formally NPL-listed Superfund community. Cleanup pace is governed by a consent decree — a negotiated private agreement — not by the mandatory timelines that National Priorities List designation would impose. This is not a bureaucratic footnote. It is the load-bearing structure of the entire delay.
The $85.2 million OU4 cleanup plan, to be funded by Solutia/Eastman Chemical as the responsible party, involves dredging creek sediment and excavating contaminated soils from residential properties along the Choccolocco corridor. The EPA's proposed plan was published for public comment in June 2024; the ROD was signed six months later. Active remediation has not yet begun. The projected timeline is ten to forty years, a range so wide it encompasses an entire generation.
"This is going to have ripples in the community of Anniston, Oxford, the communities downstream as well as Logan Martin Lake. We're looking at potentially 30 to 40 years before this remediation plan is completely finished, with ongoing monitoring once the active work is done."
— Justinn Overton, Executive Director, Coosa Riverkeeper, July 2024 (AL.com)
The rate-limiting factor, per Solutia's own remediation manager, is residential property access. Dredging and soil excavation require landowner consent. Some residents don't want crews on their property. That delay is structurally guaranteed in a neighborhood where distrust of institutional actors — including the company responsible for the contamination — runs across generations. The consent barrier is not incidental to the 10–40 year window. It is part of why the window is that wide.
"The sooner we get access from property owners, the quicker we can start. That's probably the biggest delay, because some people just don't want us on their property."
— Gayle Macolly, Remediation Manager, Solutia, July 2024 (AL.com)
The West Anniston Foundation received an EPA Community Change grant in December 2024 — the same month the OU4 ROD was signed — to build environmental health literacy among the approximately 250 households most directly affected. The grant funded air quality education and would have helped residents understand the scope, timeline, and implications of the remediation plan. The project began in March 2025. It was terminated in July 2025. The official reason: "change in administration priorities." The community is now seeking replacement funding from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation. That search was ongoing as of March 2026.
Compound this with Anniston's broader civic deterioration. The city has lost population for five decades. Its current 21,127 residents represent a 2.0% decline since 2020 alone. The poverty rate sits at 20.6%; median household income is $46,668 — well below the Alabama state median. The Anniston Water Works and Sewer Board announced rate increases in March 2025 to cover infrastructure maintenance costs. A shrinking, lower-income tax base reduces the city's capacity to monitor, advocate for, or accelerate any federally-driven remediation process. West Anniston has no institutional substitutes for the federal capacity the Trump administration just withdrew.
Environmental justice research has documented for decades that the location of hazardous industrial facilities, the pace of remediation, and the probability of community notification are not evenly distributed across race and income. The pattern in Anniston follows a geometry that appears repeatedly in the national record: industrial siting near lower-income Black communities; slower regulatory response; longer remediation timelines once cleanup is finally authorized.
A 2021 analysis by researchers at the University of Michigan found that Superfund sites located in census tracts with higher proportions of non-white residents took significantly longer to reach final cleanup status than comparable sites in whiter, wealthier tracts — even controlling for contamination severity and site complexity. The Anniston case is not an outlier in this pattern. It is the pattern, with a name attached.
The federal grant termination layer adds a newer dimension. The Community Change grant program — a Biden-era EPA initiative — directed funding specifically to communities living near legacy contamination sites to build their own environmental health capacity. Cool. Now explain who pays when that program disappears. The termination of the West Anniston Foundation's grant is one instance of a broader withdrawal of federal environmental justice infrastructure. At the same moment the EPA was committing Solutia to an $85.2M cleanup obligation, the administration was eliminating the community-side capacity to track whether that obligation is being fulfilled on schedule and at adequate quality.
There is also a parallel contamination ecosystem in Anniston that the OU4 ROD does not address. Fort McClellan — the former Army base on Anniston's eastern edge — carried its own contamination burden: Agent Orange precursor compounds, heavy metals, PCBs from military activities. The Fort McClellan Veterans Group filed a civil rights complaint against EPA Region 4 in November 2023, alleging the agency had refused to process their environmental review petition since 2021. As of the complaint's public release in May 2025, the petition had been resubmitted multiple times without substantive federal response. The West Anniston Foundation's own project documentation noted "additional environmental issues outside of PCBs — lead, mercury, pesticides" in the neighborhood. The total environmental burden on Anniston is larger than the Choccolocco Creek ROD captures, and there is currently no federal institutional mechanism tracking it as a unified load.
