Community worried about Smurfit toxins as EPA pushes forward

Laura Lundquist

(Missoula Current) There was very little new information presented at the Frenchtown Smurfit Stone Citizens Advisory Group meeting, and that was the problem.

On Thursday night, the discussions during the Frenchtown Smurfit Stone Citizens Advisory Group meeting dealt mainly with the history of how the group and the Smurfit Stone site came to be and where they stand. But that’s because the advisory group has yet to receive much information on the latest round of contamination sampling that the Environmental Protection Agency carried out in 2024, said Elena Evans, Missoula City-County Environmental Health manager.

Evans presented a history of what is known about the contamination that occurred while  the Smurfit Stone pulp mill was in operation between 1957 and 2011, which included ponds for storage of toxic wastewater from the milling process, some of which was annually discharged into the Clark Fork River, and dumps where 55-gallon drums of chemicals were buried. The result is the site contains many of the toxins associated with the pulp milling process, including dioxins, furans, and heavy metals such as arsenic and chromium. PCB’s are also present due to electrical transformers on the site.

After the mill closed in 2011, Smurfit Stone claimed that the site was clean and ready for development. But the EPA determined that to be false and started sampling the site in 2015 as part of the remedial investigation of contamination. Since then, Missoula County and community members have had to push the EPA and the new property owners to do better sampling across the massive mill site.

If the EPA doesn’t know where all the contamination exists, it can’t identify all the risk so it won’t be dealt with in the cleanup. But during each Trump administration, the EPA has curtailed its sampling efforts and tried to push on to the next step.

During the first Trump administration, Trump-appointed EPA Region 8 Administrator Greg Sopkin said the EPA budget was limited so less effort would be made to decontaminate the area unless it would be used for housing. KC Becker replaced Sopkin under the Biden administration and she agreed in 2022 to more sampling, particularly of sludge and wastewater areas and groundwater.

Sampling occurred in 2023 and 2024 but it wasn’t according to the work plans that the agencies and community had devised, Evans said. In particular, the EPA hasn’t done quarterly groundwater sampling to see if measurements change with changing water levels. The EPA also only used wells located mostly on the eastern end of the property near the river.

“Monthly meetings were supposed to take place through the Frenchtown Technical working group. It was supposed to be a feedback of information, but a lot of those minutes were summarized in ways that weren’t reflective of the concerns that the community had,” Evans said. “Right now, almost none of the data is available. We’re uncertain whether the data collected reflects the workplan.”

In November, the EPA reported lab results from a subset of wells sampled in 2023, which appeared to show that heavy metals, namely arsenic and chromium, were the greatest risk in groundwater. But the laboratory had failed to properly test the 2023 samples for dioxins, furans and hexavalent chromium.

Now with Trump back in office, a new Trump-appointed administrator has replaced Becker in the Region 8 office, and the EPA is moving on. In March, EPA project manager Allie Archer said her team didn’t have all the data because the labs where the samples were sent “are being really slow.” But she said the EPA has all the data it needs to start the feasibility study because “you cannot study everything.”

Bruce Sims, former U.S. Forest Service hydrologist, said that if the Clark Fork River experienced a 50-year flood - the likelihood is greater than 60% that could happen in a 50-year period - the earthen berm along the river could fail and the site would be flooded. So it’s important to know where contamination is because flood waters could carry those chemicals back into the Clark Fork River, Sims said.

Evans and the advisory group are concerned because once the EPA finishes the remedial investigation and moves on to the feasibility study and the cleanup, it’s unlikely that new information would be included in the remedial assessment. So the cleanup could end up being minimal, leaving some waste for the community to clean up in the future, Evans said. That’s happened in several Montana Superfund sites, including Whitepine Sash in Missoula, the Stimson Mill site in Bonner, and Arrowstone Park in Deer Lodge.

“Working with the commissioners, the communities and the partners here, we tried to bring the lessons to bear that we learned from other cleanup sites in the area,” Evans said. “What’s concerning here, it seemed pretty clear that the path was moving toward leaving waste in place. What’s concerning is that’s what happened in Deer Lodge at Arrowstone Park.”

As part of its cleanup plans, the EPA has often used “waste in place,” a technique where the contamination is left on the site in lined repositories that are capped. In Deer Lodge, the EPA did a waste-in-place cleanup in the 1990s that capped a mine tailings site containing arsenic, lead, copper, cadmium and other heavy metals and said the groundwater wasn’t to be used and the site wasn’t to be developed. The town turned it into Arrowstone Park, but now, the caps have eroded, exposing the contamination.

Most recently, for the Columbia Falls Aluminum Company site, which contains tens of thousands of tons of contaminated soil from an aluminum smelting operation, the EPA released a cleanup plan in January that will leave most of the waste in place and surround it with a concrete wall. The EPA rejected a citizens’ proposal to completely remove the toxic soil and ship it to an Oregon landfill, saying it was too costly.

Evans highlighted parts of a Frenchtown Community Newsletter that the EPA issued for May that says unacceptable levels of arsenic and manganese contamination in the shallow aquifer directly below the site but then added in parentheses that “the shallow aquifer is not a drinking water source.” That harkened back to the EPA’s decision regarding groundwater under Arrowstone Park.

“What I see, between the parentheses of it not being a drinking water source, is it crosses off one of those few ways that there’s more risk on the site. If there isn’t risk, it isn’t usually cleaned,” Evans said. “We’ve been concerned all along about having the process drive us toward waste-in-place. And this information certainly got out in front of the work group reviewing it or seeing it or any of the data even being released or data qualified to get on the (EPA) website.”

Evans said it would be better if the Smurfit Stone cleanup was more like that of the Milltown Dam and reservoir in 2008-2009, where the EPA removed contaminated sediment to the Warm Springs area and left a clean area for the river to recover.

“This is a time that is important for the community to come together,” Evans said. “It’s important for us to think about what we can hope for, what we could fight for, what we want to see, and what that could do for the next generation.”

Contact reporter Laura Lundquist at lundquist@missoulacurrent.com.