By SHERRY DEVLIN of the Missoulian
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will propose a Superfund cleanup plan for Milltown Reservoir that both removes the most polluted sediments in the pond and the dam that holds them in place, the director of the agency's Montana office said Wednesday.
To be released in February, the $90 million proposal will include a reconfiguring of the Clark Fork River's channel, restoration of the confluence of the Clark Fork and Blackfoot rivers, and a slurry pipeline that delivers contaminated sediments to a permanent repository on high ground south of the river.
"It's permanent and it's complete," said John Wardell, director of EPA's Montana office. "Fundamentally, the dam removal-sediment removal option is the remedy that deals with all the problems. It does the best job of cleaning up both the river system and the aquifer. And it lasts; we never have to go back."
Bolstered by Gov. Judy Martz's call for Milltown Dam's removal in her State of the State address Tuesday, Wardell said he has no worries about the recommendation.
"We've collected enough information that we feel that what we do will, in fact, work," he said. "As we get ready to release the proposed plan, we have both the technical information and very strong statements of support by the governor and the leadership in the local communities."
Martz's endorsement, Wardell said, "is hugely important."
A surprise to many, the governor's support represents an evolution that Wardell also experienced. "I think it was the step-by-step collection of information and the realization that a whole lot of things could be accomplished - and without causing an environmental problem as a result of doing the cleanup," he said.
"And we can do it at a cost that makes it make sense," he said. "We really want to do something here that, in fact, is permanent."
By removing Milltown Dam and nearly 3 million cubic yards of polluted sediments, the EPA can rid the Milltown-Bonner aquifer of arsenic pollution, Wardell said. The sediments are the source of the arsenic; the dam both encourages the collection of sediments and creates the hydraulic force that drives the arsenic into the drinking water.
With the sediments gone, the groundwater would rinse itself of arsenic in as few as four years, said Russ Forba, the EPA's Milltown project manager. Some water wells in Milltown and Bonner have been off-limits for 20 years because of the arsenic pollution.
Washed downstream from mines and smelters in Butte and Anaconda, about 6.6 million cubic yards of tailings dropped out of the river and into the reservoir at Milltown over the past 95 years. The sediments are polluted with copper, lead, zinc, manganese and arsenic - threats to both fish and people.
The EPA will not, however, propose removing all of the sediments, Wardell said.
"You take enough sediments out so you clean up the contaminated aquifer, and you ensure that once you have a free-flowing river that the contamination isn't at a level that damages the aquatic environment," he said. "You'll never completely remove the contamination. Clearly, we are not taking all of it out."
Forba said the EPA has spoken with a landowner who owns 140 acres on the south side of the Clark Fork downstream from the dam, and has told him the property could be selected as a repository for the reservoir sediments.
A pipeline would deliver the slurry of water and sediment from the reservoir to the repository.
"It's way up, high and dry and out of the floodplain," Forba said. "We would take the sediments we think are contributing to the groundwater problem in Milltown."
Never even part of the cleanup options under consideration until recent years, the dam's removal came to the forefront after an ice jam broke up on the Blackfoot River in February 1996 and headed - in a five-mile-long block - for Milltown.
Even though the jam itself stopped on the river's last curve before reaching the reservoir, blocks of ice eventually came crashing into the pond from both rivers, scouring the contaminated sediments and sending them downstream in fish-killing concentrations.
By the following spring, fisheries biologists could not even find any fish to count in the river downstream of the dam. That event, Wardell said, "caused a lot of folks to look hard at the dam."
The more they looked, the more problems they found with the aging structure - which was built of rocks and timbers in 1905 and 1906. Most recently, engineers found voids in the fill material and cracks in the dam's face.
"At least from my perspective, the evidence suggests that the dam would need a great deal of rehabilitation, and at a much larger expense than simply taking it out," Wardell said.
"It is possible we would have made a different decision a number of years ago," he said. "But thankfully, we didn't have to because we kept taking a look at it. And to give a lot of folks their due, there were people in Missoula who asked us to take a look at it from the perspective of dam-out, sediment-out. They deserve a great deal of credit for insisting that it be examined."
