Regulators, Kaiser Spar Over Pollution Problems Ecology Says Mead Among State’S Worst Air Offenders; Company Says Latest Figures Show Huge Improvement

When state clean-air cops crunched 1998 industrial-pollution numbers last summer, they didn’t like what they saw for Kaiser Aluminum’s big Mead smelter.

Emissions of hydrogen fluoride, a gas that can harm eyes and lungs and damage plants, rose from 599,000 pounds in 1997 to 1.98 million pounds - a sharp upward trend from a decade ago.

“We brought in their corporate folks and said, `This isn’t OK - you need to do better,”’ said Cullen Stephenson, a state Department of Ecology manager in Olympia.

Kaiser officials admit they had problems at the smelter as they switched over to replacement workers when the United Steelworkers union went on strike in 1998. They also say most of those problems have been fixed.

In recent months, the smelter has performed dramatically better, said Kaiser Mead plant manager Steven Anderson, a mechanical engineer and 20-year Kaiser employee.

“Our performance today is better than it was a year ago; it’s better than it was two years ago. In fact, it’s the best we’ve been in the history of this facility,” Anderson said.

Kaiser agreed to share its estimated 1999 air emissions numbers with The Spokesman-Review, although the federally mandated toxic release inventory data for 1999 won’t officially be reported to regulators until July 1.

“We’ve said to all of our people, if we’re not seen as an environmental positive, we’ll lose community support and we’ll cease to exist,” said S. Peter Forsyth, Kaiser vice president for Northwest external affairs.

But Kaiser’s environmental performance continues to worry state regulators.

Kaiser Mead ranks last among the state’s six aluminum smelters, according to a March 2000 Washington Department of Ecology comparative analysis based on the 1998 data.

“Kaiser Mead is the worst polluter. Kaiser’s Tacoma smelter also has problems,” said Robert King, Ecology’s chief air quality inspector. “We are asking, why are they underperforming their peers?”

Kaiser will fare better when the state reviews the company’s 1999-2000 emission data, said Bernard P. “Bud” Leber, Kaiser’s Northwest environmental affairs manager.

“Ecology was concerned with the trends they were seeing nine months into the strike. We’ve since changed how we operate the scrubbers,” Leber said.

Ecology also is unhappy about Kaiser’s request for a two-year delay to meet tougher new federal air quality standards for aluminum smelters, which took effect last October.

In September 1998, Kaiser told regulators it couldn’t immediately comply with the new fluoride standard and asked for a postponement to October 2001.

Ecology denied the request last July. But the EPA said it has jurisdiction and is expected to grant a delay for Kaiser’s Mead and Tacoma smelters.

Kaiser’s proposed delay is noteworthy because the EPA’s new national smelter standards for hydrogen fluoride and particulates were based on Mead’s performance in the mid-1990s, said Dan Meyer, a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency engineer in Seattle. Kaiser has owned the smelter since 1946.

“Mead was selected as the top dog back in 1995. They have since slipped,” Meyer said. But there’s no legal way under the Clean Air Act that EPA can deny Kaiser an extension even though the compliance date has passed, he said.

Mead was able to achieve the higher standard of performance because the EPA tested during a narrow window - from August 1993 to mid-1994 - when Mead was running six instead of eight potlines, Leber said.

“Their lawyers said 10 months is enough time to demonstrate achievability. You can look at it as being sour grapes, but the smallest amount of data they used was from the Mead plant,” Leber said.

It will cost Kaiser $4million to $5million to upgrade its Spokane plants at Mead and Trentwood to meet the EPA standards by October 2001, Leber said.

The delay doesn’t pose human health or environmental risks because smelter emissions are far below state and federal safety limits for air quality near the plant, he added.

Meanwhile, the Vanalco smelter in Vancouver, Wash., a smaller, World War II-era prebake plant similar to Mead in design, is already meeting the new air pollution limits, said Paul Boys of EPA.

“Vanalco took the lead in this region,” Boys said. “Kaiser’s time line for making changes to bring their plant into compliance is the longest of any of the facilities. It raises the question, where have they been for the past five years?”

The 1998 upturn

Kaiser managers blame some of the pollution problems in 1998 and 1999 on poor housekeeping in the smelter the month before the strike, and on inexperienced replacement workers the company had to train.

In the last three months of 1998, when striking Steelworkers had left the plant, the smelter was fined $18,400 for exceeding permit limits on pounds of sulfur dioxide allowed per ton of aluminum produced. In October 1998, it also exceeded allowable particulate limits.

