Asarco tacoma toxic legacy surprises newcomers to the area




LOCAL
NOVEMBER 7, 2015
Three decades after the Asarco smelter shutdown, its toxic legacy surprises Tacoma newcomers




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Tacoma's industrial history confronted Alex Stillman on a late spring morning while she was up to her wrists in front-yard dirt.

A neighbor saw the 27-year-old school nurse, part of the city's influx of new homeowners, digging to plant a hedge outside her North 40th Street house and walked over to share some friendly insight about the neighborhood. The conversation sent Stillman inside to start learning things no real-estate agent or inspector had explained to Alex or her husband, Bryce, when they bought the place in fall 2014.

It fell to Google to tell her about the long-gone Asarco copper smelter that operated less than a mile from where her tidy 1940s bungalow stands, and that the lead and arsenic emitted from its 571-foot-tall smokestack for several decades had polluted her yard and thousands of others with agents linked to cancer and other serious health problems.
"How many people my age would even know what a smelter is?" asked Alex Stillman, who grew up in Snohomish.

The waterfront Asarco complex that straddled the borders of Ruston and north Tacoma shut down in 1985, before Alex Stillman was born. Thirty years later, its invisible legacy is having far-reaching effects on the South Sound landscape.
Millions of dollars of federal work have gone toward replacing the soil in the most-polluted yards, schools and parks near the old smelter over the decades. State officials are revisiting the same neighborhoods to truck out still more polluted dirt, using higher standards for what constitutes acceptable risk to residents, particularly children.
With Tacoma and Ruston experiencing a historic surge of newcomers who were not among the 100,000 who crowded streets to watch the January 1993 dynamiting of the smokestack, once the tallest structure in the U.S. West, it is fresh news to many that the smelter's pollution remains underfoot at levels well above what state law defines as hazardous.


The core of the old industrial zone on the shore is being rebuilt as an urban center of residence and recreation atop safely capped soil, further masking the past.
County and state agencies run websites and advertisements to raise awareness of the contamination. The message can be easily missed.
Alex Stillman called the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department to ask questions shortly after her front-yard encounter.
A burly worker arrived on a cloudy June morning to extract soil samples from the Stillmans' yard. He wore an orange safety vest and purple work gloves, and carried a narrow metal tube mounted on a shovel handle. He plunged the device into the Stillmans' yard to pull out soil samples a foot beneath drought-browned grass.

While he dug, environmental health specialist Jeremy J. Bush gave friendly, practiced answers about why the government's pollution cleanups are still going decades after the smelter closed. He told the Stillmans their lives would require more precautions than they expected when they bought their north Tacoma home.
Prior testing found levels of arsenic in their yard that were near the borderline of qualifying for the state's soil replacement program, he explained.
He told them about growing vegetables in raised beds filled with clean soil, removing their shoes when they walked inside and wiping down outdoor pets' feet before they enter the house. If the couple become parents, Alex should wear a mask to do any gardening while pregnant, Bush said.
"When it comes down to it, I was just an uninformed person running around working in my yard," she said while Bush worked. "I didn't put on gloves every single time, but now I will."
Lead and arsenic occur in nature in some places, but they are also emitted as byproducts of the copper-smelting process. Both are toxic metals that carry a number of known long-term health threats, from developmental problems to cancer, when people inhale or ingest them. The Asarco smelter, long gone, scattered enough of each element in the soil and dust of the region that state officials still consider it a public-health threat.
The risks are difficult to quantify. No study has linked the Asarco pollution to any specific resident's health problems. The state Department of Ecology says that's because of the number of other potential contributing factors in modern life.
An Ecology spokesman wrote in an email, however, that the levels of toxic metals across much of the smelter's 1,000-square-mile plume of pollution constitute "an increased risk for disease," even in places long under scrutiny.
"This is out, still, in the soil," said Amy Hargrove, the state Department of Ecology's soil program manager for the smelter cleanup, "and it's going to be out still in the soil 20 years from now or 30 years from now."
Asarco and the federal Environmental Protection Agency started work in the 1980s to replace the tainted soils of thousands of homes in areas near the smelter site. State officials are now working the same neighborhoods offering cleanups to further reduce the pollution, yard by yard.
Dozens of homes and parks treated under the federal program now are eligible for more thorough work by the state. Some owners have refused to allow the repeated incursions.
"We're trying very hard to be very clear about what the EPA did versus what the state is doing, but it's definitely going to be confusing to them," said Marian Abbett, the Ecology Department's smelter plume project manager. "The government's been out there for 30 years working on this."
At least a dozen full-time employees of local, state and federal public agencies still go to work daily to deal with the smelter's pollution. Contaminated soils from from Tacoma, Ruston and Vashon Island properties are still being shoveled out, trucked to a Graham landfill and replaced with new clean soil under government programs.
"I don't think, with my time with Asarco, there was any sense that it was going to take that long," said Karen Pickett. The former Ruston City Council member worked for Asarco on cleanup efforts and now is a contractor for the federal Environmental Protection Agency.
'GRASPING FOR MORE INFORMATION'
Learning about estimated pollution for a single house's yard and whether it has ever been measured by the government requires checks of two web databases and a call to the local health department. The EPA's official completion report, compiled in 2013 when the Ecology Department took over yard cleanups and other programs, chronicles the effort in 5,811 pages.
State officials are short on information to fully gauge the health effects of the smelter's arsenic and lead pollution.
Washington is not among the 15 states that requires universal childhood blood lead testing, and of those children who are tested, 40 percent of Department of Health records lack a home address for the child. The last widespread arsenic study of area children dates from 1988. No government effort is made to count occurrences of long-term illnesses tied to smelter pollution.
"It's not to say that there hasn't been concern over the years," said Marianne Sullivan, a former epidemiologist for Public Health-Seattle and King County and author of "Tainted Earth," a 2014 book about the smelter, "but it's sort of episodic. It never has reached a sustained level of concern that has led to organization over this issue. ...
"It leaves people, I think, sort of grasping for more information," she continued. "They'd like to know more exactly what the health risks are."
As the Stillmans learned, nothing in state real-estate law requires information about potential Asarco smelter pollution to be supplied with a home purchase or rental, even at a time when U.S. Census Bureau estimates show Pierce County receiving thousands of new residents annually.
Realtor Marguerite Giguere, whose MovetoTacoma.com website, Twitter page and blog are targeted to newcomers, said no prospective buyer has asked her about the topic.
ASARCO'S SMELTER AND WHAT IT LEFT
The distribution of toxic metals across settled land in Tacoma and Ruston stems from how the cities accommodated heavy industry at the dawn of the 20th century. Other smelters in the U.S. were largely built away from developed areas.
"There isn't another urban site in the U.S. that I'm aware of, with the magnitude of arsenic emissions and contamination that Ruston/Tacoma has," Sullivan wrote in an email.
Ruston grew up as a company town around the facility. It opened as a lead smelter in 1890 and then was modified to refine higher-profit copper in 1912. When fumes and smoke from the smelter drew complaints from the surrounding neighborhoods, its smokestack was raised to disperse the bad stuff — first to 307 feet in 1905, then rebuilt in 1917 to 571 feet, the tallest chimney in the world.
This cut complaints by scattering widely the byproducts of the high-arsenic copper ore the smelter was built to purify through intense heat. Along with particles of arsenic and lead, the smelter put off noxious-smelling sulfur dioxide, which made the plant a conspicuous source of air pollution but has since dissolved away.
"They built this 500-foot stack with the idea that it would mitigate the impact," said Bill Baarsma, Tacoma's former mayor, who worked summers at Asarco while in college. "You spread it over a broader area, it would mitgate the impact."

Former Tacoma Mayor Bill Baarsma looks Oct. 20 at remnants of the smelter that were dumped on land that will soon become part of a new park.
Then it ran for 68 years. The metals that came out of the smokestack accumulated underfoot, enduring even the most prolonged Pacific Northwest rainy seasons.
"Arsenic tends to bind, as well as lead, to the organic matter, so it kind of stays in that upper layer of soil," said Abbett, the Department of Ecology manager. "It is moving, but it's moving over geologic time. It's moving very slowly."
The broad dispersal of the smelter's toxic emissions made removing the lead and arsenic buildups so vast an undertaking that no practical measure will completely eliminate it. Even modest attempts to clean up some of it were slowed for years by local politics.
With citizens of Tacoma and Ruston frustrated about Asarco's decision to close the smelter — copper-using industries could by the 1980s get metal cheaper from overseas — it appeared to some that overzealous federal regulators helped run off a cornerstone industry.
"When we walked into the community, (people of) the local town of Ruston were convinced that EPA had shut down the smelter," Kevin Rochlin, the EPA's longtime project manager, said recently. "They didn't want a cleanup, were incredibly vocal at our public meetings and said — we were told, 'We don't want you to do anything. If you have to do something, do it only for the worst properties.' "
Longtime residents recall ample reason to bristle at the incursion, starting with the stigma of labeling their homes a Superfund site. The Asarco plant had employed more than 1,300 workers at its peak. Crowds of children had been raised happily in the neighborhoods shouldered closest to it.
"They rode in on their white horses and challenged what kind of mothers we were and how could we let our children eat the dirt," said Beth Torbert, who with her husband has operated Don's Ruston Market, a grocery and lunch counter in the heart of Ruston, since 1983. "Generations of people had lived here and had done the best we could."
LINGERING PUBLIC-HEALTH CONCERNS
Government officials have grappled for years with a problem of perception about the pollution's consequences.
Arsenic and lead have punishing long-term effects. Arsenic can greatly increase the risk of skin or organ cancer. Even miniscule doses of lead can harm children's developing brains and result in learning disabilities and violent behavior.
Children are especially vulnerable to being exposed to both through ingesting soil or dust. They play outdoors and aren't always thorough about washing dirt off their hands before they touch food or put their fingers in their mouths.
"Most people hear arsenic and they immediately think of an acute risk and it's poisoning, and that is not what we're talking about," Abbett said. "We're talking about low levels at long-term exposure could lead to an increased risk of getting cancer later in life."
Outreach officials teach that the long-range risk of cancer and other problems grows without day-to-day symptoms.
"What I tell people is, you probably can't eat enough dirt in one day to get arsenic poisoning. You will get sick from something else first," said Gregory Tanbara, the Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department's smelter plume health promotion coordinator.
A series of government-researched maps chart the toxic metals the smelter left in the South Sound region, but no such maps exist for illnesses related to the lead and arsenic — or the cadmium and mercury believed to be among other byproducts of the smelting — over the years.

