I remember the first time I
tasted the air near the Asarco copper smelter in El Paso, Texas. It
was 1990, and my wife and I had just moved there from Tucson,
Ariz., to start teaching jobs in the English Department at the
campus of the University of Texas-El Paso. I soon met two
professors who shared my love of hiking, and the three of us were
returning home from an all-day trip to Guadalupe Mountains National
Park, when we saw a dense cloud hanging over the freeway near the
university.
Then a heavy sulfuric taste suddenly coated
my tongue, and I felt like I’d just inhaled fumes from a
struck match. I recall saying, “This stuff has got to be
toxic.” One professor said flatly, “They open the
stacks at night so people don’t see the pollution in the
daytime.”
The disquiet I felt at having to teach
across the road from Asarco was palpable, and turned to depression
whenever I had a night class. On those occasions I’d jump
into my car after class l and get away as fast as possible,
relaxing as I approached the West Side and our home. We soon
learned though, that if the wind blew from the south, bad air would
quickly reach us. The telltale sign was a headache that persisted
until a fresh breeze swept through the city.
In large
part, it was Asarco’s smelter pollution that convinced us in
1997 to move to Las Cruces, N.M., 40 miles up the highway. But even
here on rare instances, when an ill wind blows north from Mexico,
the normally clear air in the Mesilla Valley hazes over. So we were
ecstatic when Asarco shut down in 1999, thanks to a precipitous
drop in copper prices. A few years after Asarco closed its doors,
the EPA began to investigate, gathering soil samples from the
Texas-El Paso campus and surrounding neighborhoods. The results
were not surprising to many locals: arsenic and lead in exceedingly
high levels. The Environmental Protection Agency named Asarco as
the guilty polluter; Asarco officials angrily denied blame,
pointing instead to brick-making plants in Mexico.
Then
in October 2006, a New York Times article revealed that Asarco and
its Corpus Christi subsidiary, Encycle, had conspired to dispose of
toxic waste during the 1990s, and that at least 300 tons of that
waste were non-metallic residues from a now-defunct chemical
warfare depot at the Rocky Mountain Arsenal outside Denver. Rather
than properly recycling the materials, Asarco had burned them in
its El Paso smelter.
The El Paso community was outraged,
and many residents, including some former Asarco employees
who’d long suspected the smelter as the source of their
illnesses, came forward to protest. Activists then discovered,
through public information requests to the Texas Commission on
Environmental Quality, that the EPA and Asarco had reached an
agreement in 1999, that included a landmark penalty against the
company of $20 million. Incredibly, the details of Asarco’s
illegal abuses were withheld from the public and kept secret for
seven years. The Times reported that the Justice Department lawyer
who negotiated the 1999 settlement explained that the “EPA
memorandum detailing Asarco’s violations was for internal use
and was not meant to become public.”
This would be
horror story enough, but guess what: Copper prices are up again,
and Asarco wants to reopen.
The company has begun a slick
campaign to convince area residents that reopening would create 380
high-paying jobs. A slick TV commercial shows a job-hungry mob of
hard-hat-wearing folks yelling in unison: ”I want to work for
Asarco!”
Asarco has applied for a new air permit
from the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality, whose executive
director said recently that Asarco might be able to renew
operations if it agreed to repair corroded equipment. The public
comment period ends June 18, and a commission hearing may come as
soon as this August.
Not surprisingly, there is
widespread opposition to reopening the smelter. El Paso city
officials have vowed to fight Asarco, and the state of Chihuahua,
Mexico, strongly opposes copper-smelting operations, as does the
New Mexico Environment Department. Astonishingly, Asarco has its
supporters. Recently, I heard a conservative talk-radio host in El
Paso lamenting the lack of progress in the city: “How are you
going to attract new businesses here when they see how you’ve
treated Asarco?”
The better question is this:
“Why would anyone want to move to a city that has a copper
smelter in the middle of town?”
Robert
Rowley is a contributor to Writers on the Range, a service of High
Country News in Paonia, Colorado (hcn.org). He writes in Las
Cruces, New Mexico.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