Since the labor dispute began, the company’s image has been battered by $171,200 in state pollution fines for the air quality violations, complaints by neighbors about black clouds from a new carbon bake furnace, and a United Steelworkers of America pamphlet that hammered Kaiser for the pollution.

In a January 1999 letter to Ecology, Mike Sawatsky, Kaiser Mead’s laboratory and environmental manager, said the labor dispute had slowed Kaiser’s efforts to improve pollution controls.

But Mead’s pollution problems are long-standing. The smelter is ranked as Spokane County’s No. 1 industrial polluter, according to toxic release inventory reports through 1998.

In 1998, the Mead smelter ranked third on Washington state’s large polluter list, out-ranked by a coal-burning power plant in Centralia and a pulp and paper mill in Longview.

Air emissions at Mead were caused by “poor operation and maintenance, such as misplaced, damaged and missing shields” on the potlines where molten aluminum is made, according to a 1996 state inspection report.

“Hundreds of tons of additional fluoride have been emitted from roofs to the atmosphere since March 1995. Ecology considers this a serious violation,” Ecology inspector King told company managers in 1996.

Routine maintenance and major plant upgrades are now on track to address those problems, Anderson said.

Kaiser has spent close to $2million to recondition fans in the potrooms and is replacing leaky shields over the smelter’s 1,135 pots that allow emissions to escape, he said.

The shields are being replaced on an “as fail” basis because the process requires taking a pot out of production, Anderson said.

“We’ve tightened up all our operating practices in that area and we’ve got a work force that’s sensitive to it,” he said.

Ecology inspectors agree that Kaiser’s recent efforts have been paying off at Mead.

“The last time I went in, they were much better than they’ve been before,” said King, the state inspector.

Concerned neighbors

As regulators joust with Kaiser, some of the plant’s neighbors are asking questions.

After reading last summer about a series of bypasses at Kaiser’s new carbon bake factory, Keith Moors called the Spokane County Air Pollution Control Authority.

Moors, a car salesman, lives with his wife, Darla, and four children north of the smelter on five acres in the rapidly growing rural suburbs of Spokane County near Mead Middle School.

His neighbors had complained last year about a chemical film on their windows they suspected was coming from the smelter. “It was like acid rain; you couldn’t get it off,” Moors said.

Moors quickly learned the smelter isn’t regulated by Spokane’s clean air authority.

Eric Skelton, SCAPCA’s director, told Moors he’d never been inside the Kaiser plant. “That’s scary,” Moors said.

The state’s major industries, including pulp and paper mills and smelters, lobbied to be regulated from Olympia when the Washington Department of Ecology was established in the 1970s, Skelton said.

“Ecology’s industrial section has retained enforcement authority,” Skelton said.

Despite this arrangement, local air quality officials were drawn into the Kaiser Mead controversy early in the strike and lockout.

After sending his staff to document four opacity violations at the carbon bake oven from the edge of Kaiser’s property and listening to citizen complaints in 1998, Skelton wrote to Ecology.

“We are concerned about these apparently ongoing emission problems and would like to have assurance that they are being addressed,” Skelton said in a letter to the industrial section.

In early 1999, SCAPCA inspectors responded again after locked-out Steelworkers videotaped black clouds coming out of the bake oven.

Some of Kaiser’s neighbors were also complaining about black smoke and strong sulfur smells, complaint files sent from Spokane to Olympia show.

“We documented these episodes and provided the information to Ecology,” Skelton said.

In a second letter to Ecology in March 1999, Skelton said he was concerned the pollution was continuing.

“Failing consistent compliance, SCAPCA essentially is forced to maintain surveillance, because the Industrial Section cannot respond in a timely manner due to distance from Spokane,” Skelton said

A month later, the EPA’s regional Office of Air Quality in Seattle told Ecology they’d step in with a federal enforcement action if Ecology didn’t stop the problems.

“We are concerned about the excessive by-passing of the anode bake furnace control system,” Don Dossett of EPA told Carol Kraege, Ecology’s industrial section manager.

Kaiser’s Sawatsky blamed several of the by-passes on “operator error” in an April 1999 response to Ecology.

“As you know, we have a `new’ workforce here during the strike and are experiencing an increased turnover of personnel … we cannot totally protect against operator mistakes,” Sawatsky said.

Ecology fined Kaiser $19,600 for the bypasses. Kaiser wasn’t reporting every violation as the law requires, King said.