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"Studies to quantify the range of possible health effects have not been done — disappointing but not unusual in U.S. smelting communities," author Marianne Sullivan wrote.
Almost all of the 15 states that require lead testing of all children lie entirely east of the Mississippi River. Iowa and Louisiana are the only exceptions.
Children in Washington are required to be tested for lead in their blood only if they've emigrated from another country, receive Medicaid or if a caregiver suspects lead poisoning. The state Department of Health's Childhood Blood Lead Registry compiles the results of every test, but it tracks entries only by county. No home address is listed for 40 percent of the children tested.
"Sometimes we're just using the address of the (health care) provider, because that's all we sometimes get," said Elisabeth Long, childhood lead poisoning surveillance epidemiologist with the state Department of Health.
Pierce County's rate of blood-tested children under age 6 who were found to have high lead levels tracked to within 1.5 percent of the statewide rate in each year from 2006 to 2012, Health Department data show. But results from Ruston and north Tacoma aren't differentiated from those from Puyallup or Orting, where little to no smelter pollution is indicated on the state's maps.
"We can't generalize this to anything, really, because we don't have enough information about who's being screened," Long said.
As for arsenic: The last large-scale resident testing in the smelter's plume was in 1988. That year, a test of children near the former Asarco site was compared with a 1974 survey, when the smelter was still going strong. It found that even though the smelter had gone dark, arsenic was still finding its way into children's bodies. A 1993 EPA report summarized the study: "Arsenic levels had generally declined since smelter closure. Some individuals, however, still had elevated levels."
No systematic testing is done of the people who live in the smelter's plume. The arsenic and lead content of the area's soils are measured carefully. Those findings determine whether the government will foot the cost of shoveling out and replacing the soil of a yard, park or area where children play, such as a school or day care, as Alex Stillman learned from her neighbor.
The test itself is quick and done locally, in a squat Fife industrial building where dirt has been coming for Asarco-related analysis for 15 years.

Stan Palmquist, Inorganics Supervisor at TestAmerica in Fife
TestAmerica's inorganics supervisor, Stan Palmquist, who founded the Fife lab, describes the process as "real straightforward." Yard dirt comes into his building in 4-ounce glass jars, is sifted into smaller tubes, treated with hydrochloric and nitric acid, then given a "digestion" heating at more than 200 degrees for 90 minutes to break it down.
After that, it's burned with a plasma torch. The light thrown off by the fire is analyzed by computer equipment that tells what chemicals are present, and in what densities. Some of the wavelengths are visible to the human eye. Copper turns the flame green and lithium red, for example. With this method, TestAmerica can process up to 60 yard samples a day, Palmquist said.
He lives in a North End neighborhood and tested his own yard soil years ago.
"It was fine," he said, smiling slightly.
CLEANUPS AFTER CLEANUPS
Records go back to the 1980s on the thousands of yards that have been shoveled up for sampling. Sorting through them can be a challenge because of the three layers of government — federal, state and local — that have overseen aspects of the program over the years, sometimes in overlapping efforts.
First came the EPA, to the chagrin of a vocal number of residents from Ruston and nearby, which used the courts to force Asarco to clean up the most heavily polluted land within a 1 square mile area around the smelter. After Asarco's bankruptcy settlement in 2009, the EPA handled cleanups itself.
From 1993 to 2011, Asarco and the EPA lab-tested 3,570 properties' soils for pollution, and 2,436 of them had at least a section of soil replaced.

