Agency Wants More Testing Of Asarco Site

The state Ecology Department is demanding more information on toxic residues at the site of a long-vanished smelter in Everett.

The department’s enforcement order to Asarco Inc. also covers preparation for cleaning up the area - about 600 acres of homes, businesses, industrial plants and the municipal Legion Memorial Golf Course.

Parts of the site in the northeastern part of town, south of Washington 529, have levels of arsenic, lead and cadmium higher than in residential areas around the old Tacoma smelter that Asarco shut down in 1985. A class action citing that pollution was settled in 1995 for payments that could total $67.5 million.

“In some ways, it’s kind of similar,” said Dave Nazy, the department’s Everett site manager. “You have a smelter producing high levels of arsenic that is dispersed over a wide area through a smokestack.”

Unlike Tacoma, however, houses and businesses in Everett were built directly on top of the old smelter site.

Terms of the Everett order were “kind of negotiated,” but Asarco officials would not sign an enforcement agreement and resisted some terms sought by the state, Nazy said.

Some of the most critical work covered by the order is detailed soil testing to be used in setting the boundaries of the cleanup project and in drafting a decontamination plan.

The smelter was built by the Puget Sound Reduction Co. in 1883 with financing from the Rockefeller family to refine gold and silver ore from Monte Cristo, about 35 miles to the east in the Cascade Range.

At the time, Nazy said, “the smelter was kind of out of town.”

Failing to find a mother lode, facing high transportation costs and declining ore quality, owners sold the smelter to American Smelting & Refining Co. in 1903.

Asarco, as the company later became known, switched to refining low-grade lead and arsenic trioxide. An arsenic extractor was added in 1908, but the complex was closed in 1912 and demolished in 1914.

That history was largely forgotten when, more than two decades later, a developer bought part of the area and built houses on the site.

Discovery of significant contamination in 1991 was thus more of a jolt in north Everett than in Tacoma, where Asarco had long been a major employer and enjoyed considerable community support, Nazy said.

“There was a lot of distrust and mistrust and anger on all sides. It hasn’t been easy for anybody,” he said.

In hair and urine tests on 95 members of 36 households in the fall of 1994, eight people were shown to have been exposed to arsenic, state health officials reported.