Idaho site makes bad air list
BOISE – The health risk from industrial air pollution in southeastern Idaho’s Caribou County is the 13th highest in the country, compared with other counties, according to an Associated Press analysis of a government research database.
The analysis also found that people living in the area of Soda Springs in Caribou County have a “health risk score” that is nearly 109 times higher than the national average for other neighborhood tracts included in the 2000 U.S. census. The Soda Springs census tract ranks 283rd out of the nation’s 65,443 census tracts for the highest risk industrial air pollution in the country.
Along with three census tracts in neighboring Bannock County, the four areas of southeastern Idaho are among the top 5 percent nationally with the highest health risk scores, according to the AP’s analysis of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s Risk Screening Environmental Indicators Project database, a little-known government research project that assigns numerical scores to neighborhoods where factory-generated air pollution is suspected of posing the greatest health danger.
According to state and federal regulators, Caribou County’s two largest producers of toxic air emissions are also its two largest employers: P4 Production’s Soda Springs Plant, a joint venture between Monsanto Chemical Co. and Solutia Inc.; and Agrium’s Nu-West Industries Conda Phosphate Operations north of Soda Springs.
“If Caribou County is ranked the 13th worst, then our country is doing pretty good,” Agrium Conda general manager Charlie Ross said Tuesday. “I live here. We comply with all the regulations. I’m very proud of what we do here.”
The AP analysis used factory air emissions data from 2000 to compare it with the neighborhoods counted in the 2000 census. In 2001, Ross said, Agrium spent $90 million to upgrade the Conda plant, including improving its pollution control technology to reduce harmful emissions.
The latest Toxic Release Inventory of industrial air pollution sources published in May by the EPA shows the Conda plant, which mines and manufactures phosphate for fertilizer, emitted 54,000 pounds of pollutants into the air from its smokestacks in 2004, and another 11,000 pounds of toxins into the air from so-called “fugitive” sources at the facility besides the stacks. Ammonia and sulfuric acid comprised the most emissions from the Conda plant and mine, which has approximately 300 employees.
The P4 Soda Springs plant, which mines phosphate ore and processes it into liquid elemental phosphorus for a variety of industrial uses, last year released 137,000 pounds of toxic emissions into the air from the plant’s smokestacks and 99,800 pounds from fugitive sources, according to the EPA inventory. The largest emissions were of hydrogen fluoride, zinc, chromium and carbonyl sulfide.
“We’ve put in quite a few projects for reducing air pollution, most recently a unit that has reduced SO2 (sulfur dioxide) emissions by 90 percent this year,” said Bruce Pallante, manager of the P4 plant, which employs about 400 workers. “We’re constantly trying to improve reducing the fugitives, the windblown stuff on slag piles.”
Mike Dubois, air toxics analyst for the Idaho Department of Environmental Quality, said the two Caribou County plants are probably among the state’s top 10 producers of airborne pollutants.
“Potlatch (Corp.) in northern Idaho is probably at the top of the list, and like these, it is a large employer in a rural area,” said Dubois.
Nez Perce County, where Potlatch’s wood products and paperboard manufacturing plant is located, has a health risk score that is 2.2 times higher than the average for other counties in the U.S., according to the AP analysis. Other Idaho counties that had health risk scores at least twice as high as the national average include Bannock (17.3 times higher); Power (4.1); Canyon (3.9); Kootenai (2.4); Bear Lake (2.2); Shoshone (2.1); Bingham (2.1); and Ada (1.8).