During the driest months of the year Fourth Avenue and Newcastle street residents live in what they call the “dust bowl.” Jackets of dust cover their streets, pools, houses, yards, vehicles.
Just ask Teresa Cannady, who has lived on Brunswick’s southside for the past 28 years. She says that in the past decade, she says dust defeats her efforts to sweep and clean her one-story brick home.
“Our overall quality of life is terrible…our quality of life has really gone down because the dust is horrible. I will get out this weekend and clean my curb, take a picture of it nice and clean, and then in a few days, I’ll send you a picture of as to how it looks,” said Cannady.
The dust is not a natural feature of the environment, like the thick sheets of tree pollen in the spring. Instead, it is a byproduct of the wood pellet operations of Logistec, a Canadian-based stevedoring company with storage warehouses in Brunswick.
Logistec describes itself as a key partner in the global marine supply chain. Its operations span 60 ports and 89 terminals throughout North America, including its 45-person facility in Brunswick. But according to some local environmental activists and residents, it’s also a public health threat.
Since 2012 the state’s Environmental Protection Division has responded to 16 complaints that dust from the company’s wood pellet operations violated air quality standards.
Wood pellets in Logistec warehouses at the port caught fire two times — in 2015 and 2021 —accidents that resulted in total losses for the company. Less destructive fires occur regularly at the Newcastle site operated by the company, according to Rachael Thompson, the executive director of the Glynn Environmental Coalition, which has kept a file on Logistec dating back to 2012.
“This facility, almost every year for about 10 years, caught fire, and some of them were really bad. Like, there were evacuations because of the level of the fire,” she said.
Katia Reyburn, vice president of communications for Logistec, says the company is a good corporate neighbor and keeps to high environmental standards. Logistec works mitigates health and quality of life concerns about the dust churned up by the company’s operations by putting in place a dust control program, she said. Wood pellets make up approximately 75 percent of the cargo the company handles at the Brunswick terminal.
“As part of our operations, we have a dust-control procedure that follows all regulatory methods including ventilation and cleaning of the facilities and have maintained the Air Quality Permit provided by the Georgia Environmental Protection Division,” said Reyburn.
Residents don’t see mitigation
None of those measures satisfy Cannady, one of the Brunswick residents who routinely files complaints about the company.
Trucks filled with wood pellets take multiple routes to Logistec’s 225 Newcastle Street facility. One transports the product from Highway 341 to Fourth Avenue. Another brings trucks down Newcastle Street, where Cannady resides at 416 Newcastle Street.
Cannady, who is retired, spends a lot of time at home, which gives her a front-row seat to the truck traffic and the dust plumes from the wood product that she says blanket her property.
Part of her normal routine is to report the thick dust clouds to the state. When the dust first started to become a major problem in the neighborhood in 2012, she would complain to her neighbors and Brunswick city officials. Then, she met the GEC and found out she could report her concerns straight to the Georgia Environmental Protection Division (EPD) of the Department of Natural Resources.
“I was reaching out, trying to find someone to help me, because I was trying to get it done, and no one would listen to me. My neighbor down on the corner put a big sign up that says ‘Welcome to the Dust Bowl.’”
Now, Cannady reports to the EPD’s complaint tracking system and calls the Coastal District office to explain again and again how the dust covers her home.
What happens next is also part of a frustrating routine, she says.
In response to her complaint, an EPD representative meets with a Logistec official at the warehouse and asks for an explanation.
As part of the review, the EPD checks the facility’s records, including equipment maintenance records and other daily checks required by the air quality permit. The EPD is also supposed to check if there is a source for the dust.
Then Cannady normally gets an update, saying there is not much that can be done because the EPD has found no basis to take enforcement action.
EPD has fined Logistec three times for air quality permit violations and “fugitive dust emissions.” The most recent fine was January 2014 for $20,000.
Complaint after complaint
The EPD says it sympathizes with residents’ complaints, but protocols mean that they have few tools to improve their quality of life unless permit violations can be measured.
“EPD follows an enforcement protocol that prescribes when to implement different levels of enforcement if there are violations of the Rules and/or issued Permits for a facility. Enforcement actions typically require a response from the facility detailing what has been or will be done to resolve the violation,” said Sara Lips, EPD’s director of communications and community engagement.
Logistec says it has taken measures to mitigate the hardship to residents that live near its Newcastle facility. In response to an April 2012 complaint, it spent $5 million on industrial fans called DustBoss fans, which are designed for dust suppression.
The company and the EPD say that significant amounts of dust are generated by the trucks transporting wood products, not by the company’s operations.
According to EPD, there are several DustBoss fans scattered throughout Logistec’s facility. They said that these fans primarily target the entrance/exit of the storehouses and should reduce dust from trucks exiting the area.
Cannady filed her most recent complaint about Logistec in March.
In response, an EPD official drove around the Newcastle location to see what dust and debris was present on the road. The agency’s report said much of what was present was sand, dirt and pine needles, but “some dust” may have come from the facility.
