Vice President, Environmental and Corporate Affairs, Smithfield Foods Inc.

Mercury - 1982

Former Director, Department of Environmental Quality

 

As director of DEQ from 1998 to 2001, Dennis Treacy fulfilled a lifelong ambition. “As a child, I used to spend my summers at a hunting camp in Bath County, so I got sort of soaked in Virginia’s environment at a very early age,” Treacy remembers. “I wanted to be a biologist on Eastern Shore Maryland, [studying] geese, and I didn’t get the job. They said, we have one more, go work for the State Water Control Board, and then maybe you can transfer the next year and go for your geese. Well, I didn’t transfer.

 

“There were major environmental issues in Virginia, and I’m talking major. I remember going down to the Holston River, digging into the bank with my hands and pulling up marble- and golf ball-sized balls of mercury right out of the river bank. That’s how bad it was.

 

“We had almost untreated sewage going into the Chesapeake Bay. We had oil spills of enormous size in the Chesapeake Bay, which would coat ducks and geese and cause massive fish kills.

 

“That was my job, to go deal with this. My first job at the State Water Control Board was at a place called DES, the Division of Ecological Studies. We were basically first responders and ambient monitoring people. Those were in the days I think there were probably fish kills every day.

 

“But the water board dealt with it in a very aggressive manner. The agency was very small, but it was run by strong people. In those days, industries didn’t listen to anybody; the cities didn’t listen. Their theory was, get rid of this pollution, put it in the river and maybe it will wash away and everything will be fine. The State Water Control Board, I will give them credit, worked extremely hard, and was very brave in that climate to impose command-and-control rules so that it was not allowable for anybody to do this. They took extraordinary action on toxics … chlorines, metals, mercury, Kepone and
other materials.

“We went on numerous occasions as early responders out to the James River to take fish samples, and soil samples and sediment samples and found that the river was just jam-packed with Kepone, from Hopewell all the way down.

 

“It’s very different now. The days of really toxic material and massive oil spills and fish kills every day are gone. The really toxic and polluted waterways are gone. The focus has changed very much, and that’s due to extraordinary controls on industry and on cities. There is a new focus on things like nonpoint source pollution. That is the next frontier on the water—how are you going to stop nonpoint source pollution? 

 

“Global warming attention has rekindled some passion in environmentalism. Children talk to me about the air, the water and the environment, much more than I heard children talking about it in the ’80s and ’90s. I think what the country needed was some attention to readjust its focus. What we need to do is re-energize the country and the state of Virginia to have a true goal and a true ethic that can move forward. The good news is that … it’s equalizing again here in Virginia. The environment is everybody’s concern. It’s every political party’s concern. It is every citizen’s concern again, and when you see that kind of movement to me that’s a tremendous victory.”