Asarco cleanups in jeopardy

TACOMA — Kelly Osborne-Morris' back yard offers a stark illustration of what can happen when a corporate polluter declares bankruptcy.

A giant mound of dirt lies at the bottom of the stairs leading from her deck — an attempt to scrape away contaminants left by Asarco, the nearby copper smelter that closed in 1985.

The excavation began Tuesday of last week, Osborne-Morris said. But no one returned the next day to continue the cleanup. On Thursday her husband called from work to say he had read in a newspaper that Asarco, the company that ran the smelter, had declared bankruptcy a day earlier and suspended the cleanup.

"Right now our life is pretty much on hold because of this," said Osborne-Morris, who has banned her three children from the back yard out of fear they might get exposed to contaminants from the freshly dug dirt.

That back yard is part of a much bigger problem, according to a report released yesterday by the U.S. Government Accountability Office (GAO), a federal watchdog agency.

Bankruptcy has become an inviting haven for corporations seeking to avoid costly cleanups under federal environmental laws, meant to force polluters to pay for cleaning some of the most-contaminated sites in the country, the agency found.

Bankruptcies enable companies to shift cleanup responsibilities to subsidiaries, sheltering the larger company from liability. Bankruptcy also can leave government regulators with less money for cleanups.

Information

GAO report: http://www.gao.gov/docsearch/repandtest.html

And the federal Environmental Protection Agency has failed to aggressively use the tools it has to collect money from the companies, according to the GAO.

Asarco's legacy

Here are some of the Northwest cleanup sites for which government agencies believe Asarco is responsible. Asarco disputes its role in some of them. Costs are estimates.

Everett: A lead smelter and arsenic-extraction facility operated from 1903 to 1912. About 687 acres, including a residential site and port area, are contaminated with lead and arsenic. The state has cleaned up 47 residential yards, but more than 500 need to be inspected or cleaned or both. Asarco's tab: $78 million.

Tacoma and Ruston: Near a former smelter, Asarco has sampled soils for lead and arsenic at residences. Asarco has cleaned about 1,000 properties. More remain to be cleaned. About 35 acres offshore need to have marine sediments capped or dredged.

Hylebos Waterway, Tacoma: Asarco didn't operate here but sold contaminated smelter slag to log-sorting yards. Most of the cleanup, divided among 30 or more companies, is completed.

Sources: U.S. Justice Department, Environmental Protection Agency, Washington state Department of Ecology, state of Colorado

The agency hasn't forced some corporations to provide assurances that they can pay for cleaning up pollution at risky operations, nor has it consistently sought to garnishee money from federal contracts or federal tax breaks owed to the bankrupt companies, investigators found.

EPA officials had no response to the criticisms detailed in the report, saying they hadn't reviewed its findings.

But EPA headquarters spokeswoman Eryn Witcher said the department stands by its record of having roughly two-thirds of all Superfund cleanup costs covered by the polluters.

Superfund is one of the main federal laws aimed at getting polluters to pay for cleaning contaminated sites, partly through a trust fund dedicated to the cleanups.

Cantwell to press EPA

U.S. Sen. Maria Cantwell, who with several other senators asked the GAO to look into the issue, said the report shows that the EPA needs to do more. She said she planned to press the EPA to work swiftly to help families like Osborne-Morris' get their homes cleaned.

"I want to make sure that the taxpayers aren't liable for what should be corporate responsibility for cleaning up pollution," Cantwell said at a news conference at another Tacoma house with a partly finished cleanup.

Asarco's bankruptcy leaves in limbo cleanups around the country. The century-old smelting company is tied to pollution that could cost an estimated $1 billion to clean up, according to the EPA. A company spokeswoman contacted yesterday afternoon said she could not comment on issues in Washington state.

In Washington, the contamination is concentrated around the Tacoma smelter and a former smelter in Everett.

The company continues to work on the land it owns in Tacoma, installing a plastic and soil cap over a landfill holding contaminated soil, said David Croxton, an EPA manager in the regional office covering Washington. But it has stopped partially completed work on 13 nearby homes. Croxton said the company indicated that under bankruptcy rules it believed it could keep working on land it owned but not on land owned by someone else.

The company has yet to complete work capping or dredging offshore sediments around the smelter, and hundreds of additional homes still may be candidates for cleanup, according to EPA officials.

Croxton said the EPA was rushing to figure out how best to quickly finish the cleanup of the 13 homes, including possibly tapping EPA emergency funds.

Everett site

In Everett, cleanup has stalled on land the Everett Housing Authority was planning to turn into a residential development. Roughly five acres of the ground is bare dirt left partially cleaned up.

Fear of a bankruptcy had already prompted federal officials to negotiate some assurances that environmental-

cleanup money would come from Asarco. There was concern that its parent company, Grupo Mexico, was stripping assets from Asarco in preparation for declaring the company bankrupt. In a 2003 settlement, Asarco agreed to set up a $100 million trust fund for pollution cleanup, in return for permission to sell off a valuable Peruvian mine.

The EPA also put a lien on the company's Tacoma smelter property, giving it a claim to the land in case of a bankruptcy.

"I think we've done everything legally that we can in terms of protecting ourselves in bankruptcy," said Lee Marshall, another regional EPA manager overseeing part of the cleanup near the Tacoma smelter.

Warren Cornwall: 206-464-2311 or wcornwall@seattletimes.com