Thoughts on CFAC
Regarding the EPA’s probable ‘solution’ to the contamination of the CFAC site, I share the angst expressed in Chris Peterson’s “Through the lens” columns July 5th and Aug. 30th. I’d hoped that spectacular property, cleansed for re-development, would become a reborn asset to the city and valley. The nearly decade-long cleanup process has been a hopeful journey of local participation, discovery, and accountability.
Now, we seem headed toward the contaminated site being a 500-acre hazard well beyond the foreseeable future.
The offered knowledge of the many locals who labored there seems mostly ignored. It’s very disappointing. Barring a resurrection of concern and passion, other futures are steadily disappearing.
This is what happens when government is constrained by corporate power.
There’s a strategy here. If you’re a polluting industry, then the weaker the government, the better off you are. Important agencies that enforce good laws are deliberately underfunded by the leaders that corporate money puts and keeps in office. The agencies are fiscally shackled and then criticized for being inefficient and ineffective; a circular argument that’s used to further defund them.
The EPA’s fair and laborious process results in a wimpish, sort of, better-than-nothing ‘solution’. The stinky can gets kicked way down the road, but it’s still a stinky can. Politicians addicted to corporate cash don’t serve us well.
No sample drilling has really quantified the buried messes. The EPA does not know exactly how much of exactly what is buried, or in how many places. The toxic sludge that’s decomposing beneath the meadows and trees will continue to decay and to leach.
Gravity takes no holiday; it will draw the poisons ever downward. Eventually they will ooze beneath the proposed experimental ‘slurry walls’ and show up in water samples from the river… and the lake. Trying to ‘wall off’ old landfills without containment below them is folly and destined for failure.
The long EPA process inevitably wears people down. The city, admirable for holding Glencore to task, and for standing strong in 2015 against then-freshman Rep. Zinke’s memorable anti-EPA “just trust Glencore” scold has lost its mojo, attentive to other matters. This water-rich county has resolutely ignored the whole problem. The politically-weakened DEQ, charged with securing our state’s “clean and healthful environment,” as well as the Lakers, the downstream Tribes and states… are all pretty quiet.
Everybody’s tired of the CFAC problem. Enough of “the good fight”; move on, let’s focus on something else. Of all the actors in this story, only Sen. Tester in his strong cautionary May letter to the EPA stays attentive, for C-Falls and other Montana Superfund sites.
Instead of full remediation my hometown Columbia Falls will have a scab. One of the Columbia River’s pristine headwaters will have a buried, out-of-sight, out-of-mind, but silently festering sore. If you’ve been to a concert at the Kettlehouse amphitheater on the Clark Fork, you’ve seen what economic vitality can come out of an environmental mess. Bonner and Milltown are being rebirthed out of their similar historically prosperous but naïvely short-sighted industrial pasts. But here, hundreds of CFAC acres will be a permanently restricted brown-water hazard zone; marked with No Trespassing/Danger-Keep Out! warning signs. Who would want it to rebirth that?
Yes, hauling the mess away is impractical; 70,000 truckloads of dump-gunk spewing petro-exhaust and toxic dust all the way to Eastern Oregon is a cure worse than the disease. An on-site permanent (“waste in place”) repository… contained above an impermeable 500-year liner is a better and pragmatic idea. Maybe “only” 40 or 50 acres would be impaired instead of many hundreds. Locate and excavate ALL the dumps and rebury the noxious waste in an impermeable SEALED pan in the safest possible spot as far from the river, groundwater and town as practical. Optimistically, future scientists may find a way to extract and recycle the mix.
This was and still is the last chance to have the mega-corporations that profited from their messes clean them up. If we settle for an expeditious but unlikely “solution” as looms now, then within a couple of generations the seeping poisons will trigger rediscovery of a “forgotten” problem. But by then public money will be the only source of a better fix. Money that future Montana generations won’t want and shouldn’t have to pay.
Bill Dakin
Bigfork