Bain Capital profited heavily off this Georgetown, South Carolina steel mill as part

of GS Industries, which went bankrupt and laid off 450 workers in 2001.

Bain Capital profited heavily off this Georgetown, South Carolina steel mill as part

of GS Industries, which went bankrupt and laid off 450 workers in 2001.

Mitt Romney often objects to environmental regulations and has vowed to roll them back given the opportunity. He's got some experience in making money when such regulations are ignored. In at least one case , allowing hazardous emissions to blanket a South Carolina town for years gave tremendous return on an investment by Bain Capital during Romney's tenure there.

The place was the little port town of Georgetown. The company was Georgetown Steel, a maker of wire rods that was bought by Bain in 1993 along with a sister plant in Kansas City, Missouri in a $24.5 million deal. Reorganized as GS Industries, by the time the company went bankrupt in 2001, Bain claimed in a prospectus that it had made $58.4 million off the deal from dividends and $900,000 in annual management fees.

Lost at the same time as the bankruptcy were 450 jobs and a 42-year-old steel plant.



"We were doing well and then Bain Capital bought us and they took everything they could out of the company without making the investments we needed to stay competitive," said James Sanderson, who has been with the mill since 1974 and served as its union president since 1988. "They ran the company into bankruptcy."

Standard Bain fare thus far. The profiteering off the GS Industries disaster even brought Texas Gov. Rick Perry to Georgetown briefly in January this year to diss Romney during the Texan's abortive presidential campaign.

But there was more than the usual buccaneering in Georgetown. The steel plant had been polluting the town for some time with red dust from the iron ore mineral goethite used to make the steel wire rods. Jack Gillum reports that the stuff was everywhere, got into everything and made life miserable for Georgetown residents who literally called it "The Stuff." It covered cars and boats and houses:



"Everybody talked about the red dust, The Stuff," said Marilyn Burkhardt, who owned a seven-room bed and breakfast with her husband before leaving town in 2000. "My husband scrubbed the house probably every other week with a pressure hose," Burkhardt said. It was often difficult for guests to eat breakfast on the deck. "We had to work like crazy. And for what? Just to keep the outsides of our houses clean."

After complaints were filed and state-installed monitors found the red dust not just annoying but unhealthful to workers in large quantities, South Carolina demanded Bain clean up its act. Some small changes were made to keep the dust contained at the plant, company roads were paved and a truck wash was installed. The dust kept coming. Swimming and fishing in the once-clean waters of the harbor were curtailed. Scores of residents filed a class action suit for millions of dollars in 1998, a year before Romney claims he left Bain even though documents show he was active in making decisions about the firm's investments until 2001. That was the year GS Industries went bankrupt.

A new company bought GS Industries as it emerged from bankruptcy in 2003 and a judge ordered a payout in the lawsuit to residents: $113,000 split among dozens of people. One of those, Shirley Carter, got $800. Not even enough to paint her house, she said. She also said she plans to vote for Mitt Romney. Some people never learn.

Meanwhile, the steel plant now runs in spurts. It was bought by ArcelorMittal in 2005, shut down in 2009 and reopened in 2011 with half the workers who were there until the company went bankrupt under Bain.