EVERETT – New houses are finally rising from the site of the long-gone Asarco smelter and its arsenic-laden soils in northeast Everett.
After years of complex legal wrangling, environmental cleanup and real estate negotiations, the first of 90 town houses should be ready to move into by April.
A barbed-wire fence that surrounded the foundations of 22 demolished homes for a decade is now gone. So are more than 166,000 tons of highly contaminated soil. The dirt was hauled away.
“Instead of having the north end of Everett being an eyesore forever and ever, that area is being revitalized,” said Jeff Dye, president of Bonterra Homes.
The Lake Stevens home builder, backed by Patrick McCourt, founder of Barclays North and one of the county’s most prominent developers, last year bought 7 acres of cleaned-up land from the Everett Housing Authority for $3.2 million.
The three-story houses on small lots will range in size from about 1,300 to 1,900-square feet.
The town houses are considered single-family homes, but will include shared roofs and walls in duplex, triplex and fourplex configurations.
Builders hope to price the units from the high $200,000 to low $300,000 range.
Arsenic contamination remains at levels that are lower than state cleanup standards for residential neighborhoods on about half of the site, said David South with the state Department of Ecology.
On the other half, the contamination is high enough that it had to be capped with at least two feet of clean soil, or concrete paths, streets or foundations.
“We think this is a really good and safe place for people to live,” South said. “All of the stuff that’s an acute risk is off site.”
That wasn’t the case for more than a century.
Emissions from the Everett smelter, which operated from 1894 to 1912, and tainted building material left a toxic legacy in much of north Everett.
Bankrolled in part by John D. Rockefeller, the smelter once refined ore from his mines in Monte Cristo, east of Granite Falls.
After the smelter closed, homes were built on the site, and its history was largely forgotten.
Then in 1990, nearly 80 years after mining giant Asarco shuttered operations, dangerously high levels of arsenic were discovered.
Asarco bought back some of the most polluted land and tore down 22 houses on a hill above the Snohomish River. It fenced off the section where new houses are being built.
There, the soil had concentrations of up to 70 percent arsenic. The toxic material didn’t look like regular dirt. It was chalky white.
Trace amounts of arsenic, a metallic element, naturally occur in water and soil. But breathing, eating or drinking high levels of arsenic, a key ingredient in some rat poisons, increases the risk of lung cancer, skin cancer and tumors of the bladder, kidney and liver.
The government has never conducted studies looking at the health effects of the Everett smelter site. But it has forced cleanup of the most polluted parts of the property.
In 1993, the Department of Ecology ordered Asarco to clean up nearly 700 acres in north Everett. Only a fraction of that has been cleaned to date.
Cleanup has been slow.
In 1999, the state Ecology department issued a 1,100-page, four-volume environmental study and cleanup plan. Actual cleanup didn’t start in earnest until 2004.
The site, where new homes are now being raised, remained a fenced-off no man’s land for a decade.
The Department of Ecology accused Asarco in court of dragging its feet on the cleanup.
The Everett Housing Authority made an unorthodox move to jumpstart the process: It bought the polluted land and 15 nearby houses from Asarco for $3.4 million.
The Housing Authority owns hundreds of apartments in the city’s Delta neighborhood and has a vested interest in revitalizing blighted properties, said Bud Alkire, its executive director.
Dealing with Asarco, and the liability of cleaning up the site, turned out to be complicated, though.
When the company declared bankruptcy in August 2005, cleanup work was halted. A contractor, who claimed Asarco owed it $1 million for work performed, came after the Housing Authority. It eventually agreed to a $486,000 settlement, with the city of Everett covering more than $200,000 of that expense.
Meanwhile, the state is seeking $13 million from Asarco in bankruptcy court for cleanup and oversight costs of the Everett site alone.
In spite of the setbacks, Alkire said the timing of the Housing Authority’s move saved as much as $9 million in cleanup costs.
That’s because it was able to coordinate cleanup work here with work that was going on at Asarco’s Ruston smelter near Tacoma. The company allowed soil from Everett to be buried for free in a special containment facility for soils with very high levels of arsenic.
If the Housing Authority didn’t act when it did, cleanup “probably would never be financially feasible and that barbed-wire fence would probably still be there for generations to come,” he said.
Reporter David Chircop: 425-339-3429 or dchircop@heraldnet.com.
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