Zinke tours CFAC, says he'd like to see state oversee actual cleanup

Montana Congressman Ryan Zinke toured the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. plant demolition on Tuesday, once again making his case to keep it off the Superfund list.

“We want it cleaned up in a thorough and expeditious way,” he said.

Zinke, a Republican, has long opposed Superfund listing of the site, claiming the bureaucracy of listing would delay the cleanup.

As it is, a study to determine the scope and breadth of contamination at the 60-year-old defunct aluminum smelter is expected to take about four years under an agreement with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the company.

Zinke would like the actual cleanup to be overseen by the state Department of Environmental Quality.

“I think the state can operate faster,” he said.

Once cleaned up, the site could be a defining piece of property for Columbia Falls, Zinke noted. His ideas ranged from a golf course community to a site that could lead another industry in the future. It has a lot going for it he noted — rail access, natural gas, power and its location at the foot of Teakettle Mountain on the banks of the Flathead River is idyllic.

He claimed that A Superfund designation would be a stigma to the community, though he noted that people here are probably split on the issue. Many folks in Columbia Falls don’t seem too worried about a Superfund designation, if it ensures a cleanup of the site. The Columbia Falls City Council recently agreed that if it takes a Superfund designation to get it cleaned up, then so be it.

That seems to be the one point that everyone agrees on, Superfund or not — get the property cleaned up right and do it as quickly as possible.

Zinke also had a long conversation with Cliff Boyd of Calbag Resources, the company tearing down the plant. To date, Boyd said the cleanup was going well, though they encountered more asbestos than they expected. Calbag is waiting on a final permit from the DEQ  on a plan to transport the spent potliner out of the plant. Spent potliner is considered a hazardous waste, containing heavy metals and asbestos.

That permit could come next month. In the meantime, a huge shearing machine is expected to arrive in about three weeks to cut down the paste plant.

Boyd said the Montana crew he’s hired have been “the best workforce I’ve had in the U.S.”

Boyd told Zinke that the talk of Superfund listing wasn’t happening when his company first signed the contract to tear the plant down. But he promised Zinke that when the plant was gone, that portion of the property would be “shovel ready” for another project.

The contamination at the site likely doesn’t come from the 40-acre plant, which is the largest building in Montana, but from age-old landfills to the north of the facility. This spring, crews from the environmental firm Roux Associates, will dig 43 new tests wells in addition to the 25 wells that already exist to determine the extent of the pollution at the site.

Once it’s cleaned up, “the sky’s the limit,” for the site, Zinke said.