Former employee writes tell-all book on CFAC's history

A former Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. electrical planner has published a comprehensive online history of the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. plant. From the geology, chemistry, and history of Earth’s aluminum, to the aluminum boom from the 1960s to the 1990s, Richard Hanners’ history tells the whole story, including the rise and fall of Anaconda Aluminum Co. and the Atlantic Richfield Co. ownership of the facility.

He also looks ahead to the future – what can be done now in terms of cleanup at CFAC.

Hanners, who now lives in Absarokee, received a history degree from the University of Montana in 1991. He started working for a historical research company in Missoula, building a computer database with information about the Butte Anaconda site. After the job was done about three or four years later, he knew he wanted to do something similar.

“I didn’t want to do something everybody else was doing – the history of Glacier National Park, the history of cowboys and Indians,” he said.

When he moved to the Flathead, he was hired as the electrical planner at Columbia Falls Aluminum Co.

He then started a historical database that today spans the entire history of aluminum in the Pacific Northwest and has over 5,000 documents, some of which are hundreds of pages long. The oldest document in Hanners’ database is from January 1856.

The newest document is last month’s Hungry Horse News article about a Technical Assistance Grant for the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. Superfund site.

When Hanners was hospitalized about a year ago, he started turning the data into a narrative.

In a recent interview about his narrative, he spoke of the West Coast energy crisis. There used to be 10 aluminum plants in the Pacific Northwest. But when federal deregulation was passed in the 1990s, “that’s when power disappeared in Montana.”

California implemented a “Byzantine system” that didn’t work. Aluminum plants couldn’t operate in the Northwest unless electricity sold for $35 per megawatt-hour. During the electricity crisis in the early 2000s, prices went as high as $2,000 per megawatt-hour. CFAC shut down in January 2001.

The Bonneville Power Administration provided power to companies who could pay for it, and these companies could then sell the power on the open market, Hanners said.

“Glencore made a killing,” he noted.

After the crisis, eight of the 10 Northwest aluminum plants were demolished.

But in 1998, before CFAC was closed, another problem was brewing. Owners Brack Duker and Jerome Broussard, who bought the plant in 1985, had forced workers to take pay cuts in exchange for profit sharing.

“The workers were unhappy. Those guys owned the plant and stole money from the workers,” Hanners explained.

Profits were so high that the workers were making huge bonus checks, so Duker and Broussard starting keeping more and more of the profits until workers weren’t getting any.

The issue was resolved with a $100 million lawsuit in 1998. Glencore bought CFAC in 1999.

And the history of Glencore? It evolved from notorious international trader Marc Rich’s company, Hanners said.

Hanners also unearthed a “smoking-gun letter” in Glacier National Park’s records. He’d known the standard story about air pollution from the company. But this letter, written by Glacier’s superintendent in 1980, told a different story.

At the time, acclaimed pollution expert and University of Montana professor Clancy Gordon was vocal about pollution.

His protege, Clinton Carlson, was writing his dissertation on air pollution. Meanwhile, Glacier National Park and the Forest Service were suing Anaconda for polluting the air.

The smoking-gun document was a confidential letter in which the Park superintendent wrote that high-ranking Park and Forest Service officials met with Department of Justice attorneys. They were told that the lawsuit was a loser – for two reasons.

One reason was Clancy Gordon. The professor tended to use flowery language when speaking publicly, and had been caught allegedly lying on the stand in another case, so he wouldn’t be allowed to testify for the Park.

The other reason was that Carlson’s dissertation had been torn apart by Anaconda’s expert witness, a Virginia professor. Carlson had been doing cutting-edge research, using infrared photos from planes to observe the effects of pollution on trees.

The lawsuit was dropped on the conditions that Anaconda had to institute new pollution control starting in 1980, and that its new owner, ARCO, would trade Teakettle Mountain land for the Forest Service’s Coal Creek land.

Gordon and the Forest Service also had to start relying on Anaconda’s scientists to report air pollution data. ARCO was willing to make the deals in order to complete their buyout of Anaconda, which had begun in 1978.

But within a couple years, ARCO Metals shut everything down. By 1985, CFAC was the only plant it owned left, and Duker and Broussard bought it for $1.

They sold it to Glencore for $50 million – but made more money running it than selling it, Hanners said.

The failure of the pollution lawsuit proves that “big companies had no trouble proving people wrong,” he noted.

Large aluminum companies had enough money to back scientists at the Boyce Thompson Institute. These scientists, like the professor who opposed Carlson’s stellar dissertation, aren’t independent, Hanners asserted, but are willing to side with big business.

The deposition of Carlson by Anaconda’s attorney was 800 pages long.

“They put him to the ropes,” Hanners said.

But as far as most of Hanners’ history goes, “a lot of it is just a retelling,” he said.

“You end up assembling a lot of little facts that eventually tell a story. There’s a lot of human interest in this,” he added.

For example, when Gordon visited town to speak in the 1970s, less than a quarter of residents supported him.

“Most people in Columbia Falls didn’t want to hurt the company because they depended on it for jobs,” Hanners said.

Despite safety issues with working at an aluminum plant, “this plant was different from other aluminum plants. Everybody there wanted to know how to do their job and do it right. The equipment was just the wrong equipment. It was like they ran a Model T like a racecar.”

And as for the current Superfund process, Hanners thinks there’s one big problem to fix.

“Landfills are leaking into the groundwater. If they dug out the landfills and hauled it away, that place would be OK,” he said. “It got more political than it ever needed to be.”

Anyone interested in reading more of Hanners’ narrative or documents can visit http://montana-aluminum.com. Chapters are organized by topic and timeline, making it easy to search. Hanners also has a Facebook page called “From Superstar to Superfund” with lots of photos.