Milltown, Montana and the History of Superfund Implementation

University of Montana ScholarWorks at University of Montana Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers Graduate School 2012 Restoring the "Shining Waters": Milltown, Montana and the History of Superfund Implementation David James Brooks The University of Montana Follow this and additional works at: https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd Let us know how access to this document benefits ou.y Recommended Citation Brooks, David James, "Restoring the "Shining Waters": Milltown, Montana and the History of Superfund Implementation" (2012). Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers. 836. https://scholarworks.umt.edu/etd/836 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate School at ScholarWorks at University of Montana. It has been accepted for inclusion in Graduate Student Theses, Dissertations, & Professional Papers by an authorized administrator of ScholarWorks at University of Montana. For more information, please contact [email protected]. RESTORING THE “SHINING WATERS:” MILLTOWN, MONTANA AND THE HISTORY OF SUPERFUND IMPLEMENTATION By David James Brooks MA Anthropology, University of Montana, Missoula, Montana, 2004 BS Biology, Adams State College, Alamosa, Colorado, 1995 Dissertation presented in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of PhD in History The University of Montana Missoula, MT May 2012 Approved by: Sandy Ross, Associate Dean of the Graduate School Graduate School Dan Flores, Chair Department of History Jeff Wiltse Department of History Jody Pavilack Department of History Tobin Shearer Department of History Nancy Cook Department of English Literature Sara Dant Department of History, Weber State University COPYRIGHT by David James Brooks 2012 All Rights Reserved ii Brooks, David, PhD, May 2012 History Abstract: Restoring the "Shining Waters:" Milltown, Montana and the History of Superfund Implementation Chairperson: Dan Flores This dissertation is a case study of a dam removal and river restoration within the nation’s largest Superfund site. In 1981, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency included Milltown Reservoir on its first list of Superfund sites. Superfund law capped two decades of the federal government’s most aggressive environmental legislation. While tracking the national story of Superfund law, my story provides a local view of how individuals, organizations, and agencies shaped the Superfund process. After the EPA designated Milltown a national Superfund site, the environment itself, persistent work within the channels of public policy, and federally-mediated compromise helped restore some shine to Milltown’s waters. Milltown is representational, rather than unique. Human health concerns, which were the primary purpose of Superfund, garnered Milltown designation. Arsenic contaminated the groundwater in a residential community. Groundwater contamination has been the most consistent and worrisome risk throughout the history of designating Superfund sites, while arsenic tops the list of contaminants reported at those sites. Nearly a century of upstream mining caused Milltown’s problem. Mining sites cost more and occur more frequently than any other Superfund cleanups. Two major corporations were responsible for funding cleanup at Milltown, whereas nearly half of all Superfund sites have two to ten responsible parties. Thus, Milltown is exceptionally representative of Superfund’s history. Using extensive archival research, government documents, oral histories, newspaper accounts and personal observation, I have written a dissertation that explores how Milltown provoked major changes in Superfund implementation and late-20th century environmentalism. The final remedy at Milltown removed an average-sized dam and restored a section of the Clark Fork River. The process increased the importance of public input in Superfund and its emphasis on restoring environments. That shift coincided with a turn toward repairing degraded landscapes by both grassroots and national environmental groups. Milltown helped foster the growth of a corporate, restoration industry. And, it helped define restoration, while pushing restorative efforts beyond the confines of its Superfund boundaries. iii TABLES OF CONTENTS PAGE ABSTRACT iii INTRODUCTION 2 CHAPTER 1 Arsenic in Old Places: Milltown’s Path to Superfund Designation 22 CHAPTER 2 Floods of Change: From Tainted Wells to Threatened Watershed 50 CHAPTER 3 Placing the Blame: Liability at Milltown and the New Superfund 89 CHAPTER 4 Seeing the River as Resource: Suing for Damages 132 CHAPTER 5 Another River Runs Through It 177 CHAPTER 6 The Campaign: Remove the Dam, Restore the River 223 CHAPTER 7 The Three Rs of Superfund: Remediation, Restoration, and Redevelopment 276 CONCLUSION 