Economic Dream Is Now Eco-Nightmare

The view from Major and Bama Williams’ backyard is a desert of gray sand dunes, abandoned machinery and stagnant pools of sludge.

Corroded door hinges, breaker boxes and hubcaps protrude from the mounds of gray, powder-like salt cake. The corrosion has tinged the spongy ground yellow, orange and blue. Doors swing back and forth on vacant buildings.

Neighbors say waste from the closed aluminum recovery plant is not only killing their plants but is also making them ill.

Red River Aluminum began 13 years ago as an economic hope in a rural area desperate for jobs. So great was its promise that the state supplied nearly $1.3 million to get the plant running and to keep it going.

But records show the plant violated environmental regulations from the start, storing toxic residue without permits. The collapse of the aluminum market in the early 1990s caused financial woes.

Red River declared bankruptcy in 1999, leaving behind a trail of bad debts and 70,000 cubic yards of contaminated material.

Also left behind were the Williamses and other residents of the Pride neighborhood, where laundry dries on outdoor lines and friends visit from their porches or hunt squirrels in nearby woods.

“I just want the stuff moved so we can go on with our lives,” said Bama Williams, who bought her home 23 years ago.

As the state Health Department tests the neighborhood and interviews residents, she warns her grandchildren and their playmates to stay away from the site.

Eight-year-old Colby Ivey, playing on the street outside the Williams home on a recent afternoon, said he had heard rumors about the stockpiled waste.

“That stuff,” Colby said, “it can kill folks.”

There was a time when the plant promised to sustain folks instead.

In 1987, unemployment in Lafayette County topped 10% when Red River Aluminum set up shop on the site of a closed Georgia Pacific mill and promised to hire 40 local workers.

“That was a pretty good shot in the arm for a small town like Stamps,” recalled Mayor E.W. Johnson. “It was a good thing that just went bad.”

In September, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared the plant a Superfund site, designating $2 million for its cleanup. But preliminary cleanup estimates range from $2.4 million to more than $10 million, according to a 1998 analysis by the Arkansas Department of Environmental Quality.

“The impacts to the environment at Red River are tremendous,” said Mike Bates, head of the ADEQ’s hazardous waste division.

Attorney Robert Depper Jr. said Red River founder Dub Ferguson has been made the “fall guy” for the problems. Depper represents Ferguson in bankruptcy proceedings.

“He was taking an opportunity to eliminate a waste product and turn it into something that was productive,” said Depper, describing a system designed by Ferguson, an engineer, to extract aluminum from dross, the byproduct of conventional aluminum smelting.

“It was a creative and innovative idea,” Depper said. “The market just didn’t work at that time.”

In 1987, Ferguson and a group of mostly local investors applied for and received an $800,000 loan from the Arkansas Development Finance Authority’s bond financing program, created in 1985 as part of then-Gov. Bill Clinton’s economic development initiative.

“It was reusing an older industrial site that had been shut down. It pumped a lot of money and wages into the local economy,” said Gene Eagle, vice president of the finance authority.

Eagle said the agency’s representatives were impressed when they toured a similar plant in Tennessee. And the agency was impressed that Ferguson and his investors were willing to make a 45% down payment, he said.

In agreeing to make the loan, the agency focused on the economics of rural southern Arkansas, leaving environmental issues to state regulators, he said.

“You cannot always have environmentally friendly industry,” he said.

ADEQ spokesman David Kern said Red River opened without the proper permits for storage of the salt cake waste. A substantial amount of waste had accumulated before his agency became aware of the problem, he said.

The original 18 Red River shareholders included Tim Covington, a Lewisville grocery store owner and 16-year member of the Lafayette County Quorum Court.

Several sawmills, a charcoal maker and a carpet factory had closed before Red River’s opening, Covington said.

“We needed something to create jobs, and those of us in banking and retail were trying to do that,” he said. Still, within two years of the plant’s opening, most of the local investors had decided to pull out.

As early as 1988, the ADEQ was corresponding with Ferguson about disposal of the salt cake.

In 1990, the agency started receiving complaints from citizens that their trees and grass were dying from water runoff at the site. In 1991, the agency sent the plant a letter noting problems with the permit application for surface water runoff controls. It fined Ferguson in 1992 for not having the proper permits for holding ponds.

In a 1994 letter to regulators, Ferguson laid blame for his financial problems on the collapse of the world aluminum market, caused by the introduction of cheap aluminum from Russia.

But Ferguson said he hoped to correct the environmental problems with a $496,000 loan from the state’s industrial development agency, to buy salt cake disposal equipment.

A salt cake crusher was installed at the plant in 1995. But problems with water runoff persisted.

A 1998 study for ADEQ found the salt cake contained corroded copper, chloride, cyanide, chromium, lead and nickel.

The copper is “a very severe aquatic toxin,” said Patrick Hammack, senior on-scene coordinator for the EPA, which recently began building berms to contain runoff.

The study says the material sits above the Sparta Formation, a major aquifer that supplies drinking water for parts of southern Arkansas and northern Louisiana.

Further tests will determine whether the aquifer would be threatened further by a plan to bury the material on site.

“It’s not the perfect solution, [but] it may be the only solution we have,” Hammack said, because an alternative plan, hiring a recycler to haul the material away, would be too expensive.

Although health officials have not completed an assessment of the site, they say drinking water supplies appear uncontaminated in testing so far and they do not expect to find damage to the aquifer. They are conducting further tests to assess chromium traces found in some houses, to determine whether they pose a hazard.

But residents say all the testing makes them nervous.

“I try not to think about if there is something harmful out there. We have to wait and see if we are infected with anything first,” said Carolyn Thompson, who lives nearby.

Attorney William Magee represents 130 nearby residents and former Red River employees in a lawsuit against the Texas company that supplied the aluminum dross for recycling at Red River.

Magee said his clients suffer from respiratory problems, rashes, skin blisters and nosebleeds.

Josie Hester’s home abuts the vacant plant. In October, the state suspended placement of foster children in her home because of concerns about possible health effects of the waste.

Hester’s foster children and several of her grandchildren had mysterious blisters on their arms and legs after playing near the piles of salt cake this summer.

She blames exposure to the salt for her shriveled roof shingles, corrosion of the chain-link fence separating her property from the plant and contamination of a pond where her family used to fish. As a test, Hester placed pennies outside her home several months ago--and they have dissolved into green specks.

“On a really hot day,” she said, “you stand out here and it seems like you are going to burn the soles of your shoes.”