Toxic Legacies

Bunker Hill smelter circa 1984

In his novel Bleak House, Charles Dickens invented the interminable lawsuit Jarndyce and Jarndyce to satirize the dysfunctional British court system. A real-life Jarndyce case just settled in U.S. federal court illustrates the glacial pace at which hazardous waste cleanup disputes get resolved and undermines the arguments of those who want to weaken environmental enforcement.

Hecla Mining Company has agreed to pay $263 million plus interest to resolve a lawsuit dating back 20 years. In 1991 Hecla and other mining companies were sued by the Coeur d’Alene Tribe over damages to natural resources in Idaho’s Silver Valley caused by some 100 million tons of toxic mining waste released into local waterways over the decades.  A smelter used by the companies caused massive lead emissions that contaminated soil and showed up at high levels in the bloodstream of local children. The federal government joined the case in 1996.

The lawsuit was filed after years of efforts by the mining companies to evade responsibility for cleaning up one of the country’s most polluted areas, which was designed the Bunker Hill Superfund site in 1983. The federal government began spending several hundred million dollars on the cleanup—costs that the lawsuit was meant to recoup. (The eventual cost would surpass $2 billion.)

The corporate defendants made that recovery process as difficult and time-consuming as possible. One company, Gulf Resources and Chemical, went bankrupt in the 1990s, leaving little in the way of assets. Another, Asarco, also filed for bankruptcy in 2005 in an apparent attempt to sidestep huge environmental liabilities around the country, but the U.S. Justice Department was later able to get the company that took it over, Grupo Mexico, to pay $1.8 billion for cleanup costs at more than 80 toxic sites in 19 states, including $436 million for the Bunker Hill site.

The new Hecla settlement is welcome news, but the fact that it has taken nearly three decades from designation of the Bunker Hill site to this financial resolution indicates there is something seriously wrong with the Superfund system (and the courts).

Ironically, the Bunker Hill story is in many ways a best-case scenario in that the federal government was able—eventually—to recover a substantial portion of its cleanup costs.  In numerous cases, responsible corporate parties no longer exist or don’t have adequate assets.

Congress anticipated this problem when it established the Superfund program in 1980. It created a trust fund for the program that received revenues generated by excise taxes on two highly polluting industries—petroleum and chemicals—as well as a corporate environmental income tax. The sources boosted the trust fund balance to nearly $4 billion by end of 1996.

The authority for these “polluter pays” taxes expired in 1995, and the balance began to dwindle, reaching zero in 2004. In recent years, Congress has kept the fund alive through modest appropriations, but these are subject to political whims.

Last year the Obama Administration called for reinstatement of the Superfund tax, giving a boost to the lonely efforts of Oregon Rep. Earl Blumenauer and New Jersey Senator Frank Lautenberg. However, given the current composition of Congress, that proposal seems to be going nowhere.

Unfortunately, the choice is not simply between a Superfund program financed by polluting industries and one funded by the general public. If some conservative groups had their way, the Superfund program would be eliminated outright or weakened by transferring responsibility to the states.

Think how that would have played out in Idaho, where state officials kept their distance from the Bunker Hill case until the last minute, when they signed on to get a cut of the money from Hecla. For years, those officials (along with members of the state’s Congressional delegation) vilified the Environmental Protection Agency for aggressively pursuing the Bunker Hill cleanup while they said little about the companies that caused the mess.

That anti-EPA attitude is, alas, all too common today among corporate apologists both in Washington and in many states. The Superfund program, for all its limitations, remains one of our main tools for dealing with the legacy of corporate environmental irresponsibility. It needs to be on as firm a footing as possible.

Leave a Reply