310 BIBLIOGRAPHY 317 1 Introduction The notes of a single observer, even in a limited district, describing accurately its features, civil, natural and social, are of more interest, and often of more value, than the grander view and broader generalizations of history. -Anonymous epigraph to Bela Hubbard Memorials of a Half-Century (1887) The more a site feels like a place, the more fervently it is so cherished, the greater the potential concern at its violation or even the possibility of violation. Lawrence Buell Writing for an Endangered World In 1980, the population of Milltown, Montana, was not enough to warrant a listing on the U.S. census, not even in combination with the nearby communities of Bonner and West Riverside. Most of the economic activity in those towns revolved around a plywood factory located on the banks of the Blackfoot River, just upstream from its confluence with the Clark Fork. The heyday of milling in western Montana, and hence local population, had declined since the first decades of the century. That highpoint, three-quarters of a century earlier had included the building of a modest hydroelectric dam that impounded the waters of the rivers’ confluence to produce power for the local mills, businesses, and some residents. Since 1908, the Milltown Dam and Reservoir had been fixtures of the community. All the way across the continent, Congress passed and President Jimmy Carter signed the Comprehensive Emergency Response, Compensation, and Liability Act (CERCLA) in 1980. Better known as Superfund because of the $1.6 billion cleanup trust fund the law established by taxing chemical and petroleum industries, it was meant to help identify and clean up the nation’s worst toxic waste sites. Within a year of its 2 passage, Superfund’s first National Priority List of such sites included Milltown. By 1983, the small western Montana community joined a few hundred other places as the country’s first federally designated Superfund sites. Milltown would eventually become the tail end of the largest such site in America, encompassing roughly 120 miles of the Clark Fork River watershed. Superfund capped two decades of the nation’s most vigorous environmental lawmaking. Precipitated by highly publicized environmental emergencies at places like Love Canal, New York, and Valley of the Drums (think oil barrels, rather than percussion instruments), Kentucky, the law aimed to stop, contain, and potentially clean up the dumping of toxic wastes by industries. Its namesake fund came from a tax on corporate dollars and a fundamental stipulation of the law was that the “polluter pays.” Where the Environmental Protection Agency, which oversaw the law’s implementation, could connect a viable responsible party to a contaminated site, that party would have to pay for its remediation. What happened at Milltown in the course of thirty years from its designation as a Superfund site to river restoration efforts at the site demonstrates some of the essential ways that Superfund has changed through its implementation. The final remedy at Milltown was to remove a very average-sized dam and restore a section of the Clark Fork River, western Montana’s largest headwaters of the Columbia. After the EPA designated Milltown a national Superfund site, the environment itself, individual’s persistent work within the channels of public policy, public comment, federally mediated compromise, corporate funding, a fish, and a Hollywood movie all shaped the Superfund process at Milltown. That process helped increase the importance of public input in Superfund, as 3 well as the EPA’s increasing attention to restoring environments. At the same time, environmental groups, such as those involved at Milltown, also began focusing more on restoration of damaged environments. While Superfund cleanup at Milltown did push the law and environmental advocacy in new directions, many things about how it all happened were not exactly exceptional. Dams are found everywhere in America. In her book Watershed: The Undamming of America, Elizabeth Grossman pointed out that the Army Corps of Engineers could give only a rough count of “over 75,000 dams” on the country’s waterways. While she summarized significant dam removal efforts in the late 20th century, Grossman saw those endeavors as the beginning of restoring “approximately 600,000 miles of what were free-flowing rivers.” Most of those river miles have lain stagnant for many years as the dams that impede them have persisted for decades and, in many cases, for centuries. In other words, most people live near a dam at least something like the one at Milltown, Montana.1 As a Superfund site, Milltown is almost typical; it had many of the significant features found at the “tens of thousands of hazardous waste sites”

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