Community will get representative for CFAC cleanup

The community will get a third set of eyes and ears on the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. Superfund cleanup. After two meetings with city leaders and community members last week, they agreed to go ahead with hiring a community representative under the EPA’s National Technical Assistance Services for Communities (TASC) program.

The program provides independent assistance through an EPA contract to help communities better understand the science, regulations and policies of environmental issues and EPA actions.

It could prove especially beneficial as the CFAC Superfund will enter the next phase of determining a cleanup in the next few months.

The TASC representative won’t likely be a local person, but will have expertise in technical documents and will act as a “another voice in the process,” according to Al Basile, a public affairs officer with the EPA.

The EPA plans on releasing its Proposed Action this spring, but officials said they couldn’t provide a date for the release at this point. The Proposed Action is the next step in the Superfund Process and is the EPA’s first draft on how to best clean up the site, which has high levels of cyanide and fluoride in the groundwater.

Getting a third party in place in the coming weeks could prove very beneficial to the community, as that person is typically a scientist with a background in the Superfund cleanup process, noted Alison Frost of Skeo. Skeo holds the federal contract for the EPA’s Technical Assistance Needs Assessment program.

The city considered another third-party program called the Technical Assistance Grant Program, but that requires forming a non-profit to oversee the program. The community would also have to come up with a 20% match.

The one advantage is the community hires the representative under TAG.

Under National Technical Assistance Services for Communities program, there’s no cost to the community, but the EPA hires the community representative.

Once the Proposed Action is released, the community will have 60 days to comment on it. Once the comment period is over, the EPA will release a Record of Decision, hopefully by the end of the year.

Project manager Matt Dorrington said the EPA will then enter into consent decree negotiations with current owner Glencore and ARCO, the previous owners.

Under a federal court order, ARCO was ordered to pay 35% of the cleanup costs, while Glencore, the parent company to CFAC, was order to pay 65%.

ARCO is owned by British Petroleum.

The consent decree can take months, even years, to negotiate. Cleanup of any sort comes with a hefty price tag.

A feasibility study completed by CFAC in June 2021 looked at several alternatives and scored a slurry containment wall combined with bolstering existing landfills as the best alternative for dealing with contamination at the Superfund site.

Test wells near the west landfill and adjacent ponds show levels of cyanide and fluoride significantly higher than the safe drinking water level.

For example, the safe drinking water level for cyanide in water as set by the EPA is 200 parts per billion. Test wells just downstream from the west landfill show contamination of 5,000 parts per billion.

The feasibility study suggested the best way to clean up the site would be to keep the waste in place and create a “slurry wall” around it to keep the contaminants from leaching out.

A full containment slurry wall has a cost of about $50 million, according to the feasibility study. It would also require longterm monitoring and testing.

Treating wastewater onsite would not be unique to the CFAC property.

The former Kaiser Smelter in Mead, Washington near Spokane, currently has a groundwater treatment system in place that pumps out the contaminated water to a wetland where it’s both biologically and physically treated for cyanide and fluoride and then pumped back into the aquifer.

Kaiser, too, is a Superfund site.