Decades late, say critics, Anaconda working on lead cleanup

Sep. 15--In 1983 the Environmental Protection Agency came to Anaconda, making it one of the first Superfund sites in the nation. At 300 square miles of damage due to former smelters raining arsenic, lead and other metals for 97 years, it is also one of the largest. But it wasn't until 30 years later -- in 2013 -- that the EPA made Atlantic Richfield Company clean up for lead.

EPA says it didn't make a mistake -- even though Atlantic Richfield is currently re-remediating properties where it once removed arsenic to get the lead. Joe Vranka, Montana EPA Superfund chief, said that the positive takeaway is that the agency learned new information and adapted to that.

But Bill Everett, Anaconda-Deer Lodge County's chief executive, said Saturday that "there's really no way to justify" how long it's taken for the cleanup to focus on lead.

Charlie Coleman, EPA project manager for Anaconda, said EPA "wasn't leaving lead out; we thought we'd get lead by looking at arsenic." The EPA viewed arsenic as the "driver" of Anaconda's cleanup.

But around 2007, the EPA began to realize that lead was a bigger problem than the agency previously thought.

Coleman says the lead contamination comes from multiple sources -- lead paint, mine waste used for road sanding or for other things and, previously buried willy-nilly, now lurking underground. It also came from smelter emissions, he said. But teasing out what actually came from the old smelter's aerial discharge would be difficult at best.

When asked why Atlantic Richfield would be willing to pay for contamination coming from lead paint -- Anaconda's housing stock cannot be blamed on the former oil goliath -- Luke Pokorny, Atlantic Richfield's Anaconda project manager, also said figuring out how much came from the smelter would be too huge a task.

"It would take considerable effort to differentiate between lead paint versus the smelter," Pokorny said. "We're looking forward to a thorough remedy."

But that remedy appears to have been slow to get going, even for the "driver" of the cleanup -- arsenic.

When the EPA enforced the arsenic-only cleanup starting in 2004, the EPA had already been in Anaconda for 21 years.

In a town with 4,524 properties that have some sort of grassy space attached and are within the Superfund boundary, Atlantic Richfield Company cleaned up about 350 yards and 39 commercial properties over the span of six years -- until 2010.

Atlantic Richfield sampled 1,740 yards during that era. With the now ongoing lead-driven cleanup, Atlantic Richfield has remediated around 1,300 yards in three years, Pokorny said. And the work is not over.

"We did 350 yards in that time span (2004 to 2010)," Pokorny said. "Now we're doing 325 a year."

Coleman said the cleanup is bigger now because of the way the contaminants in the yard are measured -- the toxins are no longer averaged together.

Coleman said that much of the lead the company is having to go back for is showing up in the drip lines of Anaconda's homes. Everett says the drip lines around homes are showing up with elevated concentrations of lead because the roofs are where the problem lies.

"Roofs have high arsenic and lead if they haven't been replaced since the days of the smelter. A lot of the time, the roof has not been completely removed," Everett said.

"This lead cleanup has been a long time coming," Everett said Saturday. "They knew from the start that it was a part of the problem, and here it's taken more than 30 years to focus on it.

"That's a lot of time that people have had to live with it in their environments, and some of them are still living with it.

"And the whole thing about whether it's from the smokestack or the lead paint -- it seems like I have to get back into that fight about every other month.

"But over all, I think we're finally all on the same page now."

Atlantic Richfield shared the sampling results of a house in the 600 block of Chestnut Street that received remediation this past summer. Testing in the vegetable garden showed 1,550 parts per million of lead in the top two inches, 1,391 ppm of lead in the two to six inches, 1,104 ppm of lead in the six to 12 inches and 494 ppm of lead in the 12 to 18 inches. (See related stories.) The vegetable garden had the highest levels of lead and some of the highest levels of arsenic in the resident's soil.

The owner put the vegetable garden in next to the house, within the drip line of the roof.

Health implications

Nick Kriskovich Jr. has started to wonder if his job -- crawling around in the attics of Anaconda's homes and businesses to install or repair heating and air systems -- could have an adverse effect on him.

Kriskovich owns and operates Copper City Sheet Metal Heating & Air Conditioning, a company his grandfather started in 1972. Now 42, Kriskovich says he has begun to be a little apprehensive about his line of work. He's been doing this work for 25 years.

