OPPORTUNITY - Like lots of other kids raised on salaries from the Anaconda Copper Mining Co., George Niland used to swim in the ponds on the edge of Opportunity.
“When we got out, we'd have little red bumps all over us,” Niland recalled. “We never thought much of it.”
Today, the ponds in which Niland and generations before and after him played have all but dried up, forming a cracked and pitted wasteland - a five-square-mile resting place for mine tailings and toxin-laced soil from Butte, Anaconda, Silver Bow Creek and, as of last fall, Missoula County.
Starting on Sept. 30, roughly 2.2 million cubic yards of metals-contaminated sediment - mining waste that flushed downstream and was dredged from the Clark Fork River behind Milltown Dam - began making the trip back upriver.
By train.
About 50 railcars, each filled with 100 tons of sediment, will make the 100-mile trip every day of the week for the next two years.
As the waste arrives aboard uncovered railcars, Niland and nearly 100 other Opportunity residents - that's about one of every eight - are preparing to file a lawsuit against BP-Arco. Concerned about their water, air and soil, they plan to assert their right under the Montana Constitution to a clean and healthy environment.
The waste from Missoula is, relatively, a drop in a very big bucket - the 2.2 million cubic yards is being added to 250 million cubic yards already in the waste repository, the bulk of it the byproduct of 80 years of copper smelting, diverted to the Opportunity Ponds by the Anaconda Co.
But the new shipments have triggered old emotions in Opportunity. Residents say they were given little say in the decision. Some are bothered that Opportunity seems to be bearing the burden for the more populous and affluent Missoula area, where, under the original plan, the sediment was to stay. Others are indignant about seeing the waste, even though it originated in the hills nearby, returned by train.
The sediment dredged up from behind Milltown Dam has served to bring Opportunity's concerns - long smoldering, but seldom voiced in what was always a loyal company town - to the surface as well.
Because it put food on their tables, the smelter and the toll it took on the local environment, was tolerated. That acceptance has eroded only slowly since the smelter closed in 1983. With the arrival of the Milltown Reservoir sediments, that tolerance has crumbled a little more.
“Things don't look so grim when you're up there making good money,” said Serge Myers, 71, who worked at the smelter for 17 years. “The wages at the smelter probably topped any wages in the state. When I was working I was up to my knees in the stuff; it was just part of the way we lived.”
Today, the company paychecks are gone, the company's waste remains, and many residents of Opportunity say the concerns they voice to government agencies and corporate offices are taken less than seriously.
“You've got 250 homes down here in Opportunity,” Myers said. “We're not really too much to worry about. It's the same old story we've always been told: ‘OK, you've had your say. OK, Opportunity, this stuff's coming. Ten thousand people in Missoula said you need it up there. We've got to save the fish down in Missoula.' ”
Beyond what many see as an insult, beyond the feelings of powerlessness, the overriding concern of many in Opportunity is whether living so close to so much waste is endangering their health.
At Solan's Grocery Store, one of Opportunity's two businesses, employee Susan Sorum said she wonders if lung ailments she and her neighbors face are a result of arsenic piggy-backing on smoke particles from the smelter.
“You'd wake up in the morning and just taste the arsenic on your tongue,” Sorum said.
Niland, meanwhile, suspects several cases of cancer in his family, including his own, are connected to the area's saturation with mining waste.
So far, only two tainted wells have been detected in Opportunity, and no warnings have been triggered by air monitors put in place as part of the massive cleanup effort.
That cleanup - the cost of which is mostly borne by Atlantic Richfield, which bought out the Anaconda Co. in 1977 - stretches from Butte to Missoula.
And as with any cleanup, there has to be a place to put the trash.
On this particular train ride, the only stop is Opportunity.
Watch a video of Opportunity residents discussing concerns about the cleanupThe Anaconda Copper Mining Co. announced the birth of Opportunity in a full-page advertisement in the Butte Daily Post on June 11, 1914.
The ad promised a place where Anaconda Co. workers could “enjoy the benefits of country life, while sharing in the activities of the industries located here."
“Little farms, with cows, pigs and chickens; gardens with vegetables, apple trees and small fruits, will supplant the city street and the crowded city lot.”
The made-to-order community would be sold in 5- and 10-acre plots cut from a blanket of flat green ranch land. The wood to build houses was provided at cost by the company's lumber department.
