At CFAC hearing, former engineer says report on cleanup disappeared

While the state and the company have endorsed a proposed cleanup plan for the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. Superfund site, the public didn’t think much of it at a public hearing last week with the Environmental Protection Agency, and a former engineer says a report that was crafted after he gave company and EPA officials a tour has gone missing. Former workers at the plant as well as general members of the public raised concerns about the proposed action, which calls for putting a slurry wall to contain waste around offending landfills and sludge ponds, while also moving contaminated soils to existing dumps and burying them on site. Groundwater near the west landfill and old wet scrubber sludge pond has very high levels of fluoride and cyanide, well above safe drinking water standards.

The idea is to put a 100-to 125-foot deep slurry wall around those two dumps to contain the water and presumably, the waste.

All told, the slurry wall alternative, including moving contaminated soil from several places at the site and putting new caps on landfills, would cost about $57 million. CFAC and its parent company, Glencore, would likely bear about 65% of the cost, while former owner the Atlantic Richfield Co. would pay 35%.

The cost split was determined by a federal court ruling in 2021.

It would take between six to 12 months to design, but could be constructed in one or two construction seasons. If timelines hold, it could be completed by the end of the 2027 construction season.

The groundwater monitoring and potential treatment would take an estimated 30 years, with a review of its effectiveness every 5 years.

But the crowd of about 35 people expressed skepticism of the plan.

Former plant engineer Nino Berube was critical on several fronts. He claimed that places on the 960-acre Superfund site were being overlooked or ignored entirely.

As an example, he claimed there was a plume of cyanide in groundwater historically that ran along the east side of Teakettle Mountain — a plume that’s not identified in the proposed action and previous studies.

He also openly wondered where the old rectifiers were buried and why the investigation was finding no mercury, since the rectifiers — which were about 100 feet long, had multiple switches, all which contain the poisonous element.

Berube said he took plant and EPA officials on a three-hour tour of the site in October 2015 when it was first listed because he knew where contaminants on the site were largely located and where they should find them. He said the tour was tape recorded. He claimed the subsequent report from that tour was inaccurate and eventually was lost.

Two weeks after the tour they wanted him to sign the document, but it had a disclaimer that said it was protected by attorney-client privilege — in other words, not open to public scrutiny.

Berube refused to sign it.

He recently asked for the document from John Stroiazzo, the site manager for CFAC.

“I went to pick it up today and they can’t find it, surprise, surprise,” he said.

Of the 7,000 pages of study, he found it striking that they couldn’t find the one document that really gave investigators a good start on the project.

In short, he claimed that the investigation and subsequent study were done by people unqualified for the job.

Former plant purchasing manager and city councilman Mike Shepard brought up similar concerns.

“The things that’s bothered me from day one … is no one knows what is in what dumps where,” he said.

In the middle of the night, things would get disposed of, he said.

He also said more testing should have been done in Columbia Falls proper. His said his late wife worked in the dirt around their home for years. She died of a rare breast cancer.

Cancer rates were also brought up by Heather Peacock. She noted that she was one of six families in Columbia Falls that has experienced pediatric cancer since 2011.

“Of those six children, three have passed away,” she said.

Her daughter survived.

“We’re one of the lucky families, we still have our child, if you call going through pediatric cancer lucky,” she said.

Their pediatric oncologist told them at the time of their daughter’s diagnosis in 2017 that “there’s something wrong up there.”

While she said that pediatric cancer cases at the time were not above normal rates, she noted that her child and others weren’t included at the time in the numbers.

She expressed concerns that if the slurry wall remedy were to fail, the remedial process would start all over again — a process that could take years.

Former Columbia Falls city councilman Dave Petersen spoke to the heart of the issue — community members want the waste removed entirely. They don’t want to deal with a site that has contaminants forever.

He claimed it would be better to spend additional $100 million now and have the waste removed, than to keep it there.

“If the less expensive route is taken (the waste) is still there,” he said.

In short, if the waste is hauled away, there’s no long-term problem, he argued.

As for truck traffic, Petersen noted the community is used to truck traffic in town.

The proposed action looked at hauling the waste away, but discounted the option.

It notes that it would take about 60,000 truck or train car loads to haul the estimated 1.2 million yards of waste away to an approved landfill in Oregon. The project that would take four to five years. The contamination would have to be pre-treated and digging up the soil could also expose workers to dust contaminated with cyanide or possibly cyanide gas, which is deadly.

There is also apparently little precedent for hauling waste away from defunct aluminum plants. The Hungry Horse News looked at both the defunct Martin-Marietta plant at Dalles, Oregon and the Kaiser Mead plant near Spokane, Washington.

Both cleanups at those plants consolidated the waste on site and treated the groundwater, similar to what is proposed at CFAC.

The biggest difference is the proposed use of the slurry wall at CFAC. The Dalles and Kaiser Mead do not have slurry walls.

The state also supports the proposed action at CFAC.

“We support this preferred alternative,” Dick Sloan, project manager for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality said.

One thing EPA officials did concede after the public hearing is that they would likely extend the public comment period, so people would have time to digest more information from the studies.

There’s also talk of redevelopment at CFAC property. The site’s nine landfills and the footprint of the old plant, which has been torn down, encompass a little more than 500 acres. The entire Superfund study area is about 960 acres.

But CFAC owns about 3,000 acres of contiguous lands around the old plant, much of which is forested and beautiful. The city has eyed that for possible future housing projects.

Amanda Barkley, the outgoing project manager for the EPA, said the agency is working on a land use plan for the site, which would be released to the public in the future.

Folks can watch the entire public hearing on the Hungry Horse News’s YouTube channel.

To formally comment to the EPA by email write: Missy Haniewicz at haniewicz.melissa.m@epa.gov or by standard mail to Missy Haniewicz, U.S. EPA, 1595 Wynkoop Street, Denver, Colorado, 80202.