"Over the years, what's not been taken care of has come to light more," Kriskovich said. "It worries me."

When the EPA launched the arsenic cleanup in Anaconda in 2004, the federal agency did not consider looking into Anaconda's attics -- despite the fact that 25 miles away, officials found "aerial deposition," in 2000 in an attic on the Butte Hill and by 2002, removal of attic dust high in arsenic and lead had begun, said Eric Hassler, Butte-Silver Bow County Superfund operations manager.

"Nobody really expected aerial deposition from that distance away between Butte and Anaconda," Hassler said.

But when the EPA and Atlantic Richfield poked around in some 50 Anaconda attics in 2007, the entities found that near the old 585-foot Washoe Smelter stack, the sampled attics had elevated levels of arsenic and lead in the dust, said Carl Nyman, ADLC Superfund coordinator.

Because lead lowers IQ in children and can cause other irreversible damage like hyperactivity, health experts tend to focus on the dangers of lead exposure in kids, particularly those under the age of five. But the federal Centers for Disease Control says there is no safe level of lead. And exposure to it hurts grownups, too.

According to the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health, lead exposure in adults can cause high blood pressure, heart disease, kidney disease, and reduced fertility. NIOSH also says that the body absorbs higher levels of lead when it is breathed in.

After the discovery of the toxins in a small sampling of Anaconda attics in 2007, another six years went by before the EPA forced Atlantic Richfield to do something about it. Nyman called that "light speed" in the Superfund world.

But the work itself still didn't really get off the ground for another three years -- in the summer of 2016.

So workers, such as Kriskovich, have been crawling around in attics where aerial emissions may have left behind a footprint, especially in east Anaconda, for decades after the last smelter smelted the last copper concentrate in Anaconda.

Anaconda's kids

Anaconda School District's expenses for this fiscal year for children with special needs -- which includes anything from dyslexia to severe physical and cognitive disability -- were around $2 million, said Kevin Patrick, former Anaconda School District business manager, in a recent email.

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According to Justin Barnes, Anaconda school superintendent, 23% of the district are kids who are differently abled. Defined as "needing some sort of help to be successful," whether it's an audio version of a book, a little bit longer on a test, or significant aid in understanding a classroom activity or lecture, such a high number puts a tax on the school system, say school officials.

A spokesman for the Montana Office of Public Instruction initially told The Montana Standard that for the entire state of Montana, 7.8% of students were identified for special education in the 2017-2018 school year.

"We are almost three times higher," Barnes said. "One in four students."

But later, the spokesman, Dylan Klapmeier, revised the number, saying that "my calculation of 7.8 percent was not the correct data to work off of." He said the percentage of students on individualized education plans in Anaconda was only 12.9 percent, and statewide the percentage is slightly larger, 13.1 percent.

But Barnes, the Anaconda superintendent, said that his number of 23 percent includes both those on Individualized Education Plans and also those covered under Section 504, a federal standard.

The statistical disparity could not be immediately resolved -- but it's clear that nearly a quarter of Anaconda's students have special needs.

Nowadays, differently abled kids are integrated into regular classrooms. Because of the high numbers of differently abled students, Anaconda teachers could see 28 kids per day on average with a variety of special needs, said Dan Laughlin, Anaconda School District director of special services. Anaconda teachers average about 175 students per day.

That means that teachers in the district have to design each learning period with additional lessons especially created for those kids who require the extra help, Barnes said.

"There could be up to four different modifications in a class," Barnes said.

Laughlin said that what the school district mostly sees is middle-of-the-spectrum autism. According to the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act, autism is a developmental disability significantly affecting verbal and nonverbal communication and social interaction.

Only about five of the nearly 300 special needs kids in the district are differently abled physically, Laughlin said.

School officials say any number of factors could be the cause for such a high percentage of special needs students in the district, including various socioeconomic factors and a high rate of transfer students whose parents chose to move there. There is also the Center for Excellence, which houses roughly 40 students, some of them Anaconda kids, who have special needs. The majority come from all over the state, school officials say.

A study supported by the National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences (NIEHS) found in 2017 that there could be a link between lead exposure and autism. Deficiencies in nutrition could also be a factor.

The exposure could happen while the fetus is still in the womb, according to the research. The researchers looked at baby teeth, which gives a more complete picture of lead exposure than blood samples.