Dam removal-sediment removal advocates greeted Wardell's recommendation much as they did the governor's endorsement - with applause. "A lot of things came together," said Gary Matson, who lives in Milltown and is a member of the Friends of Two Rivers.
"The ice scouring was when people realized we had a worse hazard than we originally thought," Matson said. "That got the ball rolling."
"The other thing was a rich resource of concerned and knowledgeable people at the EPA and at Missoula County," he said. "And then the governor was really receptive to what people had to say. I am grateful for the opportunity she gave us to come and talk with her. She actually listened to us.
"I don't know many states where you can call the governor's office, ask for a meeting and actually get one. I really feel a deep sense of satisfaction, but also a challenge. There is still a lot to be done."
"We are ecstatic," said Tracy Stone-Manning, executive director of the Clark Fork Coalition, which three years ago launched a campaign calling for the dam's removal. "It is absolutely the right thing to do for the river."
While the coalition will spend considerable time reviewing and critiquing the details of the EPA's proposed plan once it is released, Stone-Manning said, the overall notion that the cleanup will include removal of both sediments and the dam is "incredibly gratifying."
"It means that democracy works," she said. "Ten thousand people said this is what the community wants, and the government has been responsive to that. And the government has been responsive to science, and that's what good government should do."
(Over the past year, the EPA's Helena office has received 10,000 comments on the Milltown cleanup, the vast majority of which called for dam removal-sediment removal. The agency will have an official 60-day comment period once the proposed plan is released in February.)
"Missoula County wholeheartedly believes this is the right thing to do," said Peter Nielsen, environmental health supervisor at the City-County Health Department. "It is the only truly permanent remedy for the site, and also will be in the best long-term interest of the public. We definitely wholeheartedly agree that it should be done, and need to start looking closely at the details."
Nielsen said he always thought dam removal would be "a good thing," but discounted it as an unrealistic objective for years and years. What, then, made it a serious option?
"It was a series of events," he said. "The ice jam in 1996, the listing of bull trout as a threatened species, Montana Power Co. getting out of the business, learning about the shortcomings of the dam, those are a few of the key things."
For the past year, Milltown Dam has been owned by NorthWestern Energy, which was forced to accept the dam when it purchased Montana Power's electric and gas transmission network. NorthWestern officials refused to comment Wednesday on the EPA's upcoming decision.
Company spokeswoman Claudia Rapkoch said a written statement prepared after Martz's State of the State speech was "all we are able to say right now."
Said the statement: "NorthWestern Energy remains committed to working with all interested parties in Montana to fashion a remedy for the Milltown Dam Superfund site. We have been working closely with Montana and federal environmental officials, and believe that substantial progress has been made. We look forward to a resolution of the issue in the near future."
Most of the cleanup bill will go to Atlantic Richfield Co., which merged with Anaconda Copper Co. in 1977 and thereby inherited responsibility for what eventually became the nation's largest Superfund cleanup site - 120 miles from Butte and Anaconda, along the Clark Fork River to Milltown.
On Wednesday, Arco vice president Sandy Stash said her company remains convinced the best option is to keep Milltown Dam in place and with it, the reservoir sediments. The dam can be upgraded, she said. "It is and will continue to be structurally sound."
"We continue to have concerns about the removal," Stash said. "We fear the current risks are overstated and the risks of implementation is understated. Our biggest concern is that there are grave risks to the implementation of the remedy. To be blunt, the potential to put dirty water over the dam is of huge concern to us."
Arco is in the midst of secret negotiations with the EPA and the state, in hopes of reaching a settlement on the Milltown cleanup, Stash said. All parties to the negotiations, which also include NorthWestern Energy, have agreed to keep the talks confidential.
"We remain hopeful that we will be able to come up with a resolution that works for everyone," she said. "We've spent $750 million in Montana in the last 10 years, basically working with a lot of different parties to come up with workable solutions. And we are doing our best to come to the same end point at Milltown."
Reporter Sherry Devlin can be reached at 523-5268
or at sdevlin@missoulian.com.