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To qualify for a paid-for cleanup, federal regulators set a threshold of 230 parts per million of arsenic in yard soil, or 500 parts per million of lead. This was 11.5 times the amount of arsenic in soil that state law defines as polluted enough to deserve cleanup, and twice the amount of lead.
During the years the EPA worked on the area immediately around the smelter, Washington officials conducted studies to draw maps showing how much farther the smelter's lead and arsenic spread.
Washington law considers the maximum acceptable risk to be an amount of toxic pollution that creates a 1 in 100,000 chance the exposure will cause cancer in an individual. Under the Superfund law, the EPA can sign off on pollution levels that allow a 1 in 10,000 lifetime cancer risk.
"We said, you know, we just aren't sure that's protective enough, and we let them know that," Abbett, of the state Ecology Department, said of the EPA's efforts. "Certainly, over time, we got to understand how much bigger the project was, how much larger the project was."
The state's evidence showing a need for a a wider cleanup for the pollution surrounding Tacoma won it a $94 million share of Asarco's $1.79 billion bankruptcy settlement. That money will fund the Ecology Department's cleanup work for about the next decade, which is largely sampling and cleaning up polluted soil in residential yards, schools and parks, along with outreach efforts.
Even the rosiest forecast for what the state can accomplish in the next 10 years doesn't claim the Asarco-polluted land will be scrubbed clean of arsenic and lead by the definition in state law before the money runs out.
The state's Model Toxics Control Act sets the cleanup threshold for arsenic at 20 parts per million of soil. For lead, it's the presence of 250 parts per million milligrams of soil. But the state is spending its settlement money to clean up only yards with arsenic pollution at or above 100 parts per million or lead pollution above 500 parts per million. Officials say it's a realistic approach.
"This gap here from 20 to 100 (parts per million) is one that can't be filled with funds that they have from that bankruptcy," Tanbara said, "because they would basically be scraping off all of north Tacoma."
Using this threshold in zones where the most pollution accumulated, the Ecology Department expects to offer cleanups for 1,200 properties. On average, this means removing and replacing 150 cubic yards of soil, plus grass and plantings, at a per-yard cost of about $50,000.
Because the campaign is working first in the same areas the federal government cleaned, with different standards, it is bringing state officials around to knock on many of the same doors EPA workers came to years ago. In 2013 and 2014, the state cleaned up 55 properties in Tacoma and six on Vashon Island. Another 90 properties — 75 in Tacoma and 15 on Vashon Island — will have received yard cleanups by the end of 2015.
Records of the federal yard cleanup program — searchable by address on a Department of Ecology website — show that each yard was divided into sections for sampling and cleanup. A section of yard that fell even slightly below the federal threshold wasn't touched, even if the soil feet away was replaced in the cleanup.
Now the state, using its easier-to-qualify standard, is offering to clean up more than the federal government did, which can mean digging into the same yard twice.
That offer isn't always greeted warmly.
That's bull, said Dennis Stine, using an expletive. Stine, with his wife, Jennifer, bought a house on North 41st Street in 2013 after moving from California. "If the work was done to the EPA standard, we said that is good enough."
The Stines are retired, have no pets or children in their home, and they don't grow food in their yard. A letter from the Health Department — which searches Pierce County's public records to learn when known polluted properties are sold — had informed the couple of the property's pollution history shortly after they moved in.
When a previous owner lived there, EPA divided its yard into four sections in 2004, found three of them saturated with high levels of lead and replaced the soil. Tests in 2006 confirmed that shoveling out bad soil and bringing in new brought the lead content below the EPA's threshold but also revealed that two sections contain arsenic content easily above the required amount to have the state clean the yard at no cost.
Dennis Stine said he felt "strong-armed" by the Ecology Department's offer to replace his soil.
"They were saying if you didn't do it and sell the house, you'll have to do it then" without the state's help, he said. "I wasn't buying that."
The state's cleanup program remains voluntary, and real-estate transactions require only a general acknowledgment of whether the seller knows of toxic pollution.
Rosemary Cowan and her husband, Alan, moved from California into a North Defiance Street Craftsman house this year and reveled in its sweeping balcony view of the South Sound. After their purchase appeared on the county assessor's rolls, a Health Department letter arrived, offering a spot on the state's cleanup list.
Federal testing in 1997 found arsenic levels in every section of the yard that now place it above the state's threshold, records show, but only a section with lead above the federal threshold was replaced.
Even though the couple keeps a pair of Irish wolfhounds who wander in and out freely, they say they are unlikely to sign up for soil replacement after discussing the situation with the previous owner, who is a contractor.
"He literally put about a foot of topsoil on the problem places," said Rosemary Cowan, 60.
As for longtime residents of the smelter area, they've spent years incorporating extraordinary measures into their lives and dealing with scrutiny, Torbert said.
"Do you know the arsenic and lead levels in your yard?" Torbert asked. "We do. That's the thing. We know we're clean. We've been remediated, and we've been tested."
Former Ruston council member Pickett, whose work with Asarco included providing information to people eligible for yard cleanups in the program's early years, said she saw views evolve over the years.
"The philosophy's changed quite a bit, as far as reaction to the cleanup," she said. "Once the cleanup got underway and yards got cleaned up, I think the perception was pretty strong we were a clean community and attractive."
State officials say 33 property owners, including Stine, had refused the offered cleanup. The EPA's completion report, prepared in 2013, lists 21 more properties whose owners refused even testing. Only one owner in that group has allowed testing since the state took over yard cleanups. Soil samples taken this April from his front and backyards were high enough to put his entire property on the state's soil replacement list.
State records show the owner received a letter in May that was frank about where he stands.
"Ecology will contact you in the next few years to discuss soil replacement options for your yard," the letter reads.
THE PROBLEM, 30 YEARS LATER
Learning exactly what's been cleaned up — and where levels of pollution the law classifies as dangerous haven't been cleaned — requires persistence.
The Ecology Department offers two enter-your-address maps: one shows the general arsenic findings for an area, and the other lists results of any state or federal testing of the soil for lead and arsenic. But because the latter database lacks results for Health Department-conducted sampling, obtaining definitive information requires an additional phone call.
The difficulty of becoming informed about this pollution — particularly for newcomers to Tacoma who never saw the smelter — is not new. When the EPA was seeking comments in 1992 about its proposed cleanup plan, Ken Wing, who had just bought a home near Point Defiance Park, complained to the agency that potential property owners received little solid information.
"I was shown lots that were contiguous with the Asarco plant and was told by one of the largest real estate firms in the Puget Sound area … that the 'arsenic problem' was merely a fiction created by government bureaucrats,' " he wrote.
The EPA proposed in the early 1990s to require deed notices of potential Asarco pollution in area real-estate transactions. Residents' concerns about property values led to the idea's rejection, Sullivan wrote in her doctoral dissertation about the smelter. State laws governing real-estate transactions don't address the subject.
Officials with the Ecology and Health departments say they've worked to encourage disclosure and explanation to potential newcomers.
"We're doing outreach with real-estate agents right now," Hargrove said.
With no law requiring even an informational letter among the myriad documents involved in house-buying, the Stillmans say they received no help learning there was a database to consult.
"You would think that would be just as mandatory," Alex Stillman said. " 'You're buying in this area, do you understand that there is possibly arsenic and lead in the soil?' We would have no idea if our neighbors wouldn't have said something."
A few blocks away from the Stillmans' home, Department of Ecology contractors in bulky protective masks spent weeks digging out soil from Baltimore Park, the fifth park to undergo large-scale soil replacement since the state took over cleanup efforts.
Becky Hill, whose children are 4 and 6, has lived blocks from Baltimore Park for 12 years and grew up in north Tacoma herself. She said nearby housing construction had kicked up dirt through the summer drought.
She taught her children to be careful about handling dirt, explaining that a smokestack they'd never seen was the reason why. She had assumed the neighborhood's public spaces had been adequately cleaned up years ago, when the EPA cleaned Baltimore Park.
Then she saw the state's contractors back in the park and began to worry.
"I didn't know that they hadn't done the park over there," she said from her front yard, "which freaked me out because we've been taking our kids there since they were born."
Similarly, Point Defiance Park, cleaned up by the EPA in 2009, is to receive further state soil replacement in the coming year.
RESCULPTING THE INDUSTRIAL WATERFRONT
The EPA hasn't totally finished its Asarco work, 32 years after the area was officially registered as a Superfund site.
Federal officials are overseeing the construction of two high-profile waterfront developments: the 97-acre Point Ruston housing and retail complex, and a Metro Parks project to build an 11-acre park using the slag peninsula created when Asarco workers dumped the solid-waste lead and arsenic directly into Puget Sound.
Out on the peninsula, where Puget Sound currents are forcing apart chunks of brittle toxic slag, workers are "armoring" the shoreline with large rocks to keep more contaminants from breaking loose. Tons of contaminated dirt from a larger parking lot and other onshore Metro Parks excavations are being moved atop the slag to build up mounds on the peninsula, to be capped off with a foot of clean soil.
So much dirt is being moved that the peninsula's highest point will rise 24 feet above its current level, said Roger Stanton, Metro Parks' project manager for the new park.
"We're saving millions of dollars by being able to put dirt out here, especially contaminated dirt," he said.
Designs for the site include running paths and a performance space atop what was a slag peninsula. Still visible near its shoreline are a handful of waist-high slag mounds rounded off like the iron kettles used to haul hot slag for industrial dumping in a less-regulated era.
"Some could be proud of the peninsula, and some could be less proud of the peninsula," Stanton said. "Regardless, our community has this opportunity right now to make this thing really shine."
The park's budget is about $40 million, which could change considerably. The complexities of building on toxic material are accompanied here by weather restrictions and limits on water-adjacent work when fish are sensitive to sedimentation.
"That's a slag pile, and in 2017, that park is going to be amazing," Stanton said.
Within sight of the future park, construction has rolled along for years on Point Ruston, the $1 billion project to erect shops, restaurants, a movie theater, condominiums and apartments where the smelter's immense fine ore bins building once stood. There, toxic soils have either been trucked away or covered with permanent construction, including parking lots and buildings.
Opening this month are the complex's nine-screen movie theater and its second building of apartments and condominiums, said Loren Cohen, the project's manager of legal affairs. He said 90 percent of the housing units in the new building are already taken.
Its completion brings Point Ruston to 268 apartments and 83 condominiums fit for occupancy atop the former smelter site, where the soil is now capped and considered safe. When Point Ruston is complete, six to eight years from now, 1,200 housing units will be part of it, along with a grocery store and hotel.
So far, 20 percent of the takers of apartments and condos in the complex have been newcomers from King County, the developer said.
"It's the new urbanism model," Cohen said. "Make it walkable, make it pedestrian-oriented, make it dense, so that you're efficiently using our finite resources. And to boot, it's what we would argue is the most beautiful setting in the area."
The garbage cans along the Point Ruston's waterfront walking path show a painting of the smokestack's implosion, with "A New Dawn" inscribed on them. In October 2014, an Asarco history exhibit opened on the ground floor of the development's Copperline building, with smelter relics and captions written by Pickett.
"When the smelter first opened, it wasn't seen as dirty and bad," Pickett said. "It was a sign of pride for the whole nation to be able to produce our own copper, and it was a great resource during World War I and II. I guess, back then, everything was dirty and smelly. We didn't have the same concept of environmental concerns."
Cohen said the safety concerns and negotiations with various levels of government helped make the project "a monumental challenge" and "a mammoth undertaking" for even an experienced developer.
"I don't know if we'd ever do a second Superfund site," he said. "I can't say I would. I can't say I wouldn't."
STILL LEARNING ABOUT RISKS
Even with the long-known problems the Asarco smelter bequeathed to today's South Sound, officials and researchers are still finding new aspects to scrutinize.
For most of the past 30 years, arsenic — known for decades to cause cancer — has been the chief concern of those seeking to clean up the smelter's ground pollution. Under the separate state and federal soil replacement campaigns, the amount of arsenic found in soil that would trigger a cleanup was set lower than the amount of lead.
Officials are reconsidering that approach.
Just last year, the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention set a new, lower definition for the amount of lead found in a child's blood test that would call for action. The agency's position now is that there is no safe amount of lead a child can ingest without troubling consequences to intelligence and attention.
"We are far more concerned about lead than we were 25, 30 years ago," said Abbett, from the Ecology Department. "We are better understanding its impacts, and realizing maybe we should have even more stringent cleanup levels for lead."
Another concern of recent vintage is water pollution. Officials have long realized that lead and arsenic aren't mobile enough in soil to seep into groundwater supplies at anything faster than geologic speed. The depth and currents of Puget Sound are among the reasons much of the lead and arsenic the smelter scattered into the waters now shows up in reduced amounts in the body's waters.
An analysis published in an academic journal in 2013, however, found that the same pollutants have hung around the area's freshwater basins in worrisome amounts. Sediment samples from 26 lakes within 20 miles of the smelter's smokestack found "significantly elevated" amounts of arsenic and lead in 10 of the 12 lakes downwind of the smelter, but only in a few of the upwind lakes.
Angle Lake and Lake Killarney, both in South King County, had levels of arsenic more than six times a level the Department of Ecology cites as a concentration "above which harmful effects on sediment-dwelling organisms are expected to occur frequently." The highest lead concentration was found in Steel Lake in Federal Way, where the analysis found more than 10 times the corresponding state-defined threshold.
Toxic metals in lakes, the paper says, can enter the food chain through fish. The state Department of Fish and Wildlife offers online guides to the game fish that can be caught in all three lakes.
James E. Gawel, the University of Washington Tacoma professor who was the paper's lead author, said studies haven't been done yet to evaluate how arsenic moves up the food chain.
Gawel said lakes in populated areas are particularly susceptible to having arsenic make its way from sediment into water. The metal is most mobile in the oxygen-poor depths that urban runoff fosters. He's now beginning a two-year study of how much arsenic is absorbed by the microscopic organisms in the lakes with the highest amounts of Asarco-polluted sediments.
"I was surprised at just how much got loaded into these systems," he said.
NEWCOMERS TO POLLUTED LAND
Census estimates released in March show Pierce County experienced an influx of 4,300 people in 2014, all newcomers to the county from other places, marking an abrupt turnaround after years of mostly dead-even net migration from other U.S. counties. The abundance of cheaper urban housing in Tacoma versus Seattle is often cited as a central factor.
The rising tide of newcomers hasn't drawn a corresponding uptick of interest in Sullivan's book on the smelter since its 2014 publication by a university press. The book has been read mostly by her fellow professors and researchers, its author said.
"That's who reads academic books, unfortunately," said Sullivan, now an assistant professor of public health at William Paterson University in New Jersey.
Future residents of Tacoma, Ruston and Vashon Island will have the same daunting task of educating themselves as today's newcomers, she said, adding that cleanup should have gone farther. One way: The removal of tainted attic dust that the EPA performed near Montana's Anaconda smelter but not here.
"If you can clean it up, you don't have to engage in a constant process of educating people as they come into the community," she said.
Asked what she wished was more widely known about the Asarco-related lead and arsenic, 30 years after the plant's closure, Abbett of the Ecology Department said the best hope is public education about the persistence of toxic pollution, even in airborne dust on a yard-grown apple.
"It's there. It's probably in your backyard and your front yard," she said. "It's nothing to be frightened about, but it's something to think about and take extra precautions."

Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department Environmental Health Specialist Jeremy Bush clears the rocks from a soil sample at the home of Bryce and Alex Stillman in Ruston on July 7. Alex shields her nose from breathing soil possibly contaminated with lead and arsenic.
Bryce and Alex Stillman waited all summer and into the fall for their test results. They decided not to plant anything while they waited.
"We still mow the lawn and things like that, but we're still holding off on the digging," she said. "You don't want them to dig it all up after you do all that work."
The Stillmans learned their home's test results Wednesday. The front yard where Alex Stillman dug, barehanded, to plant her hedge contains enough arsenic to qualify for a state soil replacement. They expect a letter from the Ecology Department to arrive soon. It likely will inform them that they have a year or more before their turn comes for a cleanup.
Alex Stillman said definitive knowledge of the pollution has already altered her habits.
"Me wearing gloves this time, that's changed," she said by phone. "I'm still out there in the yard, but that's what I'm wearing out there for caution."
Derrick Nunnally: 253-597-8693
derrick.nunnally@thenewstribune.com

@dcnunnally

The Big Wobble: 'This shouldn't happen at all!' Bees spreading Caesium-137 from a power plant closed for years: As tons of the stuff is leaking into the Pacific

The Big Wobble: 'This shouldn't happen at all!' Bees spreading Caesium-137 from a power plant closed for years: As tons of the stuff is leaking into the Pacific

November 6, 2015 Ciudad Juarez NewsKilled Border Foxconn Workers MournedTwo Ciudad Juarez families conducted funeral preparations for loved ones who suffered tragic deaths this week. Foxconn employees German David Rodriguez Balderas, 41, and Martin Gomez Limones, 56, perished when a company-contracted bus they were riding in plunged off a cliff early on the morning of Tuesday, November 3. The accident occurred as the Joselyn Personnel Transport (JPT) company bus was returning workers home to Juarez after an evening shift at Foxconn's huge electronics factory outside the city limits at Jeronimo-Santa Teresa on the Chihuahua-New Mexico border. The bus veered off the Camino Real, a controversial highway constructed during the first mayoral administration of Hector "Teto" Murguia (2004-2007) which connects the urban zone of Juarez with the border mega-development located about ten miles away at Jeronimo-Santa Teresa, and plunged 60 feet or more into a canyon. Rodriguez and Gomez were killed, and 18 other workers reported lightly or seriously injured. The surviving passengers, ranging in age from 18 to 53, included 11 men and 7 women. Three of the injured workers were reported still hospitalized as the week drew to a close. Almost miraculously, the death toll was not far higher. Esmeralda Castor Gomez, an eighteen-year-old Foxconn worker and the niece of Martin Gomez, was among the lucky ones. "The truth is, I didn't get badly hurt," Castor said. "Nothing happened to me. I didn't even get struck."   Law enforcement officials detained Jose Antonio Perez Rocha, the 24-year-old driver of the bus. The cause of the November 3 tragedy is in dispute. Castor, for instance, said driver Perez fell asleep at the wheel. But JPT owner Raul Rodriguez Santillanes defended his employee, saying the young man had a good record in his five years of service with the company. What's more, the GPS data from the bus showed that Perez was going the speed limit when vehicle crashed, Rodriguez said. As for early speculation that a tire or other bus equipment had failed, the unit in question was in good condition and recently inspected, he affirmed. Rodriguez pointed to dangerous road conditions on the Camino Real, adding that his company and a second one servicing Foxconn decided after the accident to suspend use of the desert highway even though it meant a longer ride and commute time for workers. "We prefer this," Rodriguez told El Diario de Juarez. "There are a lot of rocks on the road, and we don't want to risk something else. There is no lighting. The (highway) lamps are pretty but they do not work."  For his part, Ciudad Juarez Mayor Enrique Serrano blamed human error, possibly related to transport company practices of "overexploiting the personnel and making them work extra hours-we don't know."  Hernan Ortiz Quintana, public policy researcher and spokesperson for Citizens for Better Public Administration, said the Camino Real, presumably a "jewel of engineering," was "literally falling to pieces" like much of the public infrastructure in Juarez. The two Foxconn employees killed had little time with the company. According to German Rodriguez's sister-in-law, Lourdes Alanis, her brother-in-law had six months under his belt at Foxconn but was ready to quit because of he was "tired." Last week, Rodriguez put in double shifts, Alanis said. The factory worker left behind two daughters, aged 12 and 15, respectively. Relatives of Gomez, who had put in only two weeks with Foxconn, described the ill-fated worker as the sole support for a 77-year-old invalid father. According to his sister, Gomez ironically had not even cashed his first paycheck when he was killed. Negotiations are reportedly ongoing between victims' families on one side and JPT and Foxconn on the other over the payment of funeral expenses and other compensation. JPT's Raul Rodriguez said his company has insurance to pay for the disaster. "We want justice to be done, even if that sounds trite," said Lourdes Alanis. German Rodriguez and Martin Gomez worked at one of the most important links in the global electronics chain of production. Also the locus of the growing Jeronimo-Santa Teresa border economic cluster, Foxconn manufactures computers for Dell and other brand-name clients. In turn, Foxconn sub-contracts its workers through employment agencies and sub-contracts employee transportation and other services. The November 3 accident occurred at a moment of ferment in the Ciudad Juarez industrial sector, which mainly consists of maquiladoras, the foreign-owned factories like Foxconn's that manufacture products for export to the United States and other nations. Hundreds of workers at least four separate companies continued protests that included camp-outs this week. The unresolved grievances variously include wages and benefits, safety, management practices, sexual harassment, and union representation. The companies witnessing protests include Commscope, Eaton, Lexmark and Scientific Atlantic, a Foxconn affiliate with another plant inside Juarez's urban core. Safe and reliable transportation has also been a recurrent issue of contention in the maquiladora industry. According to El Diario, the number of mishaps involving company contracted buses jumped from 115 in 2014 to 179 so far in 2015. Citing numbers from the municipal public transportation department, the newspaper reported that 2,400 private buses are deployed to transport workers employed in the massive maquiladora sector. Meanwhile, more than 2,000 workers were temporarily evacuated from two Flextronics plants in Juarez the afternoon of November 5 after a foul odor was detected. A suspected gas leak was later discounted, but no definite determination of the source of the bad smell was reported.  For another recent FNS story about the labor situation in Ciudad Juarez maquiladoras check out:  https://fnsnews.nmsu.edu/behind-ciudad-juarezs-new-labor-movement/Sources:  El Mexicano, November 5, 2015. El Diario de Juarez, November 3, 4 and 5, 2015. Articles by Luz del Carmen Sosa, Martin Orquiz, Aracely Castanon, Fernando Mendez, and editorial staff. Nortedigital.mx, November 3, 4 and 5, 2015. Articles by Carlos Omar Barranco and Miguel Vargas. Arrobajuarez, November 3, 2015.  Opendemocracy.net, January 16, 2015. Article by Devi Sacchetto and Martin Cecchi. Albuquerque Journal, May 20, 2013. Article by Kevin Robinson-Avila Frontera NorteSur: on-line, U.S.-Mexico border newsCenter for Latin American and Border StudiesNew Mexico State UniversityLas Cruces, New Mexico For a free electronic subscriptionemail: fnsnews@nmsu.edu________________________________________Fns_NMSU-lTo Unsubscribe or Manage Your Membershiphttps://mailman.nmsu.edu/mailman/listinfo/fns_nmsu-l

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ASARCO to Pay $163.5M, Cut Toxic Emissions · Environmental Leader · Environmental Management News

https://www.environmentalleader.com/2015/11/05/asarco-to-pay-163-5m-cut-toxic-emissions/#.Vjx-1paBZlY.mailto

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National labor board accuses Asarco of unfair practices

National labor board accuses Asarco of unfair practices

Epa , us doj, asarco hayden smelter consent fecree press release from epa

EPA HomeNewsroomNews Releases By DateU.S. EPA Requires ASARCO to Cut Toxic Emissions at ....
News Releases By Date

U.S. EPA Requires ASARCO to Cut Toxic Emissions at 103-Year-Old Arizona Copper Smelter
Release Date: 11/03/2015
Contact Information: Nahal Mogharabi, (213) 244-1815, mogharabi.nahal@epa.gov

SAN FRANCISCO – Today, the U.S. Department of Justice and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced a settlement with ASARCO requiring the company to spend $150 million to install new equipment and pollution control technology to reduce emissions of toxic heavy metals at a large smelter located in Hayden, Ariz. The company will also fund local environmental projects valued at $8 million, replace a diesel locomotive with a cleaner model for $1 million, and pay a $4.5 million civil penalty.

The federal enforcement action targeted hazardous air pollutants, including lead and arsenic, and particulate matter (PM). With the controls in place, the hazardous air pollutants should be reduced by at least 8.5 tons per year, and PM emissions are expected to be reduced by 3,500 tons per year. The new equipment and controls will also slash the facility's sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions by 19,000 tons per year, a reduction of more than 90 percent, according to EPA estimates. Currently, the ASARCO smelter is the largest source of SO2 emissions in Arizona.

"The communities living near this century-old smelter will breathe cleaner air as a result of this landmark enforcement action," said Jared Blumenfeld, Regional Administrator for EPA's Pacific Southwest Region. "As one of only three major copper smelters in the nation, it is critically important that the facility operate in a way that complies with federal law, minimizes harmful pollutants and safeguards public health and the environment."

"This settlement will bring tremendous benefits to public health and the environment in Arizona for generations to come through dramatic cuts to harmful air emissions," said Assistant Attorney General John C. Cruden for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division. "The requirements of this consent decree will not only bring ASARCO into compliance with the nation's clean air law, but will also result in testing for lead contamination in area homes and improvements to nearby roads to further improve air quality."

EPA's investigation found the company violated federal Clean Air Act standards by failing to adequately control emissions of hazardous air pollutants, such as arsenic and lead, from the Hayden smelter. Under the settlement announced today, ASARCO will install new and upgraded ventilation hoods to capture hot flue gases from its furnaces to better capture the PM, which includes the hazardous air pollutants, and SO2. The company will also replace an aging electrostatic precipitator with a new, cleaner baghouse and inject high performance lime to reduce SO2 emissions.

