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Freedom, others have faced lawsuits before

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CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Over the past decade, Freedom Industries, its officers and associated companies have faced several lawsuits in Kanawha and Putnam counties, most of which were dismissed for various reasons.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Over the past decade, Freedom Industries, its officers and associated companies have faced several lawsuits in Kanawha and Putnam counties, most of which were dismissed for various reasons.

Freedom Industries now faces about 40 lawsuits after a chemical leaked from its storage tank into the Elk River and fouled the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginians last month. The company filed to reorganize under Chapter 11 bankruptcy a week after the spill.

On Dec. 31, 2013, four companies merged under the umbrella of Freedom Industries: Freedom Industries Inc., Etowah River Terminal LLC, Poca Blending LLC and Crete Technologies LLC.

Freedom markets and distributes chemicals that are mixed by Poca Blending in Nitro. Etowah River Terminal is the storage facility on the Elk that leaked the chemical. It has about a dozen tanks, each of which can hold tens of thousands of gallons of chemicals. It was formerly a Pennzoil facility.

Of the four companies merged in December, Freedom was the oldest. Carl L. Kennedy II, a longtime Charleston businessman, founded it Feb. 10, 1992. Its listed address at that time was 8 Capitol St.

In 2004, Kennedy and Kenneth C. Fox, directors of Eight Capitol Street, defaulted on $8,630 in workers compensation payments, according to documents in Kanawha Circuit Court.

The lawsuit to collect the money was later dropped in 2005 after Kennedy and Fox agreed to repay the money.

Kennedy is a longtime business associate of Dennis "Denny" Farrell, listed as president of Freedom Industries on the company's website. Kennedy is still listed as "incorporator" on Freedom on the West Virginia secretary of state's website.

In 2004, a lawsuit was filed against both Kennedy and Farrell by D-G Airways in Kanawha Circuit Court.

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Freedom, others have faced lawsuits before

WWII soldiers experience abroad fed freedom fight back home

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Breath of Freedom, a documentary airing Monday, reminds us that the world is sometimes a bizarre place, one in which a country can fight a war abroad as the champion of freedom and democracy, while enshrining their opposites in law and practice.

But there is something hopeful in the program, too. The two-hour television special is the story of black American veterans who experienced greater freedom while serving in Germany than theyd had in the U.S., and came back determined to change circumstances at home, playing significant roles in the modern civil-rights movement.

The story is told in film clips and interviews through the experiences of Americans and Germans, black, white and mixed race, including retired King County Superior Court Judge Charles Johnson, who served during the occupation.

Hosea Williams, a close associate of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.s, was a sergeant in a unit that fought under Gen. George Patton. Williams earned a Purple Heart after being severely injured in a Nazi bombing raid, but he wasnt safe at home after the war.

He was still in uniform traveling home after the war when he drank water from a bus-station fountain reserved for whites. An angry crowd beat him so badly they thought he was dead and called a hearse. He was just barely alive, but had to be driven past white hospitals to a veterans hospital more than 100 miles away where he was hospitalized for a month.

Nothing about that makes sense, but it wasnt just a matter of a few people behaving badly, it was part of the systematic subjugation of black Americans rooted in laws those veterans would help change.

Johnson, who grew up in Arkansas, joined the Army in 1948 and served almost four years in a segregated unit in Germany. While he was there, he had a German girlfriend with whom he traveled all around the country. It opened a whole new world to him, he says in the documentary, but when he came home, he returned alone.

I asked him about that last week and he said, She wanted to come here, but I knew I couldnt live that kind of life here in the United States. Its something you just didnt let yourself think about because you knew it couldnt work here. Interracial marriage was banned in most states until the Loving v. Virginia Supreme Court ruling in 1967.

The Germans hadnt suddenly given up the racist ideas that led to death camps, but the power equation was different. Johnson said Germans didnt always like seeing him and his friends dating German women, but they had to tolerate it.

Johnson came home with a mission, to get a law degree and get out of Arkansas. While he was finishing college after the war, he told a professor he wanted to attend law school and was looking for a place where hed be able to get a job. The professor had earned a Ph.D. from the University of Washington while working nights at the post office.

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WWII soldiers experience abroad fed freedom fight back home

Freedom Industries cleanup advances

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This aerial photograph shows the Freedom Industries tank farm along the Elk River in Charleston. The arrow identifies Tank 396, which leaked the coal-cleaning chemical Crude MCHM into the river on Jan. 9, contaminating the drinking water of 300,000 West Virginians for weeks.

CHARLESTON, W.Va. -- Cleanup crews at Freedom Industries are still several weeks away from emptying all of the site's chemical storage tanks, and still don't have a clear idea of how much of which materials could have contaminated soil at the site.

The West Virginia Department of Environmental Protection is overseeing the cleanup, which is being carried out by Freedom Industries and contractors for the chemical company.

Mike Dorsey, director of emergency response and homeland security for the DEP, said he hopes remediation of the facility might be completed by late spring. However, state and federal government officials remain unsure of the extent of contamination in a key part of the site.

The area around the chemical tanks in the northern end of the site -- including Tank 396, which leaked Crude MCHM into the Elk River on Jan. 9 -- has yet to be fully investigated, largely because the eight chemical tanks there haven't been removed.

U.S. Attorney Booth Goodwin is conducting a criminal investigation of the leak. The U.S. Chemical Safety Board also is examining the incident. Neither agency has completed its work in that area, Dorsey said, but those investigators should finish in the area soon.

"The sooner we can get in there, the better," Dorsey said in an interview last week.

Until the tanks are removed, he said, it's impossible to judge the extent of soil contamination or to know how much remediation must be done to clean up the area.

"The stuff was flowing around underground and who knows where," Dorsey said. "I don't expect to find large quantities of it, but I expect to find some."

The presence of more MCHM in the soil at the site not only will require additional cleanup, but that work likely will bring with it more of the licorice-like smell Charleston residents have become familiar with since the Freedom Industries leak.

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Freedom Industries cleanup advances


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