Lin Delassus, the operations manager at Logistec, told EPD that a significant amount of dust leaving the facility might be a result of trucks tracking mud from washing stations located inside the facility. He explained that the mud was being tracked onto the roadway and then drying, leading to a dustier road. He suggested a solution: trucks entering the warehouses should be rinsed before leaving the property to reduce the number of trucks tracking mud onto the road and potentially lessen the amount of dust entering the roadway.
Reyburn, the Logistec director of communications, said “several” trucking companies transport cargo to and from the terminal. Logistec’s procedures to wash down trucks before they leave the company’s facility “has been very effective over the years” in controlling local dust problems, she said.
According to the report, Delassus said the company would urge Brunswick city officials to regularly sweep Newcastle Street once a new truck arrives at their facility. In 2013, the EPD recommended this as a solution as well.
The EPD took no further action to Cannady’s March complaint, noting that the company had offered this solution. The EPD report also noted that the company “may purchase additional DustBoss fans.”
They also said that Logistec has a designated area for trucks to be rinsed before leaving the property.
“Logistec has previously stated that some offsite dust may be due to tracked mud on the tires of the large trucks leaving the facility from the wash down area. Logistec has also stated some of the dust may be due to wind shifting suddenly, leading to the DustBoss fans being pointed in an ineffective direction,” said Lips.
Reyburn said the company is working with city officials about more routine street sweeping. She said the company had called the city twice in June.
Cannady says she and her neighbors have not seen the street cleaned for months.
The city confirmed that street sweeping had not been operational for the past few months due to broken equipment.
“We have two trucks right now. One of them had been in the shop under repair. There was a motor problem. The other one hit something on the roadways which caused the problem with the brush system. So for a while, we were down both pieces of equipment. Currently, we are fully operational in our street sweeping, but it is limited to areas that have curbing on the road,” said Regina McDuffie, city manager of Brunswick.
Impact on public health
Cathy Willis Spraetz has lived on Fourth Avenue for the past seven years. She was drawn to the city for its beauty, a place for her to spend her retirement. Now, that dream is tainted by the dust.
It’s annoying, she says, to wake up to her home exterior coated with dust. But what’s worse is how her asthma flares up. She now takes two medications to ease her breathing, something that did not bother her in her previous home of Shreveport, Louisiana.
“It’s prevalent on our house, our house is white so we can see it. It’s just, I mean, everybody has dust in their house, you know, right? This is, this is much more. And we have a pool, and you can just see it laying on top of the pool, when it’s at its worst, covers our cars. And so, you know, begs the question, what are we breathing?” said Spraetz.
The correlations are no coincidence, according to Thompson.
“When you look at communities that have high rates of COPD, you can generalize or correlate that they, you know, they either are exposed to a lot of particulate matter, which is something that happens in big cities, like ozone and emissions from cars and things like that. But it also can happen in industrial settings,” said Thompson.
For Spraetz, she has had to raise the dose of her asthma medication to combat the possible impact that the dust has had. Which has been effective, though the dust remains an issue at least aesthetically when the rain stops.
“I’m taking these new medications, they’re helping me to the point where it doesn’t affect my quality of life. But I can’t help but feel that breathing the stuff in, you know, that it’s not accumulating in my lungs and everybody else’s that breathes it,” said Spraetz.
Cost of business
Since 2018, Logistec has offered homeowners adjacent to their operations on Newcastle Street free car and house washes.
But for Cannady and Spraetz that is not enough. Cannady has refused the offer, saying she wants a a permanent solution to the problem that has made the past decade miserable for her.
“I told them I was not taking anything from them. I didn’t want them to do that. I wanted them to fix the problem, not to put a Band-Aid on it, so I would not let them help me,” said Cannady.
Thompson and her GEC staff urge citizens to take pictures of the dust when it accumulates and attach them to their EPD complaints. If residents clean their properties and then document new dust built up within 24 hours, that would likely suggest a violation of air quality controls according to state law, as it would show deposits of particulate matter outside of the fence line of the Logistec facility.
Thompson said that Logistec’s short-term solutions for residents make it harder to document long-term problems.
“That’s basically the story of Logistec in a nutshell. They pay some fines they pay to have some houses cleaned, and then next thing you know, you know, a year later, the issue comes back, and it always comes back, and it has never not come back, and just a consistent offender, you know, in terms of impairing air quality and quality of life for people that live down there,” said Thompson.
EPD said that unannounced inspections are conducted at least every 5 years. They also stated that once the investigation is complete, EPD contacts the complainant with any findings. If the complainant has any additional information or questions, those will be considered, and the investigation will stay open until the final questions are answered.
Cannady said that her interactions with the EPD have been lacking.
“All they do was tell me, there’s nothing they can do because there’s not enough evidence to help,” said Cannady.
Spraetz sees the recent storms and rain as more helpful in preventing dust than the city’s street sweeper.
“I don’t think the street sweepers really make any difference in terms of the dust,” said Spraetz.
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