Kaiser Pollution Continues To Pour Into Little Spokane Cyanide Levels Have Doubled, Recent State Samples Show

Most workers try to leave job worries behind when they go home for the day. Dan Lake can’t.

After 25 years at Kaiser’s Mead smelter, the locked-out Steelworker waits for an end to the bitter, 19-month labor dispute.

In a twist of irony, Lake lives on a lush green bend of the Little Spokane River, where Kaiser’s pollution problems have followed him home.

The five springs that gush from his land into the Little Spokane contain cyanide and fluoride coming from a 120,000-ton mountain of spent potliners on Kaiser’s Mead Works property 2.5 miles away.

The potliners are discards from decades of aluminum manufacturing at the smelter. Chemicals from the potliners - carbon liners that protect the steel shells of the pots where molten aluminum is made - were first detected in neighbors’ drinking water wells in 1978.

Because of the ground water pollution, Kaiser’s Mead property became one of Spokane’s eight Superfund sites in 1983.

“I never realized Kaiser had done so much damage to the environment until I bought this place,” Lake said.

He isn’t alone in his worries. Springs on a neighbor’s land are also being tested.

Kaiser’s leaking chemicals “have contaminated a portion of the Spokane-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer and the Little Spokane River,” says a Jan. 10, 2000, Washington Department of Ecology cleanup order to Kaiser.

Kaiser will continue its efforts to clean up the pollution, said Bernard P. “Bud” Leber, Kaiser’s Northwest environmental affairs manager.

“We’ve done everything Ecology has asked us to do over the last 23 years,” he said.

The company has already spent more than $3 million on the potliner pile, Leber said.

The contamination is traveling in an 800 to 1,500-foot underground plume from Kaiser property to the Little Spokane, the state cleanup order says.

The Van Gelder Springs on Lake’s three-acre property are well-known among local aquifer experts. Named after the land’s previous owners, the springs are the point where the rapid aquifer carrying the pollutants from Kaiser becomes surface water.

The springs gush from the hill at several places on Lake’s land at an exuberant 60 gallons a minute.

One spring forms a pond on a hill that Lake has terraced and landscaped. It’s a spot where Buster, his friendly Pomeranian, likes to stretch out on the grass.

Lake knew about the contamination when he bought the property in 1997. He hasn’t been drinking the water. Total cyanide in the springs measured 938 parts per billion that year, tests show.

“I was told it had stabilized. But that changed last year,” when cyanide levels in samples taken by Ecology more than doubled, Lake said.

Alarmed, Lake wrote Ecology in November. A month later, Ecology wrote to Kaiser, telling the company to halt the contamination.

Two springs near the Little Spokane, one of them on Lake’s land, “show levels of cyanide that have increased to mid-80s ranges,” Ecology’s Paul Skyllingstad said in the Dec. 8 letter.

The contamination is approaching the current 200 parts per billion limit for free cyanide in drinking water, Skyllingstad said.

“Free” cyanide is the primary health concern because it is toxic in the human body, while the rest of the cyanide compounds in the aquifer water remain inert at low levels, Ecology reports say.

In December, free cyanide in Lake’s pond measured 57 ppb and the spring under his swimming pool tested at 33 ppb. The state and Kaiser will test the springs again on Monday, Skyllingstad said.

In a September 1999 letter to Ecology, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency described the potliner problem at Mead as a Superfund “teenager” - one of only a handful of sites in the country that are still not cleaned up despite being on the list for 17 years.

“The site is old,” said Ann Williamson, a manager in EPA’s environmental cleanup office in Seattle. “We sent the teenager letter to Ecology to put them on notice. They aren’t controlling the contamination to the Little Spokane River,” she said.

The teenager letter was prompted by unhappiness with EPA progress in Congress, Leber said.

“EPA went to Congress for more money to clean up Superfund sites, and Congress said you haven’t finished the first list from 1980 yet. Quite frankly, they got embarrassed,” Leber said.

In January, Ecology formally ordered Kaiser to accelerate the cleanup.

From 1942 to 1978, spent potliners were disposed of in the northwestern section of the 1,200-acre Mead site. Kaiser bought the smelter in 1946. In the ‘70s, Kaiser also hauled in spent potliners from Tacoma.

Cyanide and fluoride from the liners were first detected in 1978 in private drinking water wells about a half-mile to the northwest.

Kaiser provided an alternate water supply to people in the area with private wells. They were later hooked up to a municipal water system.

Kaiser then discontinued the practices of pot soaking and discharging effluent to sewage ponds. For the next decade, the company stored potliners in a building.

In 1990, Kaiser began shipping the spent potliners to a hazardous waste landfill in Arlington, Ore.

Now, the company estimates it will cost about $18.3 million to halt the remaining pollution.

Kaiser wants to consolidate the potliners, cover the pile with a double-lined synthetic cap, and pump and treat the contaminated ground water.

That would eventually clean up 99 percent of the cyanide and fluoride contamination, Kaiser’s engineering consultants say.

At a meeting last fall on the cleanup, citizens asked why the state doesn’t require Kaiser to simply haul all the old potliners to a hazardous waste dump.

That would cost up to $527.4 million, which Kaiser says is prohibitive, and won’t stop the chemicals that have already leaked into the soil.

A 1980 ecological study of the Little Spokane prepared for Kaiser by two University of Michigan toxicologists and updated in 1995 showed no adverse impacts on fish in the Little Spokane - and by inference, no human health hazards.

But as Kaiser proposes its latest cleanup plan, Lake worries.

He’s had to put down two older pets, a cat and a dog, who stopped eating and developed stomach tumors. They often drank from the springs, as does Buster, Lake said.

“I am really concerned about the wild animals that inhabit this area. They all drink from these springs, especially in the winter as the temperature stays at 52 degrees year round,” he said in his letter to Ecology last November.

Wildlife includes deer, osprey, wild turkeys, pheasants, grouse and bald eagles. A moose slept on his land for four days last winter.

“It’s beautiful here in the winter. The aquifer steams, and the animals come through and drink the water. I just hope they can clean it up,” he said.

This sidebar appeared with the story: PUBLIC MEETING Building closure

The Washington Department of Ecology will hold a public meeting Tuesday on Kaiser’s plans to close a building where spent potliners were stored at the Mead Works in the 1980s. The meeting is at 6:30 p.m. at Spokane Community College in Building No. 6, the Lair Auditorium.