Old Kaiser potliners to be covered
John Stucke - Staff writer
Spokane _ Superfund cleanup plans to cap a mountain of old potliners at Kaiser Aluminum Corp.'s Mead smelter drew little public interest Wednesday night.
Ten people attended a Department of Ecology hearing designed to give Spokane residents a chance to comment on how Kaiser plans to solve its Superfund problems.
The discarded potliners, forming a massive pile on the smelter property, have polluted groundwater with cyanide and fluoride. The contamination has reached the Little Spokane River and was detected more than 20 years ago in wells.
Kaiser provided bottled water to residents with drinking water problems and their homes eventually were hooked to the municipal water system. Kaiser's Mead property was listed as a Superfund site in 1983.
Now the company and state regulators believe they have an economical plan to seal the potliners under a rainproof cover. Later, the two sides will hammer out a deal to pump polluted water from the ground, remove the cyanide and fluoride, then force the water back underground.
Although no one submitted formal comments Wednesday, Steelworker Robert Kenyon criticized the cleanup agreement.
"This is just a quick fix," he said after the meeting.
Paul Skyllingstad, Ecology's project manager for the site, said the agreement offered the best cleanup for the money.
Other cleanup alternatives ranged from doing nothing to forcing Kaiser to haul the potliners to a hazardous waste dump -- at great cost.
Potliners, made of carbon, are used to line steel pots, effectively keeping the molten metal from reaching the shell. After heavy use, the potliners absorb toxic chemicals used to make metal and must be discarded.
For years, the company dumped them behind the plant.
After the meeting, Skyllingstad said that despite being the preferred cleanup remedy, the cap isn't a fix forever.
"At some point it will fail ... everything that's engineered eventually does," he said.
In fact, few cleanups are permanent, Skyllingstad said.
One goal of the Superfund is to leave a record of the legal process and physical work that goes into cleaning up a site, he said. That way, future generations can revisit sites, if necessary.
He said the synthetic cap should last a long time because it will be covered and protected from corrosive sunlight.
The second part of the final cleanup will be exhaustive water treatment, Skyllingstad said.
That work "may take 20 to 30 years. We don't know," he said. "That's a rough guess."
Kaiser managers said the cleanup plan would best serve the community. The cap will stop the source of pollution, and the pumping project will treat the existing contamination, at a price the company can afford. From start to finish, the cost has been estimated at about $18 million.