Roughly 25 years ago, a few informed observers worried that the city of Deer Lodge and Powell County were accepting a pig in a poke with Atlantic Richfield’s Arrowstone Park.
Several people voiced concerns in June 1999, on the cusp of the riverside park’s dedication, about the long-term effectiveness of its wastes-in-place remedy — especially given the proximity of the park’s contaminated soils to a meandering river.
Two who raised red flags worked for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, the agency now tasked with cleaning up the mess rendered by Atlantic Richfield. At the time, the EPA was the lead agency shepherding cleanup along the Clark Fork River and Arrowstone Park was considered by many to be an improvement over a previously blighted area at one entrance to the city of Deer Lodge.
Among the ranks of the concerned in 1999 were Wayne Hadley, then a fisheries biologist for Montana Fish, Wildlife & Parks, along with Neil Marsh, federal Superfund manager for DEQ, and Kevin Kirley, a state project officer for DEQ. The Clark Fork Coalition chimed in too.
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Kirley’s observations proved to be prophetic.
“Pragmatically, after work is done and the trails are down and the benches in, it makes it difficult politically and just from a community standpoint to go back in there and tear it up,” Kirley told The Montana Standard in the days preceding Arrowstone Park’s dedication.
That tear-it-up outcome is now all but certain.
In recent years, the cap atop wastes at Arrowstone Park has deteriorated in spots, leaving bare soil areas known as “slickens,” where potential exposure to arsenic and other contaminants led DEQ to post warning signs in the park in September.
Yet pointed questions linger about how thorough DEQ's cleanup will be — due in part to budget woes dogging the Clark Fork cleanup but also affected by previous remedial agreements — and whether taxpayers might have to pony up to restore the park’s amenities after wastes are removed.
Most of Arrowstone Park is within the Deer Lodge city limits. The boat ramp is in Powell County and the county maintains the park.
Design work on a remedy continues.
DEQ said Tuesday that the agency “is conducting a complete remedy in Arrowstone Park, including removal of high-risk contaminated material, revegetation, reconstruction of the floodplain and streambanks, and [designing] institutional controls, which combined will be protective of human health and the environment.”
Yet DEQ acknowledged that “the remedial action will not consist of removal of all contamination from the site.”
Amanda Cooley, Powell County’s planning director, responded.
“The community does not want a wastes-in-place remedy,” she said. “It’s not sufficient for the long-term.
“If we are going to do it, we are going to do it right, and I am not convinced that the direction we are moving is the right direction,” Cooley said, “Our challenge is to determine how to preserve relationships, momentum and progress, and find the best way to answer these questions and keep things moving.”
She added, “The silver bullet would be more money, probably to the tune of about $10 million.”
Katie Garcin-Forba, DEQ’s bureau chief for federal Superfund work, said Wednesday that the agency has been responsive to community concerns about Arrowstone Park. She said the cleanup planned for the park is more expansive than what was originally required by EPA in the Record of Decision document for the river. A Record of Decision is a public document explaining which cleanup alternatives will be used at a federal Superfund site.
Garcin-Forba said cleanup designs must agree with criteria that include cost-effectiveness as one measure and protection of human health and the environment as another. She said agency toxicologists will be involved to monitor the latter goal.
Kathy Hadley, a co-founder in 1985 of the Clark Fork Coalition and a longtime watchdog of Superfund cleanup along the Clark Fork River, said a wastes-in-place remedy would not pass muster if there was a similarly-popular park downstream in Missoula.
She has long said there’s been a double standard for communities in the Upper Clark Fork River Basin.
“I’ve always said it’s a question of environmental justice,” Hadley said Wednesday.
Hadley noted that the agencies managed to muster forces to remove the dam at Milltown, the toxic sediments accumulated behind it and ship them by rail for deposit in the Opportunity Ponds. The Milltown site now hosts a state park.
Garcin-Forba noted the Milltown remedy also left some wastes in place.
Atlantic Richfield said in 1999 that it spent about $500,000 to build Arrowstone Park. Today, the current estimate for addressing Arrowstone’s remaining contamination, as well as the two latest phases of remediation and restoration along the Clark Fork River, totals about $3.6 million.