To reduce wind-blown dust from the facility, which contains varying levels of heavy metals, the company will implement an improved dust control plan, including the use of wind fences, upgraded water sprayers and the installation of concrete pads. In addition, ASARCO will operate five ambient air monitors in and around the Hayden and Winkelman communities to track levels of pollutants, including arsenic, lead and PM, and will make additional improvements to dust controls if levels are high.
The settlement requires ASARCO to spend $8 million to fund two environmental mitigation projects. Of this, $6 million will be used on a road paving project in Pinal County that will reduce dust pollution on local dirt roads close to the towns and benefit residents exposed to PM emissions. In addition, $2 million will be provided to the Gila County Environmental Health Services to conduct lead-based paint testing and abatement in homes, schools and other public buildings in the towns of Hayden and Winkelman.
ASARCO will spend approximately $1 million to replace an existing diesel switch locomotive operated at the facility with a cleaner diesel-electric switch locomotive. The project will reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides, which are precursors to the formation of PM2.5, and greenhouse gases.
Long-term inhalation exposure to inorganic arsenic is associated with irritation of the skin and can affect the brain and nervous system. Exposure to lead can cause effects on the blood, as well as the nervous, immune, renal, and cardiovascular systems. Particulate matter, especially inhalable coarse particles (PM10) and fine particles (PM2.5), can cause coughing or difficulty breathing, decreased lung function, aggravated asthma, and even premature death in people with heart or lung disease. SO2 has also been linked to a number of adverse effects on the respiratory system, and SO2 is also a precursor to the formation of PM2.5. Fine particles are also the main cause of reduced visibility (haze) in parts of the United States, including national parks and wilderness areas. The PM2.5 and SO2 emission reductions achieved through compliance with this settlement will also serve to reduce visibility impairment owing to emissions from the facility.

Built in 1912 and expanded over the years, the ASARCO Hayden site is a copper ore processing, concentrating and smelter facility located adjacent to Hayden and Winkelman. The ASARCO plant includes a crusher, concentrator, smelter and tailings impoundment areas and produces 300 to 400 million pounds of copper and over half a million tons of sulfuric acid annually. ASARCO is owned by Grupo México, a Mexican consortium that owns Ferromex, the largest railroad in Mexico, and operates mines and smelters, including the one in Hayden, that make it the fourth largest copper producer in the world. The Hayden facility is one of three copper smelters in the United States, and the only one owned by ASARCO.
The settlement was lodged with the U.S. District Court of Arizona and is subject to a 30-day public comment period and final court approval. The proposed consent decree can be viewed at: www.justice.gov/enrd/consent-decrees.
More on the settlement: http://www2.epa.gov/enforcement/asarco-llc-settlement
For photos of the facility, please visit: http://www3.epa.gov/region9/mediacenter/asarco/photos.html

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Please let people know this is happening: Asarco epa us doj hayden public consent decree

Type in the following (at end) to read the consent decree....there now starts a 30 day comment period for the public.    Please think about commenting.   Check on my blog (google asarco secret document, go to newest post) and when the us dept of justice posts how to make comments, i will put it there.  Protect the families in hayden:  jobs are good until your employed spouse gets disease associated with these secret poisons.....like leukemia.  

Is there a "confidential for settlement purposes only" us doj epa asarco document for this?  Like there was for asarco's mess in el paso tx?

We know as fact that asarco el paso acted as a high level radioactive waste disposal contractor during the 1990's.  The gov never released this fact to us thru open records requests, but hid its relationship with asarco from us.

Asarco contaminated homes with material found in nuclear control rods.  We have a critical radon/radium problem: both mexico and usa epa's know, but have not told el pasoans.

We in el paso were told nothing of this. A secret consent decree between asarco, epa and us doj 1998 hid it.  The bankruptcy hid it.  Our gov hid it. 

So, what is now happening at hayden asarco... more of the same?   The us doj said asarco made a lot of $$$$ doing this.

Why on earth would our gov and asarco stop such mon$y making given an old smelter in remote poor location with mostly mexican americans.

Our politicians looked the other way.  Made it impossible for el pasoans to take legal action: that was passed to only TCEQ to do.  They never did.

Now apparently it may be happening again, this nightmare, for Hayden,  az.   Asarco will invest $150 MILLION in Hayden.....  so it is a big problem, there.  Compare it with el paso...asarco gave us just 50 million, to clean us all up!

http://www2.epa.gov/enforcement/asarco-llc-consent-decree

 

http://www2.epa.gov/enforcement/asarco-llc-consent-decree

asarco-cd-110315.pdf888085670.pdf

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Asarco epa and us doj.....again

 Tuesday, November 03, 2015Last Update: 4:33 PM PT
Century-Old Smelter to Pay $13.5M For Polluting the Air

   ShareThis
     (CN) - The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday ordered a 103-year-old copper smelter in Arizona to cut toxic emissions and pay $13.5 million in fines and green-project funding.
     As part of its settlement with the EPA, ASARCO agreed to spend $150 million to install new equipment and pollution control technology to reduce toxic emissions at its century-old smelter in Hayden, Arizona. The company will also fund local environmental projects to the tune of $8 million, spend $1 million to replace a diesel locomotive with a cleaner model and pay a $4.5 million civil penalty.
     An EPA investigation found ASARCO violated the Clean Air Act by failing to control hazardous air pollutants like arsenic and lead spewing from the Hayden smelter. The agency also the wind blows dust laden with heavy metals from the facility, which the company also agreed to address.
     ASARCO will install new ventilation hoods to capture hot flue gases from its furnaces and operate several ambient air monitors in and around Hayden to track levels of pollutants, according to the Justice Department.
     Long-term inhalation exposure to inorganic arsenic is associated with irritation of the skin and can affect the brain and nervous system. Exposure to lead can cause effects on the blood, as well as the nervous, immune, renal and cardiovascular systems.
     Particulate matter, especially inhalable coarse particles and fine particles, can cause coughing or difficulty breathing, decreased lung function, aggravated asthma and even premature death in people with heart or lung disease. And the sulfur dioxide produced by the smelter has been linked to a number of adverse effects on the respiratory system.
     "The communities living near this century-old smelter will breathe cleaner air as a result of this landmark enforcement action," EPA Pacific Southwest regional administrator Jared Blumenfeld said. "As one of only three major copper smelters in the nation, it is critically important that the facility operate in a way that complies with federal law, minimizes harmful pollutants and safeguards public health and the environment."
     Built in 1912, ASARCO's Hayden smelter produces 300 to 400 million pounds of copper and over 500,000 tons of sulfuric acid annually.
     ASARCO is owned by Grupo Mexico, which also owns Mexican railroad giant Ferromex. The company is the fourth-largest copper producer in the world.
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A repeat of asarco el paso? Secret agreement likely between us epa, us doj and asarco regarding remote century old asarco smelter: what was it burning???

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RELEASE: U.S. EPA Requires ASARCO to Cut Toxic Emissions at 103-Year-Old Arizona Copper Smelter
By Newsroom America Feeds at 3:46 pm Eastern
November 3, 2015


U.S. EPA Requires ASARCO to Cut Toxic Emissions at 103-Year-Old Arizona Copper Smelter

WASHINGTON -- Today, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) and the U.S. Department of Justice announced a settlement with ASARCO that requires the company to spend $150 million to install new equipment and pollution control technology to reduce emissions of toxic heavy metals at a large copper smelter in Hayden, Ariz. The company will also fund local environmental projects valued at $8 million, replace a diesel locomotive with a cleaner model for $1 million, and pay a $4.5 million civil penalty.

The federal enforcement action targeted hazardous air pollutants, including lead and arsenic, in particulate matter (PM). With the controls in place, the hazardous air pollutants should be reduced by at least 8.5 tons per year, and PM emissions are expected to be reduced by 3,500 tons per year. The new equipment and controls will slash the facility's sulfur dioxide (SO2) emissions by 19,000 tons per year, a reduction of more than 90%, according to EPA estimates. Currently, the ASARCO smelter is the largest source of SO2 emissions in Arizona.

"Big enforcement actions like this result in big returns for American communities," said Cynthia Giles, assistant administrator for EPA's Office of Enforcement and Compliance Assurance. "The upgraded pollution controls and advanced monitoring technologies ASARCO will install are key to a modern compliance program that cuts pollution around industrial plants."

"This settlement will bring tremendous benefits to public health and the environment in Arizona for generations to come through dramatic cuts to harmful air emissions," said Assistant Attorney General John C. Cruden for the Justice Department's Environment and Natural Resources Division. "The requirements of this consent decree will not only bring ASARCO into compliance with the nation's clean air law, but will also result in testing for lead contamination in area homes, and improvements to nearby roads to further improve air quality."

EPA's investigation found the company violated federal Clean Air Act standards by failing to adequately control emissions of hazardous air pollutants, such as arsenic and lead, from the Hayden smelter. Under the settlement announced today, ASARCO will install new and upgraded ventilation hoods to capture hot flue gases from its furnaces to better capture the PM, which includes the hazardous air pollutants, and SO2. The company will also replace an aging electrostatic precipitator with a new, cleaner baghouse and inject high performance lime to reduce SO2 emissions.

To reduce wind-blown dust from the facility, which contains varying levels of heavy metals, the company will implement an improved dust control plan, including the use of wind fences, upgraded water sprayers and the installation of concrete pads. In addition, ASARCO will operate five ambient air monitors in and around the Hayden and Winkelman communities to track levels of pollutants, including arsenic, lead and PM, and will make additional improvements to dust controls if levels are high.

The settlement requires ASARCO to spend $8 million to fund two environmental mitigation projects. Of this, $6 million will be used on a road paving project in Pinal County that will reduce dust pollution on local dirt roads close to the towns and residents exposed to PM emissions. In addition, $2 million will be provided to the Gila County Environmental Health Services to conduct lead-based paint testing and abatement in homes, schools and other public buildings in the towns of Hayden and Winkelman.

ASARCO will spend approximately $1 million to replace an existing diesel switch locomotive operated at the facility with a cleaner diesel-electric switch locomotive. The project will reduce emissions of nitrogen oxides, which are precursors to the formation of PM2.5, and greenhouse gases.

Long-term inhalation exposure to inorganic arsenic is associated with irritation of the skin and can affect the brain and nervous system. Exposure to lead can cause effects on the blood, as well as the nervous, immune, renal, and cardiovascular systems. Particulate matter, especially inhalable coarse particles (PM10) and fine particles (PM2.5), can cause coughing or difficulty breathing, decreased lung function, aggravated asthma, and even premature death in people with heart or lung disease. SO2 has also been linked to a number of adverse effects on the respiratory system, and SO2 is also a precursor to the formation of PM2.5. Fine particles are also the main cause of reduced visibility (haze) in parts of the United States, including national parks and wilderness areas. The PM2.5 and SO2 emission reductions achieved through compliance with this settlement will also serve to reduce visibility impairment owing to emissions from the facility.

