Montana Site Ruined By Copper Smelter To Be Cleaned Up Anew

A subsidiary of London-based oil giant BP agreed to finish its cleanup of a 300-square mile (776-square kilometer) site in Montana that’s contaminated with arsenic and other pollutants from decades of copper smelting and to repay the US government $48 million in response costs, Matthew Brown reported for the Associated Press (AP).

Photo Insert: A mine in Montana

The company also committed to finishing cleanup work in residential yards in the towns of Anaconda and Opportunity. It also will clean up soils in the surrounding hills and address the remaining piles of contaminated waste at the site.

Arsenic and toxic metals spewed from a 585-foot-tall smokestack in Anaconda for nearly a century and the pollution settled into the ground for miles around. It’s the toxic legacy of southwestern Montana’s mining days when copper ore processed in Anaconda was used to electrify the United States.

Opportunity resident and former smelter worker Serge Myers, 77, said any additional cleanup work done under Friday’s agreement would be beneficial.

But he remained disappointed the remediation plan being used won’t clean residential yards unless they contain more than 250 parts per million of arsenic — a level that Myers and other residents have said is arbitrary and still unsafe.

"There’s hot spots in some areas. Everybody knows that. I wish things had turned out differently where we really had more cleanup work than we had done,” said Myers, who worked at the smelter for 17 years.

The “Copper King” Marcus Daly and the Anaconda Copper Mining Co. began smelting copper ore from Butte in 1884. In 1977, ARCO purchased the Anaconda Co. and inherited vast lands polluted with arsenic, lead, copper, cadmium, and zinc from ore-processing operations and stack emissions.

Later, under the federal Superfund law, ARCO became retroactively liable for that contamination. Three years after Atlantic Richfield shut down the Anaconda smelter in 1980, the US Environmental Protection Agency designated it as a Superfund site because of the risk to human health and the environment.

The major concern was high concentrations of arsenic in the soil and water, a contaminant that can cause cancer and a range of other diseases.

WEEKLY FEATURE : MVP Group Keeps Lights On During Pandemic