TACOMA – A giant burial mound in Ruston holds the ruins of Asarco’s copper smelter: bricks, mortar and soil so saturated with arsenic and lead that the crypt they are buried in will have to be monitored indefinitely to prevent leaks.
Asarco is poised to sell its waterfront property to a Lacey developer, including the tomb and the responsibility for the hazardous waste in it.
An estimated $45 million in cleanup work remains to be done. But the developer, MC Construction, is expected to assume responsibility only for half, depending on how negotiations with federal regulators go.
Still untouched are as many as 500 contaminated residential yards, adjacent industrial properties and nearby aquatic lands.
The former Fortune 500 company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection in 2005, and might be able to walk away from some of the nation’s most vexing and expensive environmental cleanups.
That would burden taxpayers with more than $1 billion in obligations. And some regulators say that estimate is low.
The remaining cleanup in Ruston and Tacoma is just a fraction of Asarco’s heritage nationwide. Asarco has told a federal bankruptcy judge that state and federal officials blame the company for contamination at 94 sites in 21 states.
Creditors fighting over the remains of the company could raid a small trust fund established to pay for cleaning up some of the worst pollution problems, officials said. But because trust fund distributions are prioritized based on human health risks, cleanup efforts in the Pacific Northwest could take a back seat to such places as:
* Omaha, Neb., home of the largest residential lead cleanup in the United States.
* El Paso, Texas, where contamination from a mothballed smelter and its 800-foot smokestack extends into Mexico and New Mexico.
* Hayden, Ariz., where a still- operating Asarco copper smelter has polluted its surroundings.
It’s unclear how much power the government’s environmental lawyers will wield in bankruptcy court. The Texas judge can’t erase Asarco’s court-ordered cleanup responsibilities, but there might not be enough money to pay for them.
The Asarco bankruptcy was among the 10 largest filed in the nation in 2005. The company’s list of creditors is long.
“We’re in uncharted waters,” said Kevin Rochlin, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency manager overseeing the $180 million Tacoma cleanup.
Before Asarco, EPA officials had never confronted a polluter that sought to unload its cleanup its responsibility in the middle of the process.
“There has never been anything of this magnitude and this complexity,” he said.
The so-called Superfund is tapped out as well. The 1980 federal law was enacted to force polluters to pay the price of harm to public health and the environment, but the taxes expired and the Republican-led Congress has not restored them.
Asarco set up an environmental trust fund three years ago as part of a settlement with federal regulators. Over the next five years, it is expected to provide $62 million, plus interest. In contrast, individual smelter cleanups typically cost about $200 million.
Unfinished cleanups
More than a century of Asarco mining and metal extraction operations in the West and Midwest have defiled dozens of places – among them whole towns – that include some of the nation’s largest Superfund sites.
In many places, Asarco shares liability with other polluters who could be forced to pick up cleanup bills the bankrupt company won’t.
In Idaho, for example, Asarco is among the mining companies blamed for contamination spread across the 1,500-square-mile Coeur d’Alene River basin. Remedial work is likely to last for generations. The EPA has estimated the cost of the first 30 years at $359 million.
The total bill hasn’t been divided, but in 2003 a federal judge found Asarco 100 percent liable for contamination at about a dozen mine and mill sites in northern Idaho. The judge assigned Asarco 22 percent liability for the wastes left behind by metal and mining operations.
In Omaha, the EPA says Asarco’s past smelting and refining operations are largely responsible for the lead contamination in a downtown residential area that federal officials have labeled a public health hazard.
For more than 120 years, Asarco ran a lead smelter and refinery on 23 acres along the west bank of the Missouri River. The smokestacks were the first thing drivers saw when they crossed the bridge from Iowa heading toward Omaha, home to about 390,000 people.
The refinery continually exceeded air and water pollution limits during the last decades of its operation. It shut down in 1997, and Asarco demolished the buildings and built a public park in its place.
In 1998, the Omaha City Council – appalled after blood tests detected dangerously high levels of lead in hundreds of Omaha children – asked for federal help. In 2003, the EPA designated Omaha a Superfund site.
The Omaha site encompasses 20 square miles, but could expand because the boundaries of the lead contamination haven’t been mapped. The budget for the first five years of cleanup work is $77.4 million. The EPA also has ordered the Union Pacific Railroad to pay.
“By the time we’re done, total site costs could be more than $200 million,” said Bob Feild, an EPA manager for Omaha.
Other places sullied by Asarco’s mining and smelting operations include:
* Everett, where state Department of Ecology officials estimate 550 residential properties are contaminated with arsenic.
* East Helena, Mont., where a mothballed lead smelter is never expected to reopen.
* Colorado’s Rocky Mountains, where Asarco’s past pollution threatens a water treatment plant at the headwaters of the Arkansas River, a whitewater rafting and fly-fishing destination and a major source of irrigation water.
What’s left in Ruston
During 95 years of operation, Asarco’s Ruston smokestack spread arsenic and lead contamination over 1,000 square miles, state regulators say. Asarco has denied this. While regulators have never tried to force the company to pay for the cleanup, damages could be included in the state’s bankruptcy court claim.