Built in 1912 and expanded over the years, the ASARCO Hayden site is a copper ore processing, concentrating and smelter facility located adjacent to Hayden and Winkelman. The ASARCO plant includes a crusher, concentrator, smelter and tailings impoundment areas and produces 300 to 400 million pounds of copper and over half a million tons of sulfuric acid annually. ASARCO is owned by Grupo México, a Mexican consortium that owns Ferromex, the largest railroad in Mexico, and operates mines and smelters, including the one in Hayden, that make it the fourth largest copper producer in the world.

The settlement was lodged with the U.S. District Court of Arizona and is subject to a 30-day public comment period and final court approval.

For more information and to read the settlement, visit:
http://www2.epa.gov/enforcement/asarco-llc-settlement.

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EPA starts first East Helena yard cleanup project since 2011

E.Helena gets all this while cursory cleaned contaminated land called richest real estate in USA...?  

http://m.helenair.com/news/local/epa-starts-first-east-helena-yard-cleanup-project-since/article_fd626335-8de4-53ee-a3a7-f41d58fcb101.html?mobile_touch=true

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border violence related to oil and gas development

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Borderland Exodus: Towns On Path Of Proposed Mexican Pipelines Suffer Rash Of Violence
Posted on October 21, 2015

A burned home in Guadalupe, Chihuahua. Homes and businesses here and elsewhere in Juárez Valley towns that lie in the path of proposed infrastructure development have been targets of arson. (Lorne Matalon)

GUADALUPE, Chihuahua — People living in the Juárez Valley southeast of Ciudad Juárez  and El Paso, Texas allege that land speculators preparing for the start of oil and gas production have spurred a land grab that's forced what some claim is an exodus of local residents.

People interviewed for this story claim that they or neighbors have been burned out of their homes and that many others have been murdered.

They all live in a string of towns along the Rio Grande in an area slated for energy production and rapid infrastructure construction.

One of those towns is Guadalupe, a few minutes from the U.S. border across from Fabens, Texas but a world away in terms of security. Construction on a superhighway and a state-of-the-art international border crossing is underway here.

According to Mexican census rolls nearly 10,000 people lived here in 2005. The mayor – who declined to be interviewed – claimed in local media that this year only about 1,000 people remain.

One man, who like others asked not be identified for fear of retribution, explained what's happened.

"The government sends people here to pressure landowners to get out of here, to say, 'go away, we don't want you here,' " he said in Spanish, a charge vehemently denied by Chihuahua's government.

The man said wealthy buyers then show up to grab the vacant land.

Analysts suggest buyers are arriving because Mexico's state-owned oil company PEMEX is exploring for oil and gas in Chihuahua, with an emphasis on northern Chihuahua. The region shares geologiocal characteristics of the Permian Basin of Texas and New Mexico, the highest-producing oil field in the United States.

"Obviously this land is being re-consolidated in the hands of a few," said Tony Payan, Director of Rice University's Mexico Center in Houston.

"Many of these politicians will have interests in the shale development in the future and will likely get ahold of that land no matter what."

With oil and gas development and plans for pipelines, desert land no one cared about is now valuable. Chihuahua's Secretary of Public Works told a Juárez newspaper in September that he won't reveal the exact routes for new roads because the government doesn't want to fuel land speculation. We asked another person about that.

He laughed derisively.

"It's always about power and money," he said in Spanish.

He alleged that bureaucrats and politicians are now in the real estate business, acting at the very least as a middleman to sell land to investors.

"They are using, it is quite clear to me, that information for  themselves in a way that they can position themselves as a political class to profit from this industry in the future, oil, gas and the pipelines themselves," said Tony Payan.

Back in Guadalupe, physical evidence suggests that someone doesn't want people here; burned houses, shattered glass, very few people on the street.

The narrative in Mexican media is that the violence is a consequence of turf wars between cartels. But some residents are skeptical. They sense, but can't prove, that outside investors are working with organized crime to terrorize people into fleeing, leaving their land to be scooped up. The state can legally seize land and homes for unpaid property taxes.

"The valley is a lawless place," another man said in Spanish. "It's the sad truth."

Mexican authorities cited in media reports say at least 300 people have been killed in Guadalupe since 2008 — mayors, police, city councilors, business owners and human rights activists. People are learning hard lessons about real estate.

Julián Cardona is a photographer from Juárez.

"You know the rule. Location, location, location," he said.

He's watched a slow-motion depopulation unfold here. He said that residents tell him that authorities do nothing.

"Every time there was a killing, every time there was a burning house, the soldiers were a block away," he said. "They didn't stop the killers or the people burning the houses."

Pipeline companies in Texas are historically granted the right of Eminent Domain to seize private land because the transport of energy is deemed to be in the public's interest.

"In the United States, it's a lawful Eminent Domain. In Mexico it's outright violence," said El Paso lawyer Carlos Spector. He represents 250 former residents of the Juárez Valley, many from Guadalupe, now seeking asylum in the US.

"Investors are getting very aggressive," Spector said, founder of Mexicanos En Exilio, or Mexicans in Exile.

"All they have to do is get a list from the mayor of a small town, who is under their control, as to who hasn't paid the taxes. And if they can match up who hasn't paid the taxes to where the gas and the freeway is coming, then you go after that property. It's very, very scientific."

People who remain in Guadalupe say that former neighbors who've fled are anxious to sell their now abandoned land for cents on the dollar because they're too frightened to even contemplate coming back.

"I received several threats, not just one," he said in Spanish.

Huéramo was a city councilor in Guadalupe in 2010. He'd opposed the mayor's resolution that would allow the local government to expropriate land to sell to energy speculators.

The week after he entered the U.S. two women on the city council were killed. They'd opposed the same resolution. This was confirmed by two independent sources.

The year before, two of his his brothers-in-law were murdered.

"Families in the Juárez Valley have lost loved ones," he said. "It's a message saying they have to leave the Juarez Valley."

Residents say violence rose in the Juárez Valley in 2010 after the murder of Josefina Reyes Salazar, killed on the outskirts Ciudad Juárez.

She'd led the Mexican side of a successful binational campaign to stop a nuclear waste dump in Sierra Blanca, Texas, just across from Guadalupe. And she'd spoken out about land displacement in the Juárez Valley.

An art gallery administrator from Ciudad Juárez, Gabriela Carballo, compares opposition to pipelines in Guadalupe to conflict in the U.S. over the proposed Trans-Pecos Pipeline. It would ferry natural gas from Texas into Mexico.

There is intense opposition on the part of some Texas landowners and ranchers.

"As a Mexican I can say that we care as much about the environment as any one of these people that are fighting the Trans-Pecos Pipeline," said Carballo.

As for alleged land displacement in the name of energy in Chihuahua, she said it's not easy to take a stand under the actual or perceived threat of retribution.

"If we speak out against it, we run the risk of our really extremely corrupt government murdering us."

There's no way to verify such a claim. And Mexican officials are quick to refute them.

"Violence is minimal right now and no one's been affected by plans for pipelines," said Arturo Llamas in Spanish. He's Chihuahua's pipeline and energy infrastructure regulator.

Llamas is also the state's liaison with Mexico's federal energy agencies. He said energy development in northern Chihuahua is a boon to local residents that will ultimately translate into lower electricity and gasoline costs.

"It will help the entire country, not just Chihuahua," he said. He was emphatic that he and his staff are watching the Juárez Valley.

"It's our responsibility to be sure that laws are obeyed and that everything that must be done is done properly," he said. He also said he wanted anyone with a complaint to contact his office in Chihuahua City. But few people alleging harm are likely to approach a government they don't trust.

There are others beyond the alleged victims, who bear witness to a different reality. Mexican photographer Julián Cardona has catalogued the destruction of peoples lives in the Juárez Valley.

"I think they're now realizing the value of their land, because now there are people buying their lands," said Cardona.

"Violence is linked to displacement of their families," he explained.

He recalled a visit June 24, 2015 when Chihuahua Gov César Duarte made a brief stop in Guadalupe.

"The Governor visited in Guadalupe and the mayor ordered the empty buildings and house along the main avenue painted in bright colors — glowing yellow, green, blue, pink. The fact the houses were painted in bright colors is like a smokescreen of what's really going on," he said.

As for Martin Huéramo — the former Guadalupe city councilor seeking asylum — he says he'd have no issue with energy production or pipelines if they did not involve, in his words, people being forced out. He doesn't believe government claims that laws are being followed and things are being done properly.

Then unexpectedly, he said he believes one of the the government's claims.

"The government says violence is down in the Juárez Valley," he said in Spanish. "I believe it," he continued, "because there are no more people left to kill."


This story was reported by Lorne Matalon, in collaboration with Fronteras, The Changing America Desk, a consortium of NPR member stations in the Southwest.

Fwd: fns_nmsu-l] FNS News: Mexican Foxconn Workers Stage Hunger Strike

Subject: fns_nmsu-l] FNS News: Mexican Foxconn Workers Stage Hunger Strike

October 16, 2015

Labor News

Mexican Foxconn Workers Stage Hunger Strike

Employees of a Foxconn Scientific Atlantic plant in Ciudad Juarez escalated a protest this week for better wages and dignified treatment.

Setting up camp underneath a tent, worker Carlos Octavio Serrano initiated a hunger strike in front of the factory located in the Intermex Industrial Park. Twenty one other workers said they would join Serrano in refusing to eat until their grievances were addressed.

Involving more than 300 employees, the Foxconn Scientific Atlantic protest movement became public last August when scores of workers staged a demonstration against low wages, bad company food, sexual harassment and supervisory despotism. 

A woman worker at the plant was quoted at the time in El Diario de Juarez: "I had a problem because my supervisor asked me, 'How much would you charge me to touch your breasts?' I told him of course not, you're sick."