Opportunity - a company official, Henry C. Gardiner, came up with the name - was created partly to relieve crowding in the booming town of Anaconda, partly to provide the pleasures of rural life to employees.
But it was also a public relations maneuver - an attempt by the company to show skeptics that a small farming community could thrive in the shadow of the nearby copper smelter stack.
By then, the Anaconda Copper Co. - even though it owned the local newspaper in the early 1900s - needed some good press.
The Washoe Smelter in Anaconda had opened on Jan. 24, 1902. It provided good-paying jobs, but a booming economy wasn't all it brought to the valley. Copper smelting was a messy process that spewed out a number of heavy metals as waste, including lead, mercury and arsenic.
Groundwater contamination wasn't a huge concern 100 years ago, as evidenced by the company's decision to divert mine tailings from the smelter through a system of ditches and creeks into ponds outside what would later become Opportunity.
The bigger concern to residents was smoke from the smelter's stack, which - while offering an improvement over the days of open-air roasting - belched a thick black smoke that drifted across the surrounding countryside, over crops, livestock and homes.
As years passed, farmers in the valley grew increasingly concerned about the effects of the smoke, and whether it was responsible for mysterious livestock deaths.
In February 1905, a group of more than 100 farmers formed an association and filed a lawsuit against the Anaconda Copper Mining Co., seeking to be reimbursed for livestock fatalities and other damages they said were caused by smelter pollution.
By 1907, scientific investigations into the cause of increasing amounts of arsenic and other metals in valley soil and vegetation pointed to smelter activity. Even so, the farmers' association lost the lawsuit in 1909.
Opportunity was born five years later - partly as an attempt by the company to show families could have fruitful farms and happy lives beneath the smelter's shadow.
Once a swampy lowland, the company installed a system of drainage tiles underneath the town, divided the 500 acres of land into plots and built streets. Those that ran from east to west were named for Montana governors.
A general store opened, to be replaced mid-century by Solan's Grocery. An electric rail line connected the town to the valley's bustling economic center in Anaconda, and streetcars ferried workers to their jobs at the smelter. A country club was started in 1918, a community club house in 1924. And the town's first gas station opened in 1932.
Otherwise, it was a quiet place, where kids rolled tires down streets or practiced pole-vaulting at the only school, Beaver Dam Elementary. Used wood chips from the smelter were piled to cushion the vaulter's landings, longtime resident John Meshnik remembers.
The young people of Opportunity were drawn as well to the murky pools of water on the other side of the woods - fed in part by natural streams, in part by smelter waste.
Watch avideo of Opportunity residents discussing concerns about the cleanup“That's just kind of where we hung out,” George Niland says, recalling playing in the ponds as a youngster.
“We did a lot of duck hunting back there. We'd go back there and mess around on our bikes, swim in the ponds. We ate the ducks we shot there. There were a couple of ponds back there with fish in them. We'd always keep the fish and take them home and eat them.
“We were never aware that we might be eating fish that were contaminated with heavy metals.”
Niland now suspects that his spinal cord cancer, the ovarian cancer that killed his older sister and the brain cancer now afflicting his younger sister are the result of growing up and living on the edge of what, in 1983, became a U.S. Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site.
The ponds are part of the Anaconda Smelter site, which is one of three components of the Upper Clark Fork Superfund Site.
Unlike some other parts of the overall site, the ponds, even when the cleanup is complete, will never be fit for humans to live on. The most EPA officials hope for is that grass will grow and wildlife will return.
Portions of the site already boast vegetation - native grasses or barley, planted as part of the rehabilitation process. But much of it remains a dry and dusty wasteland, with only a few pools of water in toxic Kool-Aid colors of blue, rust and teal.
Only in the past couple of years was the area - which contains a small cemetery - entirely fenced off.
Niland suspects the arsenic contamination below the surface of Arco's waste site is slowly moving toward Opportunity, possibly contaminating wells and soil. And he worries about toxic particles in the air, especially when high winds whip through the waste repository and blow dust toward town.
Arsenic is a known carcinogen, but there's no evidence to back up claims of an unusually high cancer rate in Opportunity, county officials say.
The amount of arsenic in the Deer Lodge Valley is not enough to make residents sick, according to Carol Ballew from the Department of Public Health and Human Services.
According to the National Cancer Institute, Anaconda-Deer Lodge County, which includes Opportunity, ranks 14th out of 56 counties in cancer rates across Montana.
