by Henry Brannan, Washington State Standard
December 17, 2024
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Friday a roughly 150-mile stretch of the Columbia River between the Canadian border and Grand Coulee Dam has been added to the Superfund National Priorities List.
The new designation is an early step in what could be a decadeslong cleanup process following nearly a century of Canadian metal smelter Teck Metals Ltd. dumping heavy metals, including lead, into the river.
Teck was founded in 1906 and continues to operate a smelter in Trail, B.C., along the Columbia River about 10 miles north of the U.S. border.
Between its founding and 1995, Teck released millions of tons of lead, cadmium, mercury and other toxins into the Columbia River, according to legal filings and a detailed timeline by The Northport Project.
The facility has repeatedly spilled toxins — including lead, arsenic and mercury — into the river more recently.
Those pollutants, along with some from the long-shuttered Le Roi smelter on the U.S. side of the border, have settled into the riverbed between Trail and Grand Coulee Dam, which doesn’t allow sediment to pass.
Nearly since its inception, the international metal refining giant has faced lawsuits from farmers, environmental groups, members of regional tribes and even the U.S. government.
The EPA has spent decades battling the company trying to get it to pay for the cleanup — a job made more difficult because of Teck’s location in Canada.
Teck spokesman Dale Steeves did not answer questions about if the company had a responsibility to clean up the stretch of contaminated river but emphasized the company has taken action.
“Teck has spent more than U.S. $190 million conducting an extensive remedial investigation and feasibility study (RIFS) of the Upper Columbia watershed under EPA direction over the last 18 years,” he said in a statement. “To date, those studies indicate that the water is clean and the fish are as safe to eat as other fish in the Pacific Northwest.”
(A 2001 EPA analysis found sediment in the river and Lake Roosevelt, the reservoir behind Grand Coulee Dam in northeastern Washington, was contaminated.)
Steeves added the company provides crucial minerals to U.S. customers and has invested $1.7 billion to “continuously advance the environmental and operational performance of the smelter” since the 1970s.
The company’s earnings reports show it made about $4.5 billion last year.
While legal battles simmer, the EPA is moving forward with cleanup.
“EPA can now more comprehensively address long public health and environmental risks posed by over 100 years of mining-related pollution,” Casey Sixkiller, regional administrator for the EPA, said in a statement. “This work will continue to be critical for the people and communities who deserve cleaner and healthier places to live, work, and play.”
The next steps will include conducting studies to determine which places along the roughly 150-river-mile stretch have pollutants at unacceptable levels, and determining how to clean them and any health impacts they might be having on nearby communities, EPA spokesman Bill Dunbar said.
“Once the final cleanup plan is complete — and that’ll be some years down the road — then we’ll have an idea of exactly how large the Superfund site is,” Dunbar said.
The project is at the beginning of a complex process. Other regional projects such as the Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund site took more than a decade to make it through those steps, though Dunbar said this project was less complex.
There are about 50 Superfund sites around Washington.
While the specifics of the eventual Upper Columbia Site cleanup will be determined by the coming studies, it will revolve around removing contaminated soil and sediment, especially from people’s yards and land that may be developed, Dunbar said. The agency can’t yet say if cleanup will happen at Lake Roosevelt.
Dunbar emphasized there will be very little impact to river users on the lower Columbia.
“We’re not talking about water quality at all; we’re concerned about what’s in the river sediment,” he said. “Any sediment in the river that gets moved down(stream) that we would be concerned about would certainly be trapped by the (Grand Coulee) Dam.”
However, he noted, no matter where you are, if you’re eating fish caught locally, you should check for health advisories.
A 2022 investigation by Oregon Public Broadcasting and ProPublica tested 50 salmon caught above Bonneville Dam and found unsafe levels of mercury and PCBs for people who eat more servings than average.
Dunbar acknowledged the Upper Columbia Site cleanup could take decades.
“We certainly hope it doesn’t take that long,” he said. “But … it’s certainly appropriate for people to understand that it’s going to take many, many years to get through the cleanup process.”
While the cost is unknown, the cleanup of the more complex Lower Duwamish Waterway Superfund is estimated to total $342 million.
This article was first published by The Columbian through the Murrow News Fellow program, managed by Washington State University.
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