Two months later, hunger striker Serrano contended that management still had not gotten the message. "They aren't paying attention to us, and not resolving our demands," Serrano told the Juarez daily Norte.
According to Foxconn Scientific Atlantic workers, one of their principal demands is an increase in food bonuses, on top of the daily base salary of 87 pesos, or less than six dollars. 

In an article published earlier this year, University of Padua (Italy) sociologists Devi Sacchetto and Martin Cecchi estimated that Foxconn employs 22,000 workers at several factories in and around Juarez, including the company's huge,  state-of-the-art facility that straddles the Mexico-U.S. border at San Jeronimo just northwest of the city and Santa Teresa, New Mexico.

In Juarez and San Jeronimo, the Taiwan-based electronics giant manufactures products for Dell, Cisco and Hewlett Packard that are shipped to the U.S. market.

Based in part on Cecchi's field research last year, Sacchetto and Cecchi documented worker complaints that included stagnant wages and productivity bonuses, unpredictable work shifts and transportation problems such as breakdowns of company-contracted buses.

Worker discontent in the Juarez maquiladora industry, or assembly-for-export industry, is not isolated to Foxconn. In late September, about 300 workers at the ADC factory in the Bermudez Industrial Park engaged in a protest aimed at preserving benefits and ending arbitrary management policies. Another key demand was free union association.

"Respect our right to vacations" and "NO discrimination in bonuses" were among the messages on placards displayed by demonstrating workers outside the ADN plant.

Elizabeth Flores, director of the labor ministry for the local Roman Catholic Archdiocese, said she wasn't surprised by the maquiladora protests. Flores characterized the Juarez maquiladora industry as a "time bomb" fused with very low wages and exploitation.

"The industry started as a panacea for Juarez, that there was finally work since up until then there was only tourism or so," Flores told FNS.  "The salary has always been low and Juarez has always been an expensive place."

The labor advocate said the current peso devaluation is adding pressure to the prevailing wage schema and already precarious living standards, especially since food and other necessities are not produced locally and have to be imported, ironically, to a city which specializes in manufacturing and exporting products to the United States.

Flores said the low pay and high cost-of living over time forced virtually every able member of many households to seek work in the maquiladora industry in order to survive, yet even this solution is becoming unsustainable in light of the deteriorating wage situation.

Although Juarez's maquiladora industry has rebounded since the Great Recession, the low pay and other working conditions have made it difficult to lure local residents back onto the shop floor.

Foxconn and other companies are reportedly recruiting and transporting workers from other places in Mexico to meet a labor shortage, a practice that was also common in the post-NAFTA boom years of the 1990s.

Coupled with plans to build new housing subdivisions for workers, even as previously constructed ones rot in abandonment and decay, the maquiladora industry labor conditions are sparking renewed local polemics about wages, urban development patterns, mass transportation, and the breakdown of the social fabric.   

In an opinion published this year the local Semanario magazine editorialized:

"The problem is not the lack of existence of people of working age in Juarez. The problem is that wages are low and (people) prefer informal work, washing cars and even the daily sight of young people juggling (for spare change) in the many intersections of the city….as we have said at the beginning, there are a lot of jobs.  But these are rejected not only because of the miserably low pay, but also due to the commutes to and from work that reach up to four hours daily, resulting in social stress and family disintegration."

In a fissure of sorts in elite local opinion, prominent Juarez businessman Federico de la Vega criticized some of the policies of the local maquiladora industry and called for minimum wage hikes on the order of 50 percent during an interview with Norte last summer.

"There is hunger, the minimum salary of 2,000 pesos (less than $150 per month) is not sufficient to eat," de la Vega told Norte. 

Foxconn Scientific Atlantic hunger striker Carlos Serrano suspended his fast on Thursday, October 15, as legal wrangling between the company and workers intensified. On Friday, October 16, Norte reported a tense scene outside the Intermex Industrial Park factory, where apparently fruitless negotiations had occurred early in the day between workers and management. Juarez municipal police were on the scene.

Antonio Vazquez Rodriguez, attorney for Foxconn Scientific Atlantic, informed the Juarez newspaper that the company had filed legal charges against the workers because of an October 12 blockade of the plant entrance that resulted in $100,000 in losses due to logistics and shipping delays.

A lawyer for the workers, Rodrigo Stanley, said the protesting employees would attempt to reach a solution through the federal Labor Arbitration and Conciliation Board. Stanley added that 200 workers from the ADC and AMEX factories had joined the Foxconn Scientific Atlantic workers' movement with the common goal of gaining an independent union.  

Pastoral Obrera's Elizabeth Flores said it was "very probable" that more worker protests in the maquiladora industry would break out in the near future. 


Additional sources: El Mexicano, October 15, 2015. Lapolaka.com, October 14, 2015. Norte, June 28, 2015;  October 14 and 16, 2015. Articles by Miroslava Breach, Salvador Esparza and Carlos Omar Barranco. Arrobajuarez.com, August 12, 2015; September 30, 2015; October 14, 2015. El Diario de Juarez, August 12 and October 12, 2015. Articles by Araly Castanon and editorial staff. La Jornada, August 13, 2015. Article by Ruben Villalpando. Semanario, June 17, 2015. Opendemocracy.net, January 16, 2015. Article by Devi Sacchetto and Martin Cecchi. 


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2015 May 30 worker killed at asarco remediation site in restricted area

fr www.recastingthesmelter.com

"FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

There was a fatal incident at the former ASARCO Smelter Site in El Paso on May 30, 2015, involving an employee of a sub-contractor who is doing work at the Site. The sub-contractor's employee had completed his assigned work for the day. He was not performing an assigned task at the time of the incident. He was found in an area that is restricted to all site personnel.

The El Paso Police Department and OSHA are currently investigating this matter; the Trust will have no further statements until those investigations are complete.

The Trust's thoughts are with the family of the deceased.

Regards,

Roberto Puga, Custodial Trustee"

"Union, Environmental Group Say Dozens of Nuclear Workers Suffering from Toxic Materials Exposure

 

By Elizabeth Grossman

In These Times

February 20, 2015

 

Since March 2014, nearly 60 workers at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state have sought medical attention for on- the-job exposure to chemical vapors released by highly toxic waste stored at the site, some as recently as August. At a public meeting held Wednesday in Pasco, Washington, Hanford workers described symptoms that include chronic headaches, respiratory problems, nerve damage and bloody urine.

 

The meeting, hosted by the United Association (U.A.) of Plumbers and Steamfitters Local 598 and Hanford Challenge, a Seattle-based environmental watchdog group, was convened following the February 10 release by Department of Energy contractor Washington River Protection Services (WRPS) of a "corrective action implementation plan." This plan was developed in response to recommendations in a report from the Savannah River National Laboratory released in October 2014.

 

Commissioned in response to worker exposures at Hanford’s tank farms, the Savannah River report found ongoing emissions of toxic chemical vapors from waste tanks, inadequate worker health and safety procedures and evidence that "strongly suggests a causal link between chemical vapor releases and subsequent health effects."

 

For the entire article, see

http://inthesetimes.com/working/entry/17668/nuclear_workers_dangers

El Paso Times Editorial calls area polluted with hafnium (from nuclear control rods) "prime real estate"

"I think this would be a great opportunity and a great benefit for UT El Paso," Regent Ernest Aliseda of McAllen said.

The Asarco land is prime real estate for El Paso's future. Given the role UTEP must play in building that future, it makes sense for the UT System to consider the purchase.

And the regents' cautious approach makes sense. Nothing can be done before the environmental cleanup is complete.

[h.m. note: this "clean up" can never be complete, except for by ignoring what really happened there -- and, the ones involved are protected from disclosure under US 1940's Atomic Energy Act.   We have the data and documentation to show what is found around that site and that Asarco (and 2 other companies caught by EPA/US DOJ sending illegal stuff here) were US DOE High Level Radioactive Disposal Contractors, and $100 million is only a drop in the bucket for cleaning up what is there]

But eventual UTEP control of at least some of the Asarco land makes a lot of sense."

http://www.elpasotimes.com/opinion/ci_26893997/ut-interest-asarco-land-makes-sense

11-08-14

[h.m. note: proper cleanup of the ASARCO site would have created billions of dollars of jobs for at LEAST ten years!]

CEMEX deemed liable for 1 million of ASARCO clean-up costs; Stanley Jobe as material witness

"Cemex Must Foot $1M Of Asarco's Lead, Arsenic Cleanup Bill

By Jeremy Heallen

Law 360, Houston (April 01, 2014, 7:18 PM ET) -- A Texas federal judge said Monday that Cemex Inc. is responsible for a portion of about $22 million that Asacro LLC paid in environmental cleanup costs associated with a Superfund site that both companies allegedly polluted.

U.S. District Judge Philip R. Martinez ruled that Cemex must pay Asarco $1.1 million under the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act, to cover its share of a $22 million settlement Asarco struck with the federal government to remediate lead and arsenic contamination on a 6-acre industrial site in...