Not all residents in Opportunity subscribe to the belief that their town is - or could soon become - an unhealthy place to live. Some see it as getting better.
“When I first came down to Opportunity, you couldn't keep a horse over two years. The arsenic would kill them,” said Don Wyant, 80, who worked for the Anaconda Co. for 32 years as a pipefitter. “It would eat through the top of their heads and they'd go wacky.”
Wyant said neither he nor his children, who once swam and hunted ducks around the ponds, has health problems related to the mining waste. The dust situation, he adds, is improving.
“The dust ain't even a tenth as bad as it used to be years ago.”
Opportunity residents, nevertheless, have been told to take precautions.
The Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry (ATSDR), a division of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, told residents not to eat, smoke or chew gum outside, and not to eat homegrown rooted vegetables, said resident Maureen Robinson. It also recommended washing children and animals every time they come inside to keep dust outdoors.
“I think when ATSDR comes and tells you you're safe if you do these things, that's a pretty good indication to me that there's a problem,” Robinson said.
Watch a video of scenes from the Opportunity Superfund siteIn Milltown, nearly 100 miles downriver from Opportunity, traces of arsenic began showing up in residents' tap water in 1981 - a result, it turned out, of mine and smelter waste that washed down the Clark Fork River and collected behind Milltown Dam.
The aging dam was serving little purpose by then - though it was keeping some contaminants from drifting down the Clark Fork through Missoula. In 1996, an ice jam led to an emergency release of water at the dam, flushing large amounts of contaminated sediment over the spillway and killing an estimated 50 percent of the fish downriver.
NorthWestern Energy (the dam's owners) and Arco (the company liable for the contamination) fought to keep the dam in place, but the Missoula City-County Board of Health and city and county leaders - with support from numerous environmental groups - successfully pushed to remove the dam as part of the EPA-ordered cleanup process.
That left only the question of where to put the millions of tons of contaminated sediment pulled from Milltown Reservoir.
Under the Environmental Protection Agency's original Milltown cleanup plan, the waste was to go to Bandmann Flats, on the Clark Fork floodplain near East Missoula.
But that led to an outcry from residents of Milltown, Bonner and Missoula, and a push to adopt an alternative plan, suggested by Arco and Envirocon, a Missoula-based company hired by Arco to do much of the Milltown cleanup.
Rather than pump the sediment to nearby Bandmann Flats, it was suggested, why not load it onto trains and ship it to Opportunity?
The waste repository in Opportunity - unlike the more pristine land near Missoula - was already contaminated, the companies said. Opportunity was closer to the mining and smelting operations that produced the waste. And in Opportunity, the sediment - because it contains enough nutrients to support plant life - could be used to cover the more toxic waste already there.
In effect, backers of the plan seemed to be saying what was toxic in Milltown could be topsoil in Opportunity.
The EPA, after a series of hearings, approved the plan, awarding the rail shipping contract to Montana Rail Link, which, like Envirocon, is owned by Missoula billionaire Dennis Washington.
Under the new scheme, plans for Canyon River - a proposed golf course and upscale subdivision adjacent to the original dumpsite - were able to continue. Developers avoided what one said would have been a “kiss of death.”
To residents of Opportunity, the contaminated sediment was portrayed as helpful mulch.
That the sediments would be harmless once they reached Opportunity is a claim that got blown a little out of proportion, said Michael Kustudia, head of the Clark Fork River Technical Assistance Committee.
“It's not garden soil. You're not going to grow tomatoes in it. The stuff from Milltown is full of heavy metals, but is full of organics as well - and if it can grow something, that's probably as good as it's going to get,” he said. “People in Opportunity feel like they're being dumped on, and they are.”
Arco's plans to use sediments from Milltown to “cap” toxic mine tailings at the repository have become a sticking point for some in Opportunity.
“Don't insult us by saying that it's copper- and arsenic-laden in Missoula and then it takes this 100-mile magic carpet ride and ends up in Opportunity as ‘negative vegetation,' ” Maureen Robinson said.
Pat Munday, a professor at Montana Tech in Butte, questions whether Opportunity residents had enough input, but says shipping Milltown's waste up the tracks is a smart move from the standpoint of the companies involved.
Munday compared the logic of consolidating toxic waste at the ponds to the story line of Arlo Guthrie's song “Alice's Restaurant.”
“It's better to have one big pile of garbage than a lot of little ones,” Munday said.
