Excerpt from KRTV, September 19, 2017. Read the full article here.
Four years ago, the site of the former ASARCO smelter in East Helena was crowded with buildings. Today, almost all of them are gone.
It’s the most obvious sign of the long-term project to clean up the Superfund site, led by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and the Montana Environmental Trust Group, which took over the site as part of ASARCO’s bankruptcy settlement.
For more than 100 years, ASARCO conducted lead and zinc smelting operations in East Helena. Soils around the smelter were contaminated with lead and other heavy metals, while chemicals like arsenic and selenium leached into the groundwater, spreading beneath East Helena in large plumes.
The EPA laid out three key steps to address the contamination: placing a cap over the site, redirecting Prickly Pear Creek and removing limited amounts of contaminated soil. Work on the cap and the new channel for the creek were completed last year.
Betsy Burns, the EPA’s remedial project manager for the ASARCO site, said the 60-acre cap over the smelter area is one of the largest in the U.S. It’s about three feet of clay, designed to protect people and wildlife from the materials underneath and to keep rain and snow from carrying those substances into the groundwater.