Case Information

Case Title
Asarco LLC v. Cemex Corp

Case Number
3:12-cv-00155

Court
Texas Western

Nature of Suit
Environmental Matters

Judge
Philip R. Martinez

Law360 Coverage
Cemex Must Foot $1M Of Asarco's Lead, Arsenic Cleanup Bill
Asarco Says It Didn't Waive Cemex Claim In $19M Cleanup Row
Date Filed
April 26, 2012"

"

Track this case

Case Number:
3:12-cv-00155

Court:
Texas Western

Nature of Suit:
Environmental Matters

Cause
28:1331 Fed. Question

Judge:
Philip R. Martinez

Firms
Mounce Green
Ray Valdez
Companies
Cemex, S.A.B. de C.V.
Sectors & Industries:
Industrial Goods
Cement
Complaint
View recent docket activity »
Reflects complaints, answers, motions, orders and trial notes entered from Jan. 1, 2011.
Additional or older documents may be available in Pacer.
Coverage

April 1, 2014
Cemex Must Foot $1M Of Asarco's Lead, Arsenic Cleanup Bill
A Texas federal judge said Monday that Cemex Inc. is responsible for a portion of about $22 million that Asacro LLC paid in environmental cleanup costs associated with a Superfund site that both companies allegedly polluted.
Parties

Neutral
Christopher Antcliff
Represented by:
Plaintiff
Asarco LLC
Represented by:
Nicole Jennifer Anchondo, Ray, Valdez, McChristian & Jeans, PC

Laura G. Brys, Integer Law Corporation

Gregory Evans, Integer Law Corporation

Tanya Guerrero, Integer Law Corporation

David S. Jeans, Ray, Valdez, McChristian & Jeans

William R. Pletcher, Integar Law Corporation

James G. Warren, Integer Law Corporation

Defendant
Cemex Construction Materials South, LLC
Represented by:
Andres Eduardo Almanzan, Mounce, Green, Myers, Safi, Paxson & Galatzan

Steven Lee Hughes, Attorney at Law

Walter D. James, III, Walter D. James, III, PLLC

David Moises Mirazo, Mounce, Green, Myers, Safi, Paxson & Galatzan

TERMINATED: 03/22/2013
Cemex Corp
Represented by:
Andres Eduardo Almanzan, Mounce, Green, Myers, Safi, Paxson & Galatzan

Walter D. James, III, Walter D. James, III, PLLC

Defendant
Cemex, Inc.
Represented by:
Andres Eduardo Almanzan, Mounce, Green, Myers, Safi, Paxson & Galatzan

Steven Lee Hughes, Attorney at Law

Walter D. James, III, Walter D. James, III, PLLC

David Moises Mirazo, Mounce, Green, Myers, Safi, Paxson & Galatzan

Material Witness
Stanley Pruet Jobe
Represented by:
Marjorie Wilcox Jobe, 5588 Westside Drive"

1943 thru 1946 lead smelter and/or land leased from ASARCO produced uranium used in Manhattan Project

Page 1
DOE/AL/62350-210REV. 0 COMMENT AND RESPONSEDOCUMENT FOR THE LONG-TERM SURVEILLANCE PLAN FOR THE BODO CANYON DISPOSAL SITE DURANGO, COLORADO November 1995 ASTER DISCLAIMER This report was prepared as an account of work sponsored by an agency of the United States Government. Neither the United States Government nor any agency thereof, nor any of their employees, makes any warranty, express or implied, or assumes any legal liability or responsibility for the accuracy, completeness, or usefulness of any information, apparatus, product, orprocess disclosed, or represents that its use would not infringe privately owned rights. Reference herein to any specific commercial product, process, or service by trade name, trademark,manufacturer, or otherwise does not necessarily constitute or imply its endorsement, recommendation, or favoring by the United States Government or any agency thereof. The viewsand opinions of authors expressed herein do not necessarily state or reflect th.ose of theUnited States Government or any agency thereof. 1
Page 2
COMMENT AND RESPONSE DOCUMENT FOR THE BODO CANYON DISPOSAL SITE, WRANGO, COLORADO LONG-TERM SURVEILLANCE PLAN FOR THE STATE OF COLORADO UMTRA DOCUMENT REVIEW FORM COMMENT Site: Bodo Canyon Disposal I Site. Durango. Colorado Document: Draft Lona-Term Surveillance Plan Reviewer: State of Colorado Date: June 27. 1994Comment: 1, Paae 2-1, Section 2.1 Other histories of the Durango mill site indicate the U.S. Vanadium Corporation (USV)built and operated a uranium after leasing the site from American Smelting andRefining Company (ASARCO) who had operated a lead smelter at that location. This should be confirmed and, if correct, should be clarified in the first paragraph of the site history. The first paragraph seems confused about the chronology of events. It was USV not ASARCO who built and operated the vanadium mill in 1942 and who,from 1943 to the mill's closure in 1946, reprocessed vanadium tailings to provide uranium for the Manhattan Project [hm:leased from ASARCO, who was principle uranium ore buyer for US atomic energy commission (US DOE)].

RESPONSE Page: 2-1By: C. Saumur Date: September 1995 Section 2.1, Site History, has been rewritten to read as follows: "In 1942, U.S. Vanadium Corporation leased the property and constructed a uranium processing mill on the site. This mill operated until 1946, when the mill was shutdown."

[it is commonly known that in the early days lead smelters were used to separate out uranium from parent ores]

1995 Asarco silver troy oz silver registers radiation

An ASARCO 1995 silver "dollar" given as a "health safety excellence" award to "Best record Mission Complex" registers 25 micro-Sv on radiation scale for factory calibrated meter, when registering for gamma/beta/alpha particles, when tested for only a few minutes.  Background radiation in El Paso TX 3 miles from Asarco smelter site usually registers almost half that (14) with same meter.

Letter to Honorable Rep. O'Rourke, U.S. House of Representatives about Asarco, US DOE wastes, and plans to build elementary school on the old lead(Pb) dump

Statement made 2/21/2014 at 3PM EST for Honorable Rep. O’Rourke’s Attention

Masters in Science 
Fully endorsed by Nobel team winner Dr. Devra Davis, author of “Secret history of Cancer”
Attended Rachel Carson's College – she wrote "Silent Spring" a key book  about the dangers of both toxic chemicals and radiation
Trained under the last PHD student for Nobel Medical Prize Winner Dr. Niko Tinbergen
Fully certified designated highly qualified Science teacher grades 8-12, also, certified to teach gifted students (UTEP, 2010)
Bachelors of Science at the Ohio State University 
Endorsed by Father of semiotics, Dr. Thomas Sebeok (on file OSU), who participated in WA D.C. panel on how to label nuclear waste sites to warn off future generations

It has come to my attention that development is planned for a 200+ acres of land on the other side of TX Interstate I-10, part of the original Asarco properties a stone’s throw away from the site of the Asarco stacks. The plans for this site are to create family homes. Under smart code development requirements they are required to build an elementary school and playground. We know per Dr. Goodell (UTEP) statement to Channel 7 KVIA that paving the Asarco site will not make the area safe for people. We know that slag gives off gases (called "off-gassing") for nearly 100 years. Some of these gases are toxic (I.e Arsenic) and cannot be smelled or tasted. We know from the Mesita School Health Study (Peer reviewed) that children growing up attending that school close to the Asarco site have a greater chance in their lifetime of getting MS. 

• Honorable Rep. Beto O’Rourke has a greater chance of getting MS from attending the Mesita School.

• Males who have MS have greater chance of passing MS to their children. 

• According to smart code Dover Kohl diagram an elementary school will be placed on top of Asarco old lead dump, which is quite large. The grading permits are in place. 

• This lead dump was created during the 1940s and 1950s and has remained undisturbed throughout the cleanup. 

• During the 1940s the UTEP (formerly College of mines, next to Asarco site) grads were at the center of the largest uranium strikes found in the Western United States.

• Asarco during those years was a custom smelter. It would smelt anything. 

• Lead smelter during those years (1940s-1950s) were used to separate out Uranium from their parent ores (i.e. Wulfenite).

• The waste material (ores) would’ve been put in the old lead dump and likely are radioactive tailings.

• Under the bankruptcy agreement, the trustee for the cleanup is not required to address radioactive waste.

• Despite 8 years of research, all government agencies (EPA, USDA, DoD, DOJ, etc) have refused any information regarding "regulated" radioactive materials going through our El Paso Asarco site. They claim no knowledge and refuse to release key invoices listed in the 73 page US DOJ EPA Asarco confidential for settlement purposes only document (now in public domain, see NYTimes 10/2006)

• The old Atomic Energy Act still protects Asarco and all involved from disclosure and liability.

• I uncovered a document from Idaho National Laboratory Library detailing how Asarco, Dupont, Engelhard were official U.S. DOE high level radioactive waste disposal contractors from places like Oakridge TN and Hanford WA during the years Asarco was burning illegal, secret hazardous waste (1998 73 page USDOJ EPA Asarco formerly confidential for settlement purposes only document)(New York Times, front page story, October 2006).

• The community has not been told all the details about what has been burned all those years and is still not being told. 

• Engelhard, Dupont, Asarco were listed in the aforementioned 1998 confidential for settlement purposes only document sludges, incinerator ashes and only God knows what else through the two El Paso Asarco con-top furnaces (that metal curled stack was shorter than the others so its smoke stayed more local – likely a 30 mile radius including Juarez Mexico, Southern New Mexico and Texas).

• We have data showing that the chemical element Hafnium is found in greater quantities amount near the stack location. Hafnium is unusual. Hafnium is commonly found in nuclear control rods. 

• In 1998 an EPA publicly announced that El Paso had the highest Beta radiation levels in the nation. Higher than Oakridge, Higher than Hanford. In October 1998, Texas suddenly decided to deny the license of the Sierra Blanca Nuclear Dump site. During that time, the media coverage on that issue of the dump was so high that thousands of people were marching at the Capitol of Mexico against the dump. Media coverage was huge. 

• By December 1998, Asarco said in the El Paso Times it was thinking about "idling" the Asarco Smelter, and it did beginning of February 1999. The plant never re-opened.  All the staff who worked at the site's steam plant are dead now, from unusual diseases, according to an unnamed supervisor. 

• I asked all the environmental agencies representatives to give me a sample of slag from the Asarco water distillation unit (it went up in flames during clean-up) rated to remove radioactive waste from the plant's process water. They refused. 

Given all this information, we know Asarco ran U.S. DOE high level radioactive waste materials through the El Paso Asarco smelter and it is likely that the old lead dump contained radioactive material. That whole area would be contaminated by Arsenic for years to come. If the powers that be still continue with development of the Asarco site as detailed recently in an El Paso Inc article by David Crowder, I plead, deeply plead, with Honorable Representative Beto O’Rourke, given his own experience attending Mesita Elementary School a mile from Asarco, that they do not allow children to grow up on any of the Asarco land. That they do not build play grounds. That they do not build an elementary school there. He of all people should understand having attended Mesita the risks that that all these children will undergo if they allow the school and playground to be built. As a certified teacher and a Christian, it deeply grieves me. It hurts my heart to watch this happen. 

Sincerely,
Heather McMurray