In Opportunity, with mining waste having arrived from Butte, Silver Bow Creek, Anaconda and now, Missoula, that pile keeps growing.
“We feel like we've basically become the dumping spot in the state of Montana,” Myers said.
While towns like Missoula and Milltown and companies like Envirocon and Jordan Contracting are profiting from the cleanup, there is one place where it has created little opportunity:
Opportunity.
“It's a win-win situation for the communities that are being cleaned up and for the companies and the workers and the families of the workers that are doing the work. Everyone recognizes that,” said Robin Saha, an assistant professor in the University of Montana's environmental studies department. “But it's really a win-win-lose situation - Opportunity being the loser.”
Saha says the small town of Opportunity is a clear-cut case of the phenomenon in which he specializes: environmental injustice.
Co-author of “Race and Waste in the United States” and other works on environmental justice, Saha said he and his colleagues have consistently found that a household's proximity to toxins is closely related to income.
Deer Lodge County, home to Opportunity, is one of Montana's poorer counties. In a state where the average income was $35,574 in 2004, Deer Lodge County residents made an average of $30,155 a year. In Missoula County, the figure was $37,172.
Opportunity's income level, rural location and lack of local government all translate into less political power, and less ability to ward off what's being dumped on them, Saha said.
“They just simply didn't have the wherewithal to interject themselves into the debate in a way that was going to really make much difference,” Saha said.
“They're typical of a community that ... ends up with the rest of society's unwanted materials. There's a wide range of environmental hazards that rural, low-income, minority communities tend to end up with,” he added.
“The question is, what obligation does the rest of society have about that problem?”
Saha, who advised the residents who would go on to form the Opportunity Citizens Protection Association (OCPA), said the state has not done its part to make sure the cleanup was carried out fairly.
“It's a state sacrifice zone,” he said. “I believe the community is entitled to compensation for what they're facing.”
Making matters more difficult, he said, the dumping comes on top of seeing the bottom fall out of their economy 20 years earlier.
When the smelter in Anaconda halted operations in 1982 and Arco announced plans to demolish the facility, the steady jobs disappeared. Young people left, seeking opportunity elsewhere.
Most residents in the area - if they don't find work at the waste repository - travel to jobs at the nearby state mental hospital in Warm Springs or the state prison in Deer Lodge.
It was after a meeting with Saha that Myers and other residents, in 2004, formed OCPA.
“One of our slogans when we first started off was, ‘You got your way, we had no say,' and that's basically how it's been since Day One,” Myers said.
The group aims to educate Opportunity citizens and act as the community's mouthpiece in dealing with government and corporate organizations that don't always heed individual voices, Myers said.
“That Milltown stuff was supposed to stay in Missoula,” said Niland who, because of his concerns about cancer risks, joined the group as spokesperson.
“They discovered they'd rather build a subdivision in that area where they were going to store it. So it ended up coming to us. We didn't have no choice in the matter. They told us it was coming and that was the end of it.”
OCPA has been partly successful in distancing the town from the waste repository - at least in name. The county, at OCPA's urging, passed a resolution renaming the Opportunity Ponds the BP-Arco Waste Repository.
Despite the resolution, EPA, for record-keeping purposes, still uses the former name.
Not everybody in town supports OCPA's effort, and some fear it will lead to a drop in property values.
“If making people aware of the contaminants around their property lowers their property values, then so be it,” Niland said. “That's the way it goes. I feel that my life is worth more than my property value, and if other people don't think that way, then as far as I'm concerned, they have their heads in the sand.”
The state, EPA and Arco need to offer the people of Opportunity some assurances, OCPA members say.
“We're going to keep after them until they do something,” Niland said. “At least uphold the state constitution that guarantees us a healthy lifestyle.”
Tom Lewis thinks so, too. He's a partner in the Great Falls law firm Lewis, Slovak and Kovacich, hired by Opportunity residents to represent them in a planned lawsuit against Arco.
The company should help pay for property damages, Lewis said, citing the recent Montana Supreme Court ruling that required Texaco to pay for the cleanup of an underground oil leak in Sunburst, which the company abandoned more than four decades ago.
In 2001, nearly 100 property owners and the Sunburst School District sued Texaco with Lewis' firm as their counsel. The court sided with residents based on the Montana Constitution's guarantee to a healthy environment, and ruled in August that Texaco must pay $16 million to clean up Sunburst and pay damages.
