Kaiser OKs ‘minimum’ cleanup
Bankrupt Kaiser Aluminum & Chemical Co. has agreed to spend $20 million to clean up pollution from the defunct Mead smelter, about a fifth of what the state says is needed to thoroughly deal with contamination that has spread to the Little Spokane River and Spokane-Rathdrum Prairie Aquifer.
The proposed legal settlement still must go through a formal public review and be approved by a U.S. bankruptcy court judge in Delaware. A thorough cleanup, including digging up all the contaminated soil, would have cost $100 million, according to the Washington Department of Ecology.
“Although this settlement does not allow for a complete cleanup, we feel it gives us the minimum resources to protect the public and prevent the contamination from spreading further,” said Carol Kraege, manager of Ecology’s industrial section in Olympia.
The settlement represents a “fair, responsible and appropriate” approach to Mead cleanup and is another example of progress Kaiser is making to address its legal liabilities as the company moves forward in its Chapter 11 bankruptcy reorganization, Kaiser spokesman Scott Lamb said in a prepared statement.
The settlement calls for transferring a 50-acre parcel of polluted land at the smelter site into a trust that will oversee cleanup. Kaiser will finance the trust with $2.25 million in cash and an $18 million insurance policy that will pay for remedial action. The Little Spokane River will be tested for ongoing pollution and a large, capped toxic waste pile will be monitored for at least 252 years.
Commercial Development Co. of St. Louis bid $7.4 million for the smelter this spring and plans to use a part of it to manufacture anodes. Kaiser has also been selling parcels of the 1,200-acre Mead site to real estate developers.
Cyanide and fluoride leaching from a 120,000-ton pile of spent potliners buried on Kaiser’s property have contaminated groundwater for decades. Chemicals from the potliners – carbon liners that protect the steel shells of the pots where molten aluminum is made – were first discovered in neighbors’ wells along the Little Spokane River in 1978, about a half-mile to the northwest of the smelter.
Because of the groundwater pollution, Kaiser’s Mead property became one of Spokane’s eight Superfund sites in 1983. Kaiser’s chemicals have contaminated portions of the aquifer and the Little Spokane River, according to a January 2000 Ecology cleanup order to Kaiser.
“Free” cyanide in the plume of groundwater from Mead 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.
From 1942 to 1978, the spent potliners were disposed of in the northwestern corner of the Mead site. Kaiser bought the smelter in 1946. In the 1970s, Kaiser also hauled in spent potliners from Tacoma. In 1990, the company began shipping the potliners to a hazardous waste landfill in Arlington, Ore.
The potliner waste has been consolidated into one pile and covered with a double-lined cap.
Ecology had been working with Kaiser on a cleanup plan before the company declared Chapter 11 bankruptcy in February 2002, citing $3.1 billion in debts and liabilities. Last September, Kaiser agreed on a separate $24.5 million settlement involving additional Superfund clean- up claims at 66 sites, including the Spokane Junkyard in Hillyard and Commencement Bay in Tacoma.
The public has until Sept. 10 to review the proposed consent decree. Ecology also will accept public comments at a hearing on Thursday, Sept. 2, at 6:30 p.m. at the Spokane Community College Lair Auditorium, Building No. 6, 1810 N. Green St.