"It is sort of tragic. We're standing here and it's such a beautiful day and this is a beautiful stretch of creek and so many people are unaware that that sediment at the bottom of this creek is contaminated with a known carcinogen."
— Justinn Overton, Executive Director, Coosa Riverkeeper, July 2024 (AL.com)
The signal from Anniston is not only that a 95-year-old contamination finally has a cleanup plan. It is that the architecture of American environmental remediation — fragmented operable units, consent decree timelines, community access as the rate-limiting step, federal education funding as a dispensable add-on — produces multi-generational gaps between the moment a community is poisoned and the moment the poison is removed, and that those gaps fall most heavily on communities without the political density to compress them.
One legitimate reading of the OU4 timeline is that PCB creek remediation is genuinely, technically difficult — dredging contaminated sediment across miles of active waterway, managing downstream turbidity, negotiating private property access — and that the 10–40 year window reflects the actual engineering challenge rather than deliberate delay. Solutia's project manager frames the timeline primarily around property access, not corporate resistance. This is a fair point: remediation of extensive waterway PCB contamination has no fast method. The counter-evidence is that the consent decree structure, by removing NPL status, eliminated the external enforcement pressure that might have accelerated design phases and access resolution. Technical difficulty explains some of the timeline. Institutional architecture explains its outer bounds.
The July 2025 termination of the Community Change grant could be read as a general federal austerity measure applied uniformly across grant programs, rather than a targeted withdrawal from environmental justice communities specifically. The "change in administration priorities" language is broad. Many federal grant programs across multiple agencies were terminated in the same period. This alternative has real validity — it would be intellectually dishonest to claim targeting without documentary evidence of it. The issue is distributional consequence, not demonstrated intent: whatever the mechanism, the community left without capacity is a majority-Black, below-poverty-median neighborhood in the middle of a 10–40 year remediation process. The utility of the grant was specific to this population at this moment. The timing — terminated within seven months of the OU4 ROD signing — is structurally significant regardless of whether it was intentional.
What is not confirmed: The July 2025 grant termination is documented by the Thriving Earth Exchange project page (a Tier C organizational source) but has not been independently covered by Alabama press — the Anniston Star, AL.com — at this research date. A direct interview with Tycoma Miller at the West Anniston Foundation would harden this to Tier B and may reveal additional context about the termination process.
What is not tracked: The status of Operable Units 1, 2, and 3 — the former plant site and adjacent soils — is covered in EPA's Second Five-Year Review (October 2024, SEMSPUB 04/11226145) but was not fully reviewed for this dossier. Current-condition data from those units may change the aggregate picture of Anniston's total remediated acreage.
What would raise the SCI score: Confirmed reporting on the grant termination from a Tier B source; documented evidence of EPA Region 4's non-response to the Fort McClellan petition beyond the complaint filing itself; quantified municipal fiscal deterioration data linking population loss to monitoring capacity decline.
What would lower the SCI score or change the signal direction: Evidence that the Community Change grant termination was procedurally consistent with similar-stage programs in non-environmental-justice contexts at the same funding level; or evidence that EPA Region 4 has substantially accelerated OU1/OU2/OU3 cleanup such that the community's total remediated share is higher than the OU4 framing implies.
[1] U.S. EPA Region 4. "EPA Announces Record of Decision: Anniston PCB Site Operable Unit 4." Press Release, December 20, 2024. epa.gov
[2] U.S. EPA Superfund. Anniston PCB Site (Monsanto Co.), Site ID 0400123. cumulis.epa.gov
[3] U.S. EPA Region 4. Proposed Plan, Anniston PCB Site Operable Unit 4. June 2024. SEMSPUB Document 04/11200077. semspub.epa.gov
[4] U.S. Census Bureau. QuickFacts: Anniston City, Alabama. July 2024 estimate. census.gov
[5] Faulk, Kent. "Feds announce $85 million plan to dig up contaminated creek in east Alabama." AL.com, July 2024. al.com
[6] Southern Science (AGU-affiliated). "Fight for it to be better." November 13, 2024. southern-science.com
[7] WBRC Fox 6. "Anniston Water Works and Sewer Board raising rates." March 14, 2025. wbrc.com
[8] Thriving Earth Exchange. West Anniston Foundation project page. Accessed March 2026. thrivingearthexchange.org
[9] Fort McClellan Veterans Group. Civil rights complaint to EPA Office of Civil Rights, originally filed November 2023, published by EPA May 2025. epa.gov