Tainted Earth: Smelters, Public Health, and the Environment

1. The Tacoma Smelter

11 Few people who live outside of Washington State have ever heard of Ruston, Washington. The town is tiny, about one square mile, and is surrounded by Tacoma. Ruston is dominated by the ninety-plus-acre former smelter site, which occupies a prime Puget Sound waterfront location. The beauty of the area—with the snow-capped Olympic Mountains to the west, Puget Sound visible in three directions, and the rolling green hills of Vashon Island to the north—contrasts with the scarred smelter site where there is little vegetation: a burial site for tons of arsenic-contaminated soil and other toxic waste. Little known outside of the Puget Sound region, the Tacoma smelter, which operated here from the late 1800s until the mid-1980s, was one of the largest sources for anthropogenic arsenic in the world.2 Originally built as a lead smelter in 1890, its acquisition by ASARCO in 1905 was strategic; the purchase increased the Guggenheim family’s control over the western nonferrous metals industry.3 The smelter’s emissions, in addition to containing tremendous quantities of sulfur dioxide, also contained heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and cadmium, and vast amounts of arsenic trioxide, one of the most toxic forms of arsenic. The jurisdictional distinction between Tacoma and Ruston was actually created by ASARCO in 1906, after it acquired the smelter and incorporated a town around it.4 The arrangement made certain that the company’s interests would be the controlling ones in Ruston. Today, as in the past, many of Ruston’s eight hundred residents know each other, and old wood-framed houses still line the town’s streets. Once, the houses were occupied mainly by smelter workers and their families—Scandinavian, Italian , and Austrian immigrants who endured hot, dangerous, and polluted conditions to keep the smelter’s furnaces burning.5 The work was dirty and difficult, 1 The Tacoma Smelter “I don’t think there was any place else in the world that emitted arsenic like this . . . and dumped it on an urban area.” —Gregory L. Glass, environmental scientist who studied the Tacoma smelter for over twenty-five years1 FIGURE 1.1 Map of Puget Sound Region of Washington State including the former Tacoma smelter site, Ruston, Vashon Island, and Seattle. The map shows the partial footprint of the Tacoma smelter’s heavy metal contamination with arsenic and lead in the Puget Sound Region and the location of EPA’s Superfund site, which includes the entire town of Ruston. Used by permission of Washington State Department of Ecology. THE TACOMA SMELTER 13 and arsenic in the smelter’s fumes caused skin rashes, ate holes through nasal septa, and caused workers to die of lung cancer at an increased rate. Many, though not all, of the smelter’s last workers have died, and new residents without a connection to the town’s formerly dominant industry have moved in. Remaining long-time residents tend to be stubbornly proud of their industrial history. ASARCO’s legacy still influences the town, though the smelter was demolished in the 1990s. Parts of the town are still undergoing Superfund cleanup, and a developer is trying to transform the former waterfront smelter site into a community of luxury residences. The development, which some see as the town’s salvation and others see as its death knell, has revived old and acrimonious debates about the effects of arsenic exposure on the health of people living here. For many decades ASARCO was the world’s largest producer of nonferrous metals, operating mines and smelters in the United States, Mexico, Chile, Australia , Peru, and Bolivia, among other places. By 1939 the company owned and operated eighteen nonferrous smelters in the United States, many in the West.6 A midcentury corporate history boasts, “ASARCO was impressive in size at birth and has grown mightily in the half-century of its existence until the entire globe is its domain.”7 The company’s “tidewater” smelters, of which Tacoma was one, were located in coastal areas where they could receive ore and concentrates shipped from foreign mines in an arrangement that has been called “exploitative and classically colonial.”8 The company is well known today in regulatory circles and former mining and smelting communities for its notorious environmental record, with responsibility for an estimated ninety-four contaminated sites in as many as twenty-one U.S. states.9 Some of the largest contaminated sites...