Sierra Club Funds Texas, Mexico Groups to Fight Smelter

WASHINGTON, DC, August 20, 2004 (ENS) – The Sierra Club is funding a new bi-national effort to address lead contamination the environmental group says is caused by the American Smelting and Refinery Company (ASARCO) in El Paso and across the Mexican border in Cuidad Juárez. ASARCO disputes that its smelter is responsible for the contamination.

From 1887 to 1999, the El Paso ASARCO Plant produced lead, copper and other metals, and sulfuric acid. In the process it has emitted hundreds of tons of lead, arsenic and cadmium, contaminating neighborhoods in both El Paso and Juárez, the Sierra Club said.

In 1999, ASARCO temporarily suspended smelting operations due to low worldwide copper prices and the closure of several copper mines, and the plant was placed on care and maintenance status.

But lead and arsenic contamination still plagues residents of El Paso and Cuidad Juarez.

That contaminated legacy will be addressed by the Organización Popular Independiente, A.C. and the El Paso Group of the Sierra Club. They each received a grant awarded by the Sierra Club’s Beyond the Borders - Mexico Project, which works to strengthen grassroots environmental and community groups in Mexico.

ASARCO's smelter in El Paso is blamed for lead and arsenic contamination in surrounding properties. (Photo courtesy ASARCO)

El Paso Group of the Sierra Club; Rio Grande Chapter, will undertake a project to seek cleanup and appropriate health care for residents on both sides of the border.

And in Ciudad Juárez, the Organización Popular Independiente, A.C. will work to raise public awareness of environmental health problems posed by ASARCO, especially lead contamination, in the Felipe Angeles colonia and its extensions, the Sierra Club says.

This project will determine the breadth and scope of the health problems in the community and form a neighborhood committee of community promoters and recognized community leaders.

Training on environmental health and social leadership will be provided, and with the participation of the Sierra Club group in El Paso, the Organización Popular Independiente will develop public awareness campaigns within the Ciudad Juárez communities and identify and solidify local networks of leaders and activists.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has determined that the ASARCO site in El Paso has combined lead, copper, and zinc slags on site which have resulted in documented environmental damages. "Heavy metal contamination of water and sediments in the Rio Grande River have been linked to these slag deposits," the EPA says.

But the agency's attempts to get ASARCO to clean up the contamination have been rebuffed by the company.

“The EPA has determined that decades of emissions of arsenic and lead from the ASARCO copper and lead smelters into the El Paso community have resulted in contamination of the soil in residential yards throughout the city of El Paso, Texas,” the company acknowledged in 2002. But the firm says, " Preliminary results of speciation tests on soils from yards in the EPA investigation area have shown no indication of smelter emission particles were found in any of the samples."

"Other sources account for the metals present in the soils," the company says.

ASARCO, originally known as the American Smelting and Refining Company, originated in 1881, when Robert Safford Towne arrived in El Paso after touring the mines in the Mexican state of Chihuahua. Two years later he organized the Mexican Ore Company, a small plant that sampled and graded ore from the Mexican mines.

By the 1920s ASARCO was the largest mining operator in Mexico. In 1951 ASARCO built a 612 foot smokestack to reduce ground level concentrations of sulfur dioxide. In 1967 the company built an 828 foot stack, designed to help alleviate local air pollution. In 1969, however, El Paso still had a higher concentration of lead in the air than any other city in Texas.

In the spring of 1970, the city of El Paso filed a $1 million suit, later joined by the state of Texas, charging ASARCO with violations of the Texas Clean Air Act. In December 1971 the El Paso City-County Health Department reported that the smelter had emitted 1,012 metric tons of lead between 1969 and 1971 and found that the smelter was the principal source of particulate lead within a radius of a mile.

In 1990 an $81 million modernization program began, involving a smelting technology that improves operating efficiency and production while capturing 98 percent or more of the sulfur dioxide emissions. In the early 1990s ASARCO plant in El Paso employed nearly 1,000 people and produced almost a million tons of raw materials per year.

In July 2002, the EPA ordered ASARCO to clean up 45 El Paso homes where arsenic or lead levels exceed EPA’s allowable levels, but the company "respectfully" declined to do the cleanup.

"EPA has also not yet adequately identified the sources of the arsenic and lead present in the recent sampling," the ASARCO Vice President of Environmental Affairs Thomas Aldrich wrote to EPA Region 6 officials.

The Kern Place neighborhood of El Paso, where some properties have been found to be contaminated with lead. (Photo credit unknown)

"We are very concerned with EPA’s apparent eagerness to enmesh much of El Paso in the Superfund process," Aldrich wrote. "We think it better public policy to gather all the facts and realistically assess whether any risk actually exists, rather than prematurely invoking the Superfund process with all its attendant consequences - adverse publicity, depressed property values, community stigma, etc."

If contamination is ever attributed to ASARCO, wrote Aldrich, the 1996 Asarco/TNRCC Agreed Order, also incorporated into a 1999 federal court Asarco/EPA Consent Decree, provides a vehicle for remediating off-site contamination.

On August 5, 2004, an ASARCO spokesman repeated these positions at an Open Forum hosted by the Kern Place, Mission Hills and Rim Road Associations and Texas State Senator Eliot Shapleigh.

"The EPA has yet to do the tests to determine if elevated levels of metals in the soil are a health threat," the spokesman said.

"At this point, ASARCO has not even been told which residences EPA wants to clean up, what level of ground cover exists at those residences, or how EPA intends to conduct its activities," he said.

ASARCO has asked the EPA to complete the steps identified in the Texas Department of Health/Agency for Toxic Substances and Disease Registry Health Consultation dated July 11 of 2002 to determine if there is a health risk before removing any soil.

Levels that justify soil removal in other Western states are much higher than those that EPA Region 6 wants to use in El Paso, the spokesman said. "For example, Denver is using 128 ppm arsenic, Tacoma, Washington is using 230 ppm arsenic and Montana is utilizing 250 ppm arsenic. These levels are 5-10 times higher than the 24 ppm currently proposed by Region 6."

But the Sierra Club is not waiting for the dispute between the EPA and ASARCO to be resolved before addressing the pollution in El Paso and Cuidad Juarez.

Stephen Mills, director of the Sierra Club’s International Program, said Thursday, "Communities on both sides of the border have the right to a clean environment, so the message we’re sending to the polluters with these grants is that you can run but you cannot hide."

The Sierra Club believes solutions can be found in a bi-national context. "Pollution doesn’t recognize borders," said Jenny Martínez, Sierra Club program officer. "To ensure healthy air, land and water we must work together bi-nationally. We cannot protect our shared environment unless we develop effective relationships between Mexican community groups and Sierra Club members along the border."