Black Residents Want This Company Gone. Will Alabama’s Environmental Agency Approve a New Permit?

By Patrick Darrington, Inside Climate Change

Walter Moorer likes to say he lives at 411 “Death Row Street.” At least that is what he compares his living conditions to as he is bombarded with the stench, pollution, noise and dust that emanates from an asphalt plant owned by Hosea Weaver and Sons Inc.

“I changed it to Death Row because I’d be in the house and that odor comes from Hosea Weaver,” Moorer said at a hearing last month before the Alabama Department of Environmental Management (ADEM). “It’s like I’m in a gas chamber. So I been on death row 20 something years.”

Moorer’s testimony came during part of the hearing set aside for public comment on Hosea Weaver’s application for a new or revised Synthetic Minor Operating Air Permit. The input from Moorer and others who live next door to the company could be summed up in three words: deny the permit. 

It had been a long road of opposition for Moorer and his neighbors, who can still remember life before the asphalt plant, and the Planning Commission meeting 25 years ago when their concerns were first ignored. Would their testimony, and written comments, to the state’s environmental regulators produce a different result this time? 

Moorer actually lives on Chin Street in the historic Black community of Africatown, which was founded by former slaves brought to America on the Clotilda, the last known slave ship to arrive in the country. Intertwined in Africatown’s history is the constant billow of industrial pollution that has plagued residents there for years. 

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