Trouble in the air at Port Townsend

PORT TOWNSEND — Cindy Buxton woke up one night to the rancid smell of rotting eggs and the unnerving sound of her 10-year-old son violently vomiting.

By the next day, the smell that had permeated her house — the telltale odor of the local paper mill — was gone and her son was better. But then she started feeling sick.

Sixteen months later, Buxton's headaches and respiratory problems are still so bad she and her family have had to move to Alaska. Her conclusion: The mill made them sick.

Those can be fighting words in this old mill town. Port Townsend Paper, Jefferson County's largest private employer, has put food on people's tables for 81 years, sustaining the town even through lean years when the historic downtown and elegant Victorian homes were boarded up.

Since then, the town has transformed into a tourist and retirement oasis, and the mill is under attack as never before. The odor that was once tolerated as the cost of living-wage jobs is now being dissected for its toxic content.

An organized and noisy environmental group, with Buxton as the lead case study, has campaigned for more aggressive air-quality monitoring. A recent editorial cartoon in the local newspaper portrayed the mill as a "sacred cow," dropping steaming piles of pollution, with state regulators asleep on its back.

Earlier this month, the state pollution-control board sided with the mill critics. The board ordered the Department of Ecology to rewrite the mill's air permit, after federal regulators had accused the state of going too easy on the mill's air-quality monitoring.

That likely means at least another public meeting, giving mill critics — an environmental group called Port Townsend Airwatchers, led by a flock of recent arrivals — an opportunity to vent at the microphone.

Whether the mill's emissions are making people sick is unclear. No health study has found a link, in part because there is also no ambient air monitoring to measure the density of toxins drifting from the mill's stacks.

But the mere fact that the mill's environmental cost is being debated — in local coffee shops and in the local newspaper — reflects a new day for an old mill town.

Smell of opportunity

In the late 1920s, amid the closure of local canneries and the looming failure of the municipal water system, paper company Crown Zellerbach spent $7 million to build a new pulp and paper mill on Glen Cove at the edge of town, according to the Jefferson County Historical Society.

The mill quickly rebuilt the water system and spurred a home-building boom. It remains the county's economic mainstay, employing about 300 people at an average yearly wage of about $57,000. It produces about 1,000 tons a day of virgin and recycled pulp, most of it made into cardboard boxes.

It also churns out about 58 tons of carcinogens each year, including nitrogen oxides — known to aggravate asthma — as well as ammonia and sulfur compounds that cause the mill's rotten-egg smell, according to the mill's Toxic Release Inventory, which catalogs some bulk emissions from its stacks.

Port Townsend City Councilman Mark Welch, who worked at the mill in high school and college, said opinions of the smell usually depend on how long someone has lived in town. His family has lived in Port Townsend since the 1850s, and he links the smell to "economic opportunity."

"I don't want to be critical of the people complaining about it, but they did move to a mill town," said Welch. "I'm one of those odd individuals who like the odor, because I grew up with it."

Mill monitoring itself?

Opposition to the mill blossomed in 2006, when a local environmental group, led by resident Elaine Bailey, realized the state Department of Ecology had issued the mill a new air permit good until 2009. After some digging, the group, which now numbers about 150, found the permit relied heavily on the mill to test and monitor itself, and to respond to citizen complaints.

Even complaining about the mill is complicated. Some complaints are directed to the mill, while others are recorded by a hotline in Ecology's Olympia office. Those complaints show that Port Townsend Paper ranks second — with 38 complaints since 2001 — among the 11 pulp and paper mills regulated by the state. The complaints are vivid, with people describing smells that made them vomit, turn to inhalers and pull their children indoors.

"Someone other than the mill needs to be monitoring the mill," said Bailey.

Late last year, the federal Environmental Protection Agency weighed in, e-mailing state regulators to say they wrongly waived some federal air-monitoring requirements at the mill. The state had written the permit in a way that "you couldn't really tell what was required," said Nancy Helms, the EPA official who sent the e-mail.

Although the objections were technical, the tone was one of a rebuke. For only the second time in 12 years, the EPA asked the state to redo an air permit. Merley McCall, manager of the Ecology division that regulates industrial plants, said the state would rewrite the permit to appease the EPA but disputed that Port Townsend Paper got a break.

"As we've made major reductions in emissions from the mill, rather than smelling like a pulp mill all the time, you get intermittent bursts, and it's more irritating when you aren't used to it," said McCall.

Speculation filling void

Eveleen Muehlethaler moved to Port Townsend in 1982, hired by the mill's owners with a tough job: Either close or sell the mill. She helped with the sale, and saw it sold three more times, including last year, after the mill emerged from bankruptcy.

Now the assistant mill manager, she said the mill was "not getting a fair shake" from critics, noting that the mill recently spent $8 million to upgrade equipment monitoring in the mill's towering stacks.

"We do everything we're asked to do, and we work to be a good neighbor," she said. "What I want to know is, why don't they trust us? Why don't they trust their public servants [at Ecology]?"

Richard Stedman, head of the Olympic Region Clean Air Authority, said the issue isn't one of trust, but data. The state only requires testing of the stacks, not the air quality in town, leaving a void to be filled by speculation.

"They probably have a handle on 50 to 80 percent of what's coming out of the mill," said Stedman. "It's the other 50 to 20 percent that you want to know for sure. You need to know where the hot spots are."

Buxton, 44, said she developed a permanent chemical sensitivity after noxious blasts from the mill. She and her husband, both geologists, had moved to Port Townsend in 2002 to live in a cohousing community near the mill, seeking the town's progressive and placid lifestyle.

After her splitting headaches came on, she tried to stay, buying a $1,200 air filter for their house. A few days later, she and her family left for good, moving to their cabin near Glacier Bay, Alaska, and filed an appeal of the mill's air permit.

Through the legal process, she learned that Ecology never investigated the complaint she filed just after getting sick.

"The people of Port Townsend deserve to know what's in their air," Buxton said. "The way it is now, you can't even get a complete list of chemicals."

Jonathan Martin: 206-464-2605 or jmartin@seattletimes.com