The state did not map the boundaries of the smelter’s plume until years after federal officials approved a more limited Superfund cleanup of the smelter and the vicinity.
In 1983, the EPA added the Ruston smelter site to its national Superfund priorities list. Later, Asarco struck a deal that allowed it to bury the waste on the site as long as it redeveloped the area. The most highly contaminated material has been confined in the crypt.
But there’s much left unfinished.
Asarco is responsible for the removal of contaminated soil from residential properties within a mile of the smelter. Two hundred properties that have been tested await cleanup, and as many as 300 more still need to be tested before the EPA decides whether they need to be cleaned up as well.
Besides the cleanup remaining on Asarco’s 97 acres, estimates of the company’s obligations in the Tacoma area include:
* As much as $8 million in residential soil removal to reduce exposure to lead and arsenic.
* Between $3 million and $5 million to clean up the slag peninsula, or breakwater, where the Tacoma Yacht Club stands.
* Between $17 million and $19 million to dredge the yacht basin and cap other contaminated sediments in Commencement Bay. Asarco owns some of the aquatic lands, while the state manages the rest.
Residents frustrated
“We used to have a slogan, ‘Countdown to 2003,’” said Tom Aldrich, Asarco’s vice president for environmental affairs. By that year, Asarco was supposed to have its former Ruston smelter site ready for redevelopment.
Instead, 2003 marked another development – the court-approved settlement of a federal lawsuit. It was a deal orchestrated to shore up Asarco as it was buffeted by historically low copper prices and burdened by debt.
In Tacoma, the effect was to slow the cleanup. Plans to dredge the yacht basin and cap shoreline areas were shelved. Work zeroed in on the smelter and the neighborhoods. The bulk of the money came in small appropriations from the $100 million nationwide trust Asarco set up as part of the settlement. Asarco also kicked in some of its own money to dig up residential yards.
Until the bankruptcy, many Tacoma householders patiently waited for Asarco’s contractor to come around. Some have learned to live with the contaminated soil. They’ve received multiple health bulletins warning of the risks of exposure. Parents don’t permit small children to dig in the earth, and people try not to track dirt into their homes.
Phillip Hill, who works as a capital projects manager for Tacoma Community College, is among the critics who say Asarco reneged on its promises.
A couple of years ago, he and his wife, Sochi, bought a fixer-upper on N. Stevens Street in a neighborhood dominated by old houses, big trees and well-tended lawns.
Nobody has tested Hill’s soil yet, but samplings of nearby yards showed evidence of contamination. So, while he waited for Asarco to act, Hill took advantage of a little-known program Asarco offered to property owners within the cleanup zone.
Do-it-yourselfers could dig up contaminated dirt and dump it in metal barrels provided by Asarco. The company would haul the barrels away.
Hill got six 50-gallon drums from Asarco a few weeks before the bankruptcy. He dug up parts of his yard, planted flowers and raspberries, and filled the barrels with the contaminated sod. The night before Asarco’s bankruptcy became public, he left a voice-mail message on Asarco’s line asking for a pickup.
For months, no one touched the rusty, black barrels, which cluttered the alley behind Hill’s house. “I hate them out there,” Hill said last fall. “It’s such an eyesore.”
Finally, late last year, workers removed the drums.
Before they were hauled way, Hill said the unwanted barrels were emblematic of Asarco’s treatment of its neighbors.
“Everyone is focused on the site on the water. But as we know, the cleanup is more than that. How many yards haven’t been tested? In how many haven’t they replaced the soils?”
What’s next
After Asarco’s bankruptcy filing, the EPA tapped the trust fund to continue the residential cleanups in Tacoma.
In fact, Tacoma was the biggest beneficiary in the first three years of trust fund distributions, with $16.6 million. Asarco used the money to complete the hazardous waste crypt and transport contaminated soils, among other things, from its Everett site to Ruston.
But it’s uncertain whether what’s left of the trust fund will stand up to the claims of Asarco’s creditors.
And because the worst of the contamination from the Ruston smelter is already buried, what’s left undone might not rank as high on the EPA’s priority list as other places lined up for future trust fund distributions.
Still, the Lacey developer who is negotiating with the EPA to take title to the property insisted that cleanup obligations will not be ignored.
“There’s no task from the original Superfund consent decree that’s not being addressed,” said Mike Cohen of MC Construction Consultants.
He has volunteered to clean up the breakwater peninsula and to cover contaminated sediment offshore. But he draws the line on yard restoration – “EPA has from day one said they’re comfortable taking that over” – and isn’t inclined to clean up the Tacoma Yacht Basin or Point Defiance Park.
The trust fund is likely the only source of money for that work, said Rochlin, the EPA manager. “There is no other way to do it,” he said.
The bankruptcy process could last for years. And the way the court treats Asarco’s environmental cleanup obligations could test environmental law.
“Depending on what happens here, it could have wide-ranging effects throughout the West,” said Ken Weiner, a Seattle environmental lawyer who has represented Everett in Asarco matters.
News Tribune reporter Susan Gordon: 253-597-8756; susan. gordon@thenewstribune.com.
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