This story is co-published with The Assembly and Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity. This reporting project was supported by The Uproot Project Environmental Justice Fellowship and produced through the Environmental Justice Oral History Project.
Paul Fisher first heard about the Sampson County landfill on a radio talk show in the early 1990s. Folks were adamantly discussing plans to transform Sampson’s municipal solid waste facility in Roseboro, which had officially been in operation since 1974, into a massive regional dump site that would regularly draw from 44 counties.
Fisher, who lives less than a mile away in the Roseboro neighborhood of Snow Hill, and other residents quickly organized against it, frustrated that the county hadn’t done more to engage them in the process. But officials largely ignored their protests, and the expanded site that opened in 1992 has since grown from an approximate 350 acres into over 1,300 acres — the largest landfill in North Carolina.
Like many residents of Snow Hill, Fis... Read more
