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Trus-Joist MacMillan Air Quality Permit Hearing (mid '90s) Posted: July 23, 2006
Hi. My name is Will Herrick. I live near the corner of Wolfe, Lee and Breathitt counties on a 1000 acre boundary on the North Fork of the Kentucky River. I own a farm, a bulldozer, and a sawmill. I am a University of Kentucky Commonwealth Fellow, and I own and operate a computer consulting firm. My home is about 4 miles north of the Lee County site that Trus-Jois MacMillan considered prior to selecting the Perry County site.

I am speaking to several audiences: The Governor of the state of Kentucky, Breyreton Jones, to Mr. John Robillard, General Manager MacMillan-Bloedel, and the boards of MacMillan-Bloedel and Trus-Jois MacMillan, to the regional public, and to the working folks who think they may want employment with Trus-Jois MacMillan. My message to everyone is that there are reports of severe chemically induced asthma among the working staff employed at Trus-Jois MacMillan's sister plant in Deerwood Minnesota. This Air Quality hearing is entirely the right time and place to discuss this seriously.

Further, any plant this size demands careful thought of equivalent scope and scale, and that has not entirely happened yet. In fact, Governor Jones and Mr. Robillard, you need to know that in Lee County, public discussion was suppressed. I believe my testimony today will show that we are negotiating something akin to a new Broad Form Deed here in East Kentucky, and no one, surely, wants to repeat past mistakes and let East Kentucky landowners market their valuable resources without understanding how valuable they really are. I want to appeal to Trus-Jois MacMillan, and ask you to help solve your problems by working with all comers. It would be better for all to promptly engage in open dialogue.

We know that MacMillan-Bloedel owns Trus-Jois MacMillan and is a 2 to 3 billion dollar per year multi-national with tens of thousands of employees. They are large enough to have both good and bad examples in their past, and vast experience at colonizing and adding value to new forests throughout the continent. They are reported to intend 5 more PL300 plants like the one in Minnesota. The proposed PL300 plant near Hazard will consume the Poplar wood from thousands of East Kentucky acres per year. To reconstitute this wood will use about a train car a week of MDI, Methylene bisphenyl diisocyanate. MDI is the steam activated adhesive used to bind the strands of poplar into a beam, eight feed wide, 35 feet long and up to 5 1/2" deep, a beam that is later resawed.

According to Trus-Jois MacMillan and others1, MDI vapor has a range of health affects. A single high exposure of MDI vapor (or liquid) to the 1 in 10 that are "sensitive" can cause a long term debilitating asthma. When Minnesota's Brainerd Daily Dispatch reported on 5/4/92 that two more Trus-Jois MacMillan employees had begun to suffer from MDI related asthma, Trus-Jois MacMillan's Plant Manager Bob Blatt was quoted as saying that "Sensitivity is not unusual."
I think that it will be very hard for Governor Jones to promote health care and to support any company that has a clear record of health problems. Workplace MDI induced Asthma is enough like Black Lung that it could easily become a political hornet's nest here in East Kentucky. MDI can cause a crippling allergy that once you get it, it can flare back up from re-exposure. Ten per cent of the public is easily sensitized, a single high exposure can cause allergic reactions, like asthma, and chronic coughing. Trus-Jois MacMillan wants to use public money and it is reasonable in this political environment to ask for certain health guarantees for the use of that money.

We want some specific things before the state issues permits to Trus-Jois MacMillan :

An explicit written assumption of risk in the use of MDI and either a medical and financial safety net for the workplace injured, or much tighter regulation and oversight.

Adequate review of exposure to MDI and other hazardous volatiles in the PL300 workplace. Trus-Jois MacMillan has changed from their original Minnesota PL300 plant ventilation design.

Oversight of the respirator technologies used day to day in the PL300 plant. Carbon filter systems, as those reportedly used in Minnesota, do not remove MDI vapor.

Design changes to eliminate the fire hazard proven at the Deerwood PL300 plant, where flammable Aspen strand and MDI were allowed to accumulated in unsafe quantities.

Fire and safety service equipment, training and funding for fighting very large hazardous fires emitting Hydrogen Cyanide and other toxic gases. Hydrogen Cyanide is more commonly used in gas chambers to kill convicts.

A safety review of the fire hazard and history of the PL300 plant.

Consideration of the design changes conceived by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) to introduce burning strands from the wood dryer back into the burner fuel feed stream, not the short strand waste pile. The Deerwood PL300 plant has a design where wood in the dryers occaisionaly catches fire and the burning strands are dumped and then later transferred to the short strand waste pile. Any residual fire in these strands could ignite the waste pile. The Deerwood strand pile did catch fire and it took three fire departments to control the blaze.