The link between exposure to zinc and autism appeared to be more complex, according to NIEHS. The study indicated that tots with autism had lower zinc levels earlier in the womb, but those levels increased after birth, compared to children without autism. NIEHS says this initial finding needs more studies.

Zinc is also a contaminant of concern for both Butte and Anaconda. It, too, was released from the smelters.

EPA says in a document produced in 2017, called Explanation of Significant Differences, that the agency found 12 homes out of 52 in Anaconda with elevated lead in the interior dust. But because the agency believed that was likely due to lead paint, it was not a Superfund issue.

Everett says there's "a lot of controversy" around this. But, there's no denying that lead paint could be at least part of the problem.

Anaconda's housing stock overwhelmingly predates when industry phased out the use of lead in the late 1970s in household paint. Prior to 1977, 2,325 homes were built in Anaconda, according to county records.

What we don't know

According to the World Health Organization, long-term exposure to high levels of processed arsenic -- the kind of stuff that comes out of a copper smelter -- can cause skin, bladder and lung cancer. Although the smelter closed nearly 40 years ago, residents say there is a high level of cancer in the town.

Betsy Pahut, a longtime resident, says the diseases in Anaconda aren't limited to cancer.

Pahut lists a litany of other illnesses: pulmonary fibrosis, Crohn's disease, Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), rheumatoid arthritis, fibromyalgia, Type 1 diabetes, and a very rare malady -- Trisomy 18, also known as Edward's Syndrome. She says that altogether, the health issues are overwhelming the tiny community of roughly 10,000.

"Why isn't there a bigger focus on autoimmune disorders?" Pahut wonders out loud. "People don't want to move here."

According to ATSDR, establishing strong associations between arsenic exposure and disease is "difficult" as the prevalence and spectrum of disease and exposure can differ.

While Pahut's disease list is broader than just autoimmune disorders, which are diseases in which the body attacks healthy tissue, almost every disease on her list has some sort of autoimmune connection. The exception is Trisomy 18, which is a rare illness that begins in the womb. Pahut says she has known of more than one baby in Anaconda born with it. No statistics on the disease's incidence in Anaconda -- or that of autoimmune disorders -- are available.

According to the Trisomy 18 Foundation, the condition is caused by an error in cell division, known as meiotic disjunction. When this happens, instead of the normal pair, an extra, or third, chromosome 18 is formed in the developing baby and disrupts the normal pattern of development in significant ways that can be life-threatening, even before birth.

According to the foundation, some infants will be able to survive to be discharged from the hospital with home nursing support to assist with care by the parents. About 10 percent survive to their first birthdays. There are some individuals who live to adulthood with the condition, although with significant developmental delays that require full-time caregiving.

Another Anaconda resident, Debbie DeLong, says Atlantic Richfield tested her yard years ago for arsenic and called it good. Later, testing showed her to have arsenic in her body, and she got a phone call from the Centers for Disease Control in Atlanta.

But, though a subsequent test indicated she had an even higher level of arsenic in her system, the CDC told her the arsenic wasn't elevated enough for her to worry, she said. Her personal doctor echoed the same conclusion, she said. She added that there could be other contributing factors to why she tested to have arsenic in her system.

But in the new round of testing, parts of DeLong's yard tested to have around 600 parts per million of arsenic beneath the top two inches of soil. Her attic also tested to have elevated arsenic and lead in it. So recently, Atlantic Richfield went back and got to work in her attic and yard.

Coleman says there's a "silver lining" to the fact that the lead cleanup happened 30 years after pretty much the entire city-county -- about 192,000 acres -- landed on the National Priorities List. Because of internal changes within agencies in the 2000s, Anaconda "was afforded an opportunity to come up with a much better cleanup for lead than we would have had happening in 1996," when EPA made its original decisions about Anaconda's cleanup.

"We probably would have come up with 1,200 ppm of lead action level like Butte and never really found anything," Coleman said.

A recent meeting called by the Office of Inspector General, the EPA's internal watchdog, in Anaconda brought out about 100 people, including company and governmental officials. The OIG wanted to hear from residents what they thought about EPA's communication skills, particularly when it comes to residents' health risks.

Terry Vermeire, Anaconda business owner and Council of Commission chair, said many people he spoke to didn't go.

"They say, 'what's the use?'" Vermeire said.

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