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55 In the southwest border town of El Paso, Texas, ASARCO operated another massive smelter for much of the twentieth century. In contrast to Tacoma’s location on the foggy and rainy shores of Puget Sound, the El Paso smelter rose out of the parched Chihuahuan Desert, producing lead and copper from raw ore brought by rail from Mexican mines. In El Paso, the smelter’s fires were stoked largely by Mexican American workers who raised their children in the shadow of the stack. A prominent El Paso company since the turn of the century, ASARCO was apparently surprised to learn in the early 1970s that a previously “friendly” city administration was scrutinizing the smelter’s contribution to air pollution and growing increasingly concerned about its impact on the health of people who lived in the city.1 That El Paso’s political leaders shared the emboldened attitude of Tacoma’s toward ASARCO in the late 1960s was not a coincidence; rather, it had to do with the growing national environmental consciousness and mounting concerns about the health effects of air pollution. These local efforts were buoyed, and in some cases made possible, by pending action at the federal level. Specifically, the federal government was about to gain new powers to control air pollution, with the passage of the 1970 Clean Air Act (CAA), which provided for federal minimum standards and enforcement. The CAA was signed into law by President Richard Nixon in the same year that the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was established and the federal government’s regulatory and research interest in occupational safety and health was codified in the Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) and its research arm, the National Institute for Occupational Safety and Health (NIOSH).2 One of the first issues that the EPA had to tackle was sulfur dioxide emissions from heavy industry; smelters were a significant contributor to this issue, the most significant source of sulfur dioxide emissions in the West, second only 3 Uncovering a Crisis in El Paso 56 TAINTED EARTH to electric utilities nationwide.3 In1969 sulfur dioxide emissions from the country ’s nonferrous smelters were quantified for the first time in a federally sponsored study. The study found that nonferrous smelters were pumping1.9 million tons of sulfur oxides into the air each year; of those smelters, copper smelters contributed the most: 1.4 million tons. Notably, the problem was concentrated west of the Mississippi River, where 97.4 percent of all emissions occurred. On the threshold of the 1970s U.S. copper smelters were controlling only about 19 percent of the sulfur dioxide generated, which reflects the long-held preference in the industry for dispersing, rather than capturing the toxic gas.4 The smelting industry’s response to imminent local, state, and federal controls on sulfur dioxide emissions was a harbinger of how it would handle other challenges to a polluting status quo. Copper companies in particular were organized in their opposition to strict standards and tried to influence the EPA to weaken a proposed federal standard to require 90 percent control of their sulfur dioxide emissions.5 The EPA did not promulgate the 90 percent standard for copper smelters, even though it was thought to be technologically feasible; instead the federal standard would require about 51 percent control. The EPA also urged states to consider the costs to industry of requiring stricter standards than the federal government’s, undercutting states such as Washington and Montana, which in the early 1970s wanted to take a hard line against sulfur dioxide pollution.6 In El Paso, scrutiny of that smelter’s emissions by local officials first focused on sulfur dioxide. In the early 1970s the city and the state of Texas launched a lawsuit against ASARCO aimed at bringing relief to city residents from the smelter’s sulfur dioxide pollution. It was a surprise to public officials to learn during legal discovery that that between 1969 and 1971 more than 1,100 tons of lead, 560 tons of zinc, 12 tons of cadmium, and more than 1 ton of arsenic were emitted from the smelter’s stack.7 The discovery of the magnitude of El Paso’s heavy-metal emissions would make industry’s contention that toxic metals were not a threat to the health of people living near them much less convincing and would be the catalyst for official investigations of smelter pollution and community health in...

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