Tainted Earth: Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment

Introduction

1 On a rare sunny January day in Ruston, Washington, hundreds of people lined the town’s streets and hillsides to catch a glimpse of destruction. Two miles away, across Puget Sound, on the south end of Vashon Island, crowds also stood waiting, binoculars pressed to their eyes, for the same reason. In between the mainland and the island, others surveyed the Ruston shoreline from their boats anchored in Commencement Bay. An estimated seventy thousand people turned out to watch, and many of the gatherings had a celebratory air. At the appointed time, a twelve-year-old boy pushed a plunger, demolition experts ignited dynamite charges, and the American Smelting and Refining Company (ASARCO) smelter’s massive 562-foot stack toppled to the ground in seconds. Oblivious to the mixed emotions of his elders, the twelve-year-old representative of a new era said, “I’m not going to miss it. It polluted the air and stuff.”1 The smokestack, once admired for its architecture and impressive size, a monument to U.S. twentieth-century industrial power, was reduced to rubble , covered in a huge cloud of arsenic-laden dust. As the stack fell, onlookers cheered. Was it because it was awe-inspiring to see such a massive manmade edifice reduced to rubble in just a few seconds? Or were they cheering because the stack would never again be able to rain down sulfur dioxide, sulfuric acid, arsenic, lead, mercury, and cadmium on their homes and yards? Or was it because the stack demolition seemed to signal an end to the old fights over the smelter and its pollution, pointing the way toward reinvention and renewal—an escape from a choking industrial past? The date was January 17, 1993. The smokestack, in some iteration, had towered over North Tacoma and the tiny town of Ruston for about a century, spreading its pollution at least as far as Seattle, about thirty miles to the north. While operating, the smelter employed many of Ruston’s residents and bolstered the Introduction 2 TAINTED EARTH region’s tax base. But in the space of a century, the smokestack went from being nearly an unalloyed good, a symbol of jobs and economic prosperity, to being considered by many a serious threat to public health and the environment. How did an industry, whose considerable pollution was officially considered nothing more than a nuisance for many decades, come to be regarded as a threat to the health, development, and life chances of people living in the shadow of its stacks? Smelter smokestacks once dotted the western landscape in states like Idaho, Texas, Arizona, Utah, and California, taking in raw ore and turning out pure metal—the copper, zinc, and lead that provided building blocks for the country’s infrastructure and myriad consumer products. While others have explored the contribution of mining and smelting to the development of the United States, this book is about the public health and environmental costs, and the long road to taking community concerns about the health effects of smelter emissions seriously, systematically studying them, and working to protect people in smelting communities from further harm. The book focuses on three communities that were central to debates among industry, government and academic scientists , and community and environmental activists over smelters and public health: Tacoma, Washington; El Paso, Texas; and Kellogg, Idaho. Public health and environmental disasters were discovered around smelters in all three communities after 1970, when federal and state health officials found that children who lived near these smelters were highly exposed to heavy metals from their emissions. These communities became unwittingly linked as battles over the scientific, political, and regulatory implications of these discoveries raged throughout the 1970s and early 1980s. Though the three communities are different in geography, history, and culture, there are remarkable similarities in how the disasters unfolded and particularly in the responses of the companies responsible. The conflicts and controversies that arose in smelting communities over childhood lead and arsenic exposure laid bare social and political tensions and power dynamics in each community and, more broadly, in American life. Tacoma forms the centerpiece of the book as its public health and environmental impacts are considered across the twentieth century, providing a window into what was actually a century-long conflict between communities and industry. El Paso and Kellogg are considered mainly after 1970, with in-depth examinations of the discovery and response to childhood lead poisoning epidemics discovered near these...