Elmer Fike founded Fike Chemical in 1971. The eleven-acre site he chose had been a federal nitrocellulose plant during World War One - one of the original reasons Nitro, West Virginia exists as a town. The brick buildings were still standing, the rail spurs were in place, and the Kanawha River ran along the south side of the property to take any inconvenient liquids away. Fike's commercial strategy was to take chemical processing jobs that larger companies declined. Some of those jobs were genuinely difficult chemistry. Others were difficult because the byproducts were hard to dispose of legally. Fike's solution was to not dispose of them legally. Hazardous chemicals went into unmarked 55-gallon drums that were stacked around the property. Liquids went into open-pit lagoons next to the river. There was no significant waste remediation infrastructure on the site. The savings from skipping that infrastructure were Fike Chemical's competitive advantage.

Among Fike's accepted jobs was the disposal of the liquid sodium coolant from the decommissioned Fermi 1 nuclear reactor near Detroit, Michigan. Sodium metal reacts violently with water. The standard disposal method involves controlled reaction in a contained facility. Fike's method was to dump the sodium into a World War One-era bunker on the property. The bunker was not water-tight. When rain began to leak in, the sodium reacted with the water and exploded. The town of Nitro was told to shelter in place for the next twelve hours while firefighters fought a fire that periodically reignited every time more rain reached the remaining sodium. This was not an isolated incident. Fike Chemical's history through the 1970s and early 1980s was a steady run of fires, leaks, and minor explosions that local newspapers reported on with grim regularity. The cumulative coverage attracted national attention, including the 60 Minutes segment.

After the 60 Minutes broadcast, the EPA admitted in public statements that the Fike site had 'fallen through the cracks' of federal regulation. By 1982, the agency had reached an agreement with Fike on soil and water testing and a remediation program. In 1983, the mayor of Nitro informed the EPA that Fike had laid off his workforce and abandoned the site. Throughout the inspection process, Elmer Fike maintained publicly that the government's environmental requirements had driven him out of business. He sold the property to Artel Chemical in 1986. Artel kept the plant running until 1988, then closed it for good. In June 1988, the EPA sent in remediation teams. What they found included an unsecured pressurized cylinder of hydrogen cyanide, additional remaining sodium metal, a large tank of methyl mercaptan (which is highly flammable and smells like garbage), ten thousand unlabeled barrels containing volatile organic compounds and other hazardous wastes, and elevated dioxin levels throughout the soil.

Federal cleanup of the Fike site took more than two decades. Drums had to be opened and contents identified one at a time. Lagoons were excavated and the contaminated soils removed. The decision was made to thermally treat the soils on site rather than ship them out for incineration elsewhere. In May 1999, the EPA transferred the cleaned-up property to the Nitro Development Authority for productive reuse. Major remediation was considered complete in 2011, with monitoring showing no residual leakage into the Kanawha River - a remarkable achievement given the plant's history. Groundwater monitoring of the underlying aquifer continues to this day. The story of Fike Chemical is a kind of dark mirror to the story of mid-twentieth century American industrial chemistry: an enterprise that survived for decades by externalizing every cost it could, and a cleanup whose final price tag - paid almost entirely by taxpayers - dwarfed whatever Fike ever turned in profits. The buildings are mostly gone. The chemistry, as much as it can be, has been put back in the ground in a less dangerous form.