“I think people ought to clean up their messes - big corporations, everybody,” Lewis said. “They (people in Opportunity) have the right to have their land free of pollution. They have a right to have that cleaned up.
“If somebody dumped their garbage on your property you'd expect them to clean it up, right?”
Just outside of Opportunity rest some
250 million cubic yards of contaminated material.
And more is coming in every day from Milltown Reservoir and Silver Bow Creek.
When the last of the Milltown sediments are hauled to the site, the newest addition will cover a fifth of the site's 4,000 acres of smelter tailings.
Charlie Coleman, the EPA's Superfund project manager at Opportunity, said combining all of the toxic materials into one site makes it easier for Arco to manage and monitor the waste and provides a fertile topsoil to grow vegetation.
The Milltown sediments, which will equal 1 percent of the total toxic material at the site, present less of a dust problem than the tailings, which are a finer material more easily picked up by the wind, he said.
“The dust was a real concern,” he said, “and it is being addressed.”
Growing vegetation, such as wild grasses, is Arco's method to keep the toxic material in the ground and out of the air. The company also sprays a polymer over land not yet capped.
While surface water around Opportunity is polluted with toxins such as arsenic, the EPA and Arco say the well water Opportunity residents use for drinking, bathing and cooking is safe and uncontaminated.
Wells are regularly tested and, in two cases where toxins exceeded the limits, Arco paid for new wells to be dug.
The water from Opportunity's wells originates high in the mountains and flows in deep aquifers under the community. Because water from the settling ponds flows toward the Clark Fork River rather than Opportunity, the deep aquifers are protected from contamination, Coleman said.
While government drinking water standards are the same across the country, there are no uniform national standards for soil.
Coleman said the cancer risk for living in Opportunity and Anaconda, or for working at the repository, does not exceed the one in 10,000 risk level adopted at Superfund sites by the EPA.
In fact, the EPA and Arco are so confident in the safety of living near the repository ponds that Arco hopes to sell plots of land below the smelter stack hill that were converted to grassland over the past eight years.
“(The lots) are perfectly suitable for industrial consumer development,” Arco project manager Gavin Scally said.
At the waste repository itself - its entrance is marked with a memorial to Brian David Nelson, a 42-year-old Opportunity resident and Jordan Contracting employee who died when his bulldozer overturned in the ponds in January 2006 - development isn't a consideration.
Housing and commercial uses will never be allowed, and even when the area is converted to grassland, no one can say for sure if the improvements will last.
“There will always be a responsibility to manage this forever,” Coleman said.
Leslie Stone grew up in Opportunity and moved back in June to care for her father, retired from 40 years at the smelter.
One of the first things she did was to have her father's blood and her own tested for arsenic and lead levels.
The tests showed their arsenic levels were both negligible, she said, though his were slightly higher than hers. She plans to have additional tests periodically to make sure those levels don't rise.
Stone says she can see the logic in bringing the sediments to Opportunity. “It probably makes sense - but it's uncomfortable to live so close to it - and it's really uncomfortable because you don't have any say in it.”
Despite the potential hazards of living next to the country's largest Superfund site, many residents would rather put up with the toxic waste next door than move.
Some Opportunity residents are concerned that the EPA will buy out their property and relocate them, just as the agency did with the town of Mill Creek in 1987, when high levels of arsenic in the water made living in the community hazardous.
However, Arco project manager Scally said that moving Opportunity is “simply not on the radar.“
John Meshnik, who was born in Opportunity, served in the Navy, worked as a meat cutter in Anaconda and now lives next door to his childhood home, doesn't see any risk either.
Meshnik, 80, whose father worked in the smelter for 43 years, says he's not worried about toxic dust or water contamination, and he thinks Arco deserves nothing but praise for cleaning up a mess it inherited.
OCPA members, he says, are out to score a fat settlement: “I think what they want is the geedis (money).”
Niland says that is not the case.
“We're not looking for a payday,” Niland said. “I just want to be happy and be able to raise my grandchildren in a community where I feel comfortable raising them. I don't want them to get cancer.”
University of Montana journalism students Mary Hudetz, Sepp Jannotta, Jake Grilley, Suhan Chen, Karen Plant, Amber Kuehn, Kristine Paulsen, Erica Rose Simpson, Emma Schmautz, Rachel Cook, Murphy Woodhouse, Miller Resor and Morgan Frederick contributed to this story.
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Tammie Siders-Subitch wrote on Oct 19, 2008 7:36 PM: