Hayes-Sammons Pesticide Plant

Content sourced from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

The Hayes-Sammons Pesticide Plant in Mission, Texas, became a Superfund site in 1987 after decades of pesticide use and pollution. The business began as a hardware store in 1907 started by Albert Sammons. His brother Thomas Sammons and Ted Hayes formed Hayes-Sammons Hardware by 1912. By 1918 they started selling pesticides, and by 1933 they had their own citrus pesticide brand.

In the early 1940s, Thomas Sammons Jr. and Clay Brazeal bought the company and expanded its reach northward and into Mexico. In 1951 the company was renamed Hayes-Sammons Chemical Company and continued expanding into South America and parts of the Middle East. The business eventually split: Sammons kept the hardware side, while Brazeal kept the chemical side and the warehouse, renaming it Mission Chemical Company. Mission Chemical went bankrupt in 1968, and Brazeal started the Tex-Ag Company.

In 1969 Helena Chemical Company bought the plant and kept the Hayes-Sammons name. Tex-Ag was later bought by Wilbur-Ellis in 1996. During the 1950s and 1960s, workers included Mexican immigrants, and toxins such as Agent Orange, calcium cyanide, chlordane, DDT, parathion, and toxaphene were stored in two Union Pacific warehouses, contaminating the air, rainwater, and soil nearby.

In 1979, after a complaint, the EPA and the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission inspected the site and found toxins, leading to the demolition of the building. Cleanup as a Superfund site ran from 1988 to 1996 after the 1987 designation, and the site is now waiting to be removed from the list. In 1999 about 2,500 people sued the companies for miscarriages, cancers, birth defects, and other health problems; the plaintiffs won, with settlements totaling roughly $4–$6 million and $5–$8 million plus a cleanup of 1,700 cubic yards of contaminated soil. Final restitution was paid on July 31, 2023.