Day 8 Anaconda Superfund Site

After Yellowstone, we drove up to Anaconda to check out the town and the Superfund site. First, let me give you a little background about the Superfund. The Comprehensive Environmental Response Compensation and Liability Act of 1980 created the Superfund, which is basically a fund raised through petrochemical tax to help pay for abandoned hazardous waste sites and help find responsible parties. CERCLA came into being due to environmental problems in the United States, mainly Love Canal, which showed that people had to be responsible for hazardous waste.

The town of Anaconda

The Superfund site turned golf course- notice the smelting stack in the background

The Anaconda smelter site closed in 1980 and was listed on the National Priority List to become a Superfund site. This site is home to the tallest smelting stack in the world and at one point it was the largest free standing structure in the world, which I found very interesting. One of our speakers for the day was Katelynn Leary of the Arrowhead Foundation City Planning Department, who helps get the community involved in the cleanup. Our other speaker was "Kitty", who is a Superfund contractor for the county. She tests and routes soil, and answers questions about sampling water and soil technology.
Katelynn and Kitty explained to us that the focus in the town has changed from the "company mentality" to dealing with the clean up. The town is poor and its hard to find work and live, so young people are moving away. They gave us some background about how it was a smelting site and a lot of copper was being refined here from Butte, Montana. They told us that there is contamination deposition from aerial emissions, 100 year flood event, waste and tailing piles, and human movement of contaminated soil. There is 300 square miles of impacted soil, indoor dust, and water. There is also heavy metal contamination; primarily lead and arsenic.
The record of decision for the site is being modified, and the program is ever-changing. Right now, arsenic is the only contaminant of concern. However, a modification was proposed in 2009 that would add lead as a contaminant of concern. It was interesting to me that Kitty and Katelynn were so hopeful and they said that the site is almost cleaned up, yet when we asked what type of remediation they were using they said a soil cap, which isn't really cleaning anything.
They took us for a short tour of the site, and we walked from the meeting building. It was a short walk, but you could really get an idea of how the town had changed. There weren't that many people around, and things looked like they haven't been maintained. We talked to the site, and it was a bit different than I expected. It was like a walkthrough with some signs explaining the activities that used to take place. We were trying to read them to get a better understanding, but the speakers were moving too fast to be able to pay attention to both. I tried my best to keep up and learn as much as I could. You could see a golf course from the site, and they told us that it was created there to reuse the site. They even recycled the slag and used it for the sand pits in the golf course, which I thought was really cool. They explained that Anaconda used to be a company town- everybody worked for them and that's how they fed their family, so nobody spoke badly about the company. I thought that was pretty interesting. I also thought it was interesting that she said the arsenic levels are so high that when people move away they need to take arsenic supplements because their body is so used to it. It was sad to walk around and see the way the town has emptied since the smelting company shut down. I don't think any of us were prepared for the despair that we were met with today. It was very heartbreaking to hear that the town they grew up in completely fell apart and people were also getting sick. The women were very hopeful about getting everything cleaned up and moving on, though, which was refreshing.