Air quality inspections randomized around six month intervals.

Independent environmental monitoring and reporting.

Explicit Air Quality permits for and acknowledgment that MDI coated wood is commonly incinerated in the PL300 boiler/dryer system. Trus-Jois MacMillian's Minnesota Air Quality permit indirectly lets them burn MDI coated wood wastes and the large quantities of MDI residue that collects inside the wood coating tanks. I would like to have this decision reviewed here in Kentucky and specifically permitted or disallowed because of the production of Hydrogen Cyanide and other toxins in the combustion of MDI, and the risk that presents to the public, to firemen, and to the environment.

After reports of asthma injuries at Trus-Jois MacMillan's Deerwood plant , MacMillan Bloedel President Tom Denig was quoted 2/3/93 in the Minnesotta Star Tribune as saying "Our primary concern is the allegations from our associates of noncompliance with our own procedures," i.e.: employees are not always following management's directives. I am sure Trus-Jois MacMillan needs a strong employee training program and vigilant management to really fix the factory floor air quality problem, train and retrain it, and to safely handle MDI. Because of the use of MDI, the PL300 plant needs to be treated both as a sawmill and as a chemical plant.

Because we may fail to make the opportunity to meet again, and because in the Minnesota equivalent of this meeting, MacMillan-Bloedel Attorney William Flynn discussed the company's position on logging regulations, I'm going to engage Mr. Robillard and the Governor in the constructive suggestion that the time has come to talk together and resolve, rather than precipitate, a fight between ensilted Lexington water drinkers, water-taxed East Kentuckians (via the Kentucky River Authority), new primary wood industries who may contribute to erosion and to the sediment load in the Kentucky River, and the existing logging industry. Governor Jones and Mr. Robillard, please take this chance to lead us to progress.

Please join with the Governor, the EQC, the indigenous logging community, and the rest of Kentucky to mandate better logging practices. Effectively train loggers to best manage their logging practice. Promote TVA style contracts from landowner to logger as well as from the logger to mill. Some lands, like riparian and steep land, need special practices and protections. State and independent oversight is needed. Kentucky's forests are ripening, and they will soon be harvested. Any farmer will tell you--crops won't wait. These protections are needed now, and if missing when the Trus-Joist MacMillan plant comes on line, they will be sorely absent.

Is there an engineering requirement that only deciduous softwoods can be used as raw stock, or can other forest products, like hardwoods, be used?

One of the most important issues for us here in East Kentucky is the source of wood stock for the PL300 plant. Based on various personal conversations, I have a sense that the state is considering a purchasing board. I would ask that we not install a state monopoly as the purchasing board, nor settle for contracts just between the logger and the mill, as they are largely unenforcable in practice. Both these market designs have proven inadequate for competitive price control, and wood seller protection. Nearly all the approximately 350 Kentucky loggers I met attending the Sustainable Forestry Conference in Morehead this spring were vocally opposed to chip mills on the basis that they evolve into major competitors for the existing wood industry. Trus-Joist MacMillan and other Minnesotta chip mills doubled the cost of standing lumber raw stocks to the Minnesotta mills. Contracts between the wood owner and the logger as well as from the logger to the Mill are essential. In their own introductory pamphlet "MacMillan Bloedel of America, inc., Deerwood Division The Product and the People", Q&A, "How will we select the wood suppliers?" MacMillan Bloedel notes that they will provide forestry management oversight and inspection, but articles by Ben Parfitt (2/27/88) and Christie McLaren (5/16/86 Globe and Mail) have questioned MacMillan Bloedel's logging practices.

I am submitting a set of newspaper clippings and articles for the state to consider as they review this permit.

In closing I would to say that I very much hope that Mr. Robillard and Governor Jones will see it in their interest to meet with the public again and discuss these issues soon. I thank you all for your time and attention.

Will Herrick
[1]: Davies RJ. Respiratory hypersensitivity to diisocyanates. 4 Clin Immunol Allergy 103-24 (1984).

Johnson, et al. Respirator abnormalities among workers in an iron and steel foundry. 42 British Journal of Industrial Medicine 94-100 (1985).

Vandenplas. et al. Hypersensitivity Pneumonitis-like Reaction among Workers Exposed to Piphenylmethane Diisocyanate (MDI) 147 Am.Rev. Respir. Dis. pp. 338-346 (1993).

Estlander, et al. Occupational dermatitis from exposure to polyurethane chemicals. 27 Contact Dermatitis 161-165 (1992).

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