One key concern in 1999 was the remedy relied upon by contractors working for Atlantic Richfield. The acronym was STARS — Streambank Tailing and Revegetation Study. It was touted by Atlantic Richfield and its then adroit regional spokeswoman, Sandy Stash, as an effective and economical method for addressing soils contaminated by tailings from upstream along the Clark Fork River.
Simply put, STARS leaves tailings in place and its “in-situ” approach treats them with lime deeply tilled into the soils. The lime immobilizes many of the toxic metals that lace the tailings, Atlantic Richfield said, and allows vegetation to grow.
Yet both Marsh and Geoff Smith of the Clark Fork Coalition noted in 1999 that such treatment can actually increase the mobility of arsenic.
At the time, Stash said about 22 acres of what became Arrowstone Park were treated with STARS.
STARS had been used upstream on the Clark Fork River during a Governor’s Demonstration Project and Stash suggested the approach could play a major role in cleanup along the Clark Fork River. But problems emerged also at the Governor’s Demonstration Project. Last year, rancher Hans Lampert, whose property included some contaminated soils that were deep tilled, said the land “just kind of fell apart again” after three to five years.
The river’s floodplain was contaminated through the years, — especially by a catastrophic flood in 1908 — when wastes from mining and smelting operations in Butte and Anaconda washed downstream all the way to Milltown. Floodplain contamination was especially bad between Warm Springs and Garrison.
Under federal Superfund law, Atlantic Richfield got stuck with the cleanup responsibility because it purchased the Anaconda Co., the original polluter, in 1977.
A 2008 Consent Decree, a judicial agreement between the federal government and Atlantic Richfield, included a settlement for remediation of the Clark Fork River. DEQ agreed to shoulder responsibilities for shepherding cleanup work on the river.
Today, Atlantic Richfield cites the Consent Decree when asked whether the company has any remaining responsibility for Arrowstone Park.
“Through the 2008 Clark Fork River Consent Decree, Atlantic Richfield Company provided more than $100 million to the United States and the State of Montana to design and implement remedy/restoration projects within the Clark Fork River Operable Unit, which includes Arrowstone Park,” the company said in an email. “The potential for future remediation work at Arrowstone Park was anticipated in 2008 and addressed by the Consent Decree.”
Andrew Gorder, legal director for the Clark Fork Coalition, noted Tuesday that design work remains underway for Arrowstone Park and that the coalition is withholding judgment until there is more clarity about the cleanup plans.
He said concerns focus on how protective a chosen remedy will be for human health and the riverine ecosystem, which he noted is a dynamic system. And he said the coalition does not want Deer Lodge and Powell County to be stuck with costs to replace park amenities.
Wayne Hadley, the fisheries biologist, cited the dynamic river system in 1999 when questioning the wisdom of STARS. He said then that it wasn’t a question of whether the capped tailings would be captured by the meandering stream but when.
“I believe the position that’s been taken by the state’s experts is that STARS is generally inappropriate in a floodplain and this clearly falls in that category,” Hadley said then.
For a host of reasons, remediation and restoration of the Clark Fork River has cost more than initially projected. For one thing, EPA’s remedial investigation of the site underestimated the extent of contamination in the river’s floodplain. As work proceeds down the river, costs increase for hauling wastes to the Opportunity Ponds.
As a result, DEQ has scaled back cleanup boundaries, with plans to remove contaminants along a narrower corridor than the wider "channel migration zone" addressed in other work upstream. The agency acknowledged a year ago that this approach will leave contaminants within the river’s floodplain.
DEQ hopes to have all the Clark Fork cleanup completed by 2038 and has said settlement monies from Atlantic Richfield might run out before then.
The 2008 Consent Decree made provisions for “round robin” funding if the money runs out. In this arrangement, the EPA would be first in line to come up with $5 million, followed by the state and, finally, Atlantic Richfield.
Kathy Hadley noted that no one with EPA, DEQ, the state’s Natural Resource Damage Program or Atlantic Richfield seems eager to discuss this outcome.
Hadley said Scott Brown, who served as EPA’s project manager for the Clark Fork cleanup during the time of Arrowstone Park’s construction and negotiation of the Consent Decree, routinely assured people that the EPA recognized that the task ahead was complex and might require adjustments as reality dawned.
“Scott Brown said, ‘If we get it wrong, we’ll fix it,’” Hadley recalled.
DEQ said it hopes to break ground at Arrowstone Park in 2025.