CFAC pollution perspective
In response to the Hungry Horse News’ May 28 article on a draft Natural Resources Damage Assessment Plan for the former Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. plant, here is some more information about damages to government land caused by the aluminum plant outside Columbia Falls.
After about nine years of local lawsuits and investigations by government and academic scientists, the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the U.S. Department of the Interior filed a joint lawsuit against the Anaconda Aluminum Co. in U.S. District Court in Missoula on Nov. 3, 1978, claiming damages to land, trees and animals in Flathead National Forest and Glacier National Park. During this time, AAC was completing the smelter plant’s $45 million (1980 money) multi-year conversion to the Japanese Sumitomo pot design and Alcoa’s Method 398 dry scrubber system, which successfully reduced fluoride emissions from as high as 10,000 pounds per day in 1969 to about 200 pounds per day in the early 1980s.
Important damage investigations for the plaintiffs were carried out by plant pathologists Clancy Gordon, at the University of Montana, and Clint Carlson, at the Forest Service in Missoula, and by personnel at Glacier Park. AAC received professional assistance from the Boyce Thompson Institute, an entomologist and a plant pathologist from the University of Utah and a veterinarian from Washington State University, among others. AAC also hired some very tough and very sophisticated attorneys - Carlson’s deposition ran to nearly 900 pages and in places required advanced knowledge of statistical mathematics, and Gordon’s extremist and expletive-strewn testimony in other aluminum plant lawsuits was used to discredit his work.
The federal lawsuit brought against the Anaconda Aluminum Co. came to a sudden end in 1980, but the circumstances behind the settlement were never reported in the media. Conventional wisdom was that the government had overwhelming evidence proving that fluoride emissions from the aluminum plant in Columbia Falls had damaged Forest Service trees, and that AAC had managed to comply with state fluoride emission standards by spending millions on new reduction cells and primary pollution control equipment. This version assumed that the Anaconda Company had given up defending its case, which didn’t align with the giant mining company’s historical legacy.
Much of the back story of the federal settlement was revealed in a “nonsecurity confidential” contemporaneous report that Glacier Park Superintendent Phillip Iversen wrote about a Feb. 5, 1980 meeting in Kalispell with 10 Forest Service officials and U.S. Attorney Ezra Rosenberg. “Discussion around the table indicated that the U.S. Attorney’s Office feels the government case is a loser,” Iversen stated in his report.
Rosenberg was concerned about upcoming testimony by plant pathologist John M. Skelly, at the Virginia Polytechnical Institute’s Department of Plant Pathology and Physiology, which might discredit Carlson’s work. “Anaconda is also aware that Dr. Clancy Gordon, who did some of the research for the Environmental Protection Agency in Glacier National Park, was recently caught in an outright lie in court testimony,” Iversen reported. “The U.S. Attorney said he has never encountered a case where the judge gave such a serious reprimand to an expert witness. Dr. Gordon would probably be a government witness and his credibility has been seriously damaged. His bias has overcome logical arguments.”
The federal lawsuit was settled in August 1980 when terms were reached for a land exchange. The land exchange was based on the estimated value of the lands and not on an acre-for-acre basis. Lands acquired from the Anaconda Company were required to have wildlife, recreation and timber production values. Forest Service lands on Teakettle Mountain that were allegedly damaged by fluoride emissions from the aluminum plant were swapped for 3,300 to 4,000 acres of Anaconda Company-owned timberland located up the North Fork of the Flathead River, in the Coal Creek drainage. The Anaconda Company already owned much of the western side of Teakettle Mountain, but the land exchange consolidated nearby holdings on the west, southwest and southern slopes of the mountain. The federal lawsuit was dismissed with prejudice on Aug. 1, 1980.
This story is told in my online history project, at montana-aluminum.com, see Part V: The Pollution Problem, Chapters 38 and 39.
Richard Hanners
John Day, Oregon