Hey, everybody. I'm really happy today to introduce you to one of my old friends, John Watham,

who's a hurricane creep keeper in Tuscaloosa, Alabama, Tuscaloosa County. And like many of the water

keepers, John is a veteran of the military service. He was in the United States Navy, came home

to an industrial job and a poisoned and ended up devoting his life to clean waterways.

Oh, John, you're originally from Boston, right?

No, no, from Birmingham. Let's don't get off on the wrong foot, buddy. So I'm from Birmingham,

Alabama. We've born there in 50 in the 50s and watched things progressively go downhill around

me as a kid. I didn't understand a lot of the environmental changes that I was seeing. We just

took it for granted that that's the way it is. You mentioned that I got poisoned on my job.

That's the first time that, me personally, that I had been impacted by industrial pollution

to the point where I was in pretty dire straits. We sued the company and in the process during

discovery, I went out with them into the community and found out that there was a cancer cluster

all the way around this plant where I was working. And there were children out

playing in the rainwater that ran down the gutter was black with cold dust. The top of their

school was black with cold dust. This stuff was all over the place. It inspired me to want to do more

to expose things like that. But when I got so sick and nearly died from it, I got angry.

That's when it hit me. Somebody made a lot of money by skirting the rules that allowed me to get sick.

And all those people living around that place up there, they were also getting sick because of

a bunch of industrial fat cats that wanted to make money. The off of our bags, they made money.

And I tell people all the time, it pissed me off and I hadn't calmed down yet.

What kind of plant was that? It was a cold cooking plant in Birmingham, Alabama. Where they take raw

coal and they put it into these coke ovens and they bake it until all of the impurities come out of

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