Editorial
EPA on right track at Lake Roosevelt

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Three cheers for an exasperated Environmental Protection Agency, which has lost patience with a Canadian mining and smelting company that polluted Lake Roosevelt for generations.

After a year of failed negotiations, and plenty of corporate stalling before that, the EPA has ordered Teck Cominco Metals Ltd. to study a century of contamination on the upper Columbia River.

The company has 30 days to say what it will do; otherwise, the EPA will do the work, and bill Cominco.

How an order to a firm located 13 miles across the border in Trail, B.C., can be enforced is not clear, but regional EPA officials, in consultation with the U.S. Justice Department, are confident they are on the right path.

On this side of the border, the Superfund process is a familiar one, with mixed results but appropriate in this setting. Participants pay for studies to determine the nature and extent of contamination, and assess the risks to people and habitat. The feasibility of cleanup and mitigation is also surveyed, and the data is used to make decisions.

Cominco has volunteered to pay for a study, but nothing that satisfies the scientific rigor EPA expects. The regulatory agency understandably wants results that will not be in doubt.

At present, the state Health Division has a fish advisory in place warning children and pregnant women about high mercury levels in walleyes taken from Lake Roosevelt. The state is worried about the contamination, and wants better assessments done, with no preference whether it's by Cominco or the EPA.

Nothing about this has been easy. EPA tried for two years to get background samples from above the Trail, B.C., smelter and was denied permission.

Superfund laws do include sweeping liability considerations, but U.S. companies typically preserve liability defenses as they agree to go forward with studies.

Cominco is evading a responsibility it knows it has. Here is a company that buys ore from the United States, has a prime market for its metals in the U.S. and used an American river as an industrial sewer.

People living around Lake Roosevelt deserve better. More power to the EPA for trying to hold Cominco accountable.

Copyright © 2003 The Seattle Times Company