EPA to begin CFAC investigation

The Environmental Protection Agency assured Sen. Jon Tester in a March 26 letter that the federal agency will conduct a Superfund site assessment of the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. smelter site.

A recent political groundswell has changed from promoting a restart of the closed plant to a call for a clean-up as a way to create jobs and stimulate local economic development.

In his letter to Tester, EPA Region 8 acting regional administrator Howard Cantor said a preliminary assessment was conducted at the CFAC site in 1986 and a site inspection took place in 1988, but more work is needed.

“Due to the smelter’s complexity and its location, it is difficult to predict how long our site investigation activities might take,” Cantor said. “But it will be a priority for the EPA, and we anticipate completing our assessment within one year, depending on available resources.”

The timing of the earlier EPA site work is significant. The future of the smelter was bleak in the early 1980s. Atlantic Richfield, which had bought The Anaconda Co., began selling off its metals division by 1983, including its aluminum plants.

Brack Duker, an ARCO vice president handling the sale of these assets, became interested in acquiring the ARCO smelter in Columbia Falls. He was joined by Jerome Broussard in June 1985, and together they formed Montana Aluminum Investors Corp., which later became CFAC.

Duker and Broussard found support in Gov. Ted Schwinden and the Montana Legislature. They secured an $8 million loan from the Montana Board of Investments for working capital and acquired the smelter plant from ARCO for one dollar in September 1985.

During this time, EPA’s Superfund list included several aluminum smelters with spent potliner waste dumps where cyanide threatened groundwater. A six-acre dump at Kaiser’s Mead smelter in Spokane, Wash., was one of them. But it wasn’t until 1985 that the Montana Legislature passed a bill establishing a fund to clean up major industrial sites as state Superfund projects.

On April 19, 1984, Sara Weinstock, at the Montana Department of Health and Environmental Sciences, the predecessor of the today’s Department of Environmental Quality, wrote to Jim Dunn, at the Montana EPA office in Helena, commenting on the EPA’s 1984 preliminary assessment and site history report.

“Based on our review of the available data, we have concluded that EPA should take no further action at this time,” Weinstock wrote.

The EPA report noted that solvents, likely used for vehicle and mechanical maintenance, had been stored in color-coded drums and hauled off to an approved disposal site. Most of the plant’s solid waste came from aluminum processing — spent potliner, basement sweepings and dust from air pollution control equipment. These were deposited in an “engineered landfill.”

A 307-page draft analytical results report on the CFAC site was completed for the EPA in November 1988 by Ecology and Environment Inc., of Denver. The report describes the area’s geology and results of sampling conducted in June 1988.

The report noted that with 600 reduction pots and two being replaced each week, the plant generated about 80 tons of waste carbon every week. Ken Reich, CFAC’s environmental coordinator, told the EPA the cyanide content in each pot was about 1 percent. Reich also said fluoride compounds could be found in about 17 percent of the plant’s waste.

Waste products that stayed on site could be found in landfills, percolation ponds and leachate ponds. Several older landfills, where waste solvents may have been dumped, were capped and revegetated in fall 1980, and a new sanitary landfill was built that was lined with clay.

Prior to 1978, spent cathodes were soaked in water to remove carbon, and waste effluent was piped to a pond holding boiler blowdown. Spent potliner was buried in an on-site landfill prior to 1985.

A focus of the EPA investigators in 1988 was potential impacts to Cedar Creek, which dumped into the Flathead River near Bad Rock Canyon, and the Cedar Creek Reservoir, which provided drinking water for Columbia Falls at the time.

They installed two monitoring wells and gathered soil, surface water and groundwater samples at locations near and around the landfills, ponds and the plant.

High concentrations of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons were found in plant waste but had not made their way into groundwater or the Flathead River, they reported. These compounds originate from the production and burning of anode carbon.

Cyanide had migrated to the Flathead River in small quantities and into groundwater near the landfills in more significant quantities, although the latter was decreasing. No contamination from the plant was found in the municipal water supply, they reported.

In his letter to Sen. Tester, Cantor noted that “site conditions have likely changed from 1988” and EPA will need to conduct another site assessment “using current protocols.”