“We issued an administrative order to put continuous opacity monitoring on their stack, 365 days a year, by April ‘99. That helps us a lot - we don’t have to go over there as much,” King said.

Ecology also ordered monthly testing for sulfur dioxide at the plant for a year, starting last June.

Problems with the plant’s computerized air pollution control system have now been fixed, Leber said last Monday.

Oven bypasses have been reduced from 30 hours in the second quarter of 1999 to under two hours in the first quarter this year, he said. Fixing the computer glitches and switching to the new bake oven has reduced overall emissions of particulates and sulfur dioxide by 65 percent, Leber said.

SCAPCA inspectors haven’t been called out to the bake oven this year, Skelton said. “Things have improved,” he said.

Meanwhile, the Moors family isn’t sure who is telling them the truth.

In February, a glossy flier produced by the United Steelworkers of America arrived at their home. It warned of possible long-term health hazards from the plant.

A month later, the family got a letter from Kaiser blasting the Steelworkers for stirring up fears.

“We want you to know that the environmental performance of Kaiser’s Mead plant today is equal to or better than it was in 1998,” the letter said.

Mead’s neighbors have nothing to fear, Leber said.

“We’ve been monitoring for 25 years. Mead is well within the state ambient air standards” that protect vegetation and people, he said.

That is backed up by a recent state review of the smelter’s fluoride emissions from 1992 to 1998. Kaiser never went beyond one-third of the plant’s 24-hour ambient air standard at monitors in north and northeast Spokane County, Ecology said.

Despite that good six-year record north of the smelter, some trends to the south worried regulators, who ordered stepped-up monitoring in April 1999.

That’s because Kaiser exceeded the 24-hour ambient air standard for fluoride twice, the seven-day standard four times and the 30-day standard once at a monitor on Kaiser property one mile south of the plant in 1998.

“Ecology has not seen levels this high in recent history. At the same time the Nord station was vandalized beyond repair and produced no ambient fluoride readings after April 1998,” Ecology’s order says.

The Nord air monitor at East Farwell and North Crestline was burned twice by vandals, Leber said.

All the Kaiser monitors have been operating since March 1, Leber said. They will run until Oct. 31, the length of Spokane’s growing season, to monitor effects on vegetation.

The greatest impact of the Mead smelter’s hydrogen fluoride cloud is on the Mead Royale trailer parks northeast of the smelter, according to a Kaiser consultant.

Hydrogen fluoride is a colorless gas that can irritate the lungs and cause coughing and congestion. It dissolves in water to form hydrofluoric acid.

It can also harm plants, and it concentrates in cow’s milk after the cows eat grass, according to the Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Control.

Damage to trees and shrubs in the Mead area is much less now than it was from 1950 through the 1970s, largely due to improved pollution controls at the smelter, said Cornell University plant expert Leonard Weinstein, a consultant for Kaiser.

Weinstein and a colleague annually look near the smelter for damage to gladiolus plants, flowers that are especially sensitive to hydrogen fluoride.

They also check out plants on the Whitworth College campus and keep track of injury to Scotch and ponderosa pines on Hawthorne Road, their report says.

“No injury from these pollutants” was seen in 1999, according to their most recent survey.

Last June, Mead Royale resident Hudlene Brown called the newspaper to complain about nighttime smells she suspected were coming from Kaiser’s site.

“Two weeks after I moved here, I started having nosebleeds. I’ve also developed a chronic cough. There’s an awful smell in the air at night,” she said.

Bill and Charlotte Donahue also complained last June about ”strong gases” coming from the direction of the smelter, Ecology complaint files show. They live 1.5 miles east of the plant on North Cheyenne Road.

“It came in at night. It smelled like poison gas. It was hard to breathe,” Charlotte Donahue said.

Smelter emissions weren’t unusually high that month, but there was a spike in bypasses at the carbon bake facility in June, Kaiser reports to Ecology show.

While some industrial emissions may be underreported, aluminum smelters are heavily monitored, Leber said. The new federal smelter standards will require continuous monitoring of the potline roofs for the first time, he added.

Kaiser is committed to upgrading the old Mead smelter and is facing up to its environmental legacies in Spokane and the Northwest, Forsyth said.

“We’ve got to redo Mead so it has a long-term future. We think we can be environmentally responsible and be very competitive, even with the age of these assets.”

This sidebar appeared with the story: PART TWO

Coming Saturday Leaking chemicals from Superfund site at Kaiser’s Mead property surface in gushing springs.

Graphic: Kaiser cuts hydrogen fluoride releases