Company’s Cleanup of Polluted Bay May Not Purge Acrimony

Even on a Texas coast peppered with working-class villages rarely visited by outsiders, Point Comfort has long stood out. Huddled amid the silos and smokestacks of an industrial zone, the town overlooks one of the most polluted spots on the Gulf Coast.

For years, a metal refinery here sent mercury gushing into Lavaca Bay, forcing officials to ban commercial fishing near the plant. This winter, regulators and the company that operated the plant, Alcoa Inc., are embarking on a plan to save the bay, largely by dredging 200,000 cubic yards of contaminated soil from its floor.

But there is little evidence that the plan will end acrimonious debate among regulators, executives and fishermen.

The fishermen, in particular, have shouldered the burden that has come with placing an enormous amount of heavy industry on a picturesque coast. They have fought to protect the bay, only to come under attack from neighbors who say they are chasing away the only work in town. The Alcoa plant alone employs more than 1,000 people, greater than the entire population of Point Comfort.

State officials promise that a recent settlement with Alcoa will make Lavaca Bay as healthy as any other pocket of the Gulf Coast within 15 years. Environmental advocates don’t buy it. They base their skepticism on what they say is a Texas tradition of winking at environmental problems to protect industry.

“Everybody just wants this to go away. And it’s not,” said Diane Wilson, a fourth-generation commercial fisherman and an activist. “We’ve got a real problem.”

Alcoa, a major producer of aluminum products and household items such as Reynolds Wrap and vinyl siding, opened its Point Comfort plant in 1948. The town is 90 miles northeast of Corpus Christi.

Originally, the plant was an aluminum smelter; today, bauxite is refined there and shipped to a smelter where metal aluminum is forged. For years, mostly in the late 1960s and 1970s, the plant generated wastewater that contained mercury, a toxin that may cause cancer and can harm fetuses and damage the stomach, brain and kidneys.

The wastewater was dumped into the bay, carrying, at one point, 67 pounds of mercury into the water each day.

In the 1970s, Texas officials began closing parts of the bay to oyster harvesting. Since then, restrictions have been added for crabs and finfish, and the bay has been named a federal Superfund site.

In 1992, the Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife filed a lawsuit seeking to clean up the bay, and was joined by a host of state and federal agencies.

In a two-part settlement reached in December, Alcoa, which has spent an estimated $40 million to study and clean up the damage, agreed to spend at least another $11.4 million to finish the job. The settlement also includes Alcoa World Alumina LLC, a separate company 60% owned by Alcoa Inc. that bought the plant in 1994.

According to the settlement, the sediment dredged from the bay’s floor would be stored on an island that has been turned into a disposal facility, said Alcoa senior counsel Ralph Waechter.

As part of the settlement, the companies have agreed to donate 729 acres of Alcoa-owned coastal land to a nearby federal wildlife refuge and build a series of fishing piers and a boat ramp.

“The public lost a period of time when they couldn’t keep the fish they were catching,” said Don Pitts, a Texas Department of Parks and Wildlife official who oversees restoration projects. “It is easier for the public to relate to an action to compensate them for lost services rather than money that they would try to translate into projects later on.”

Pitts and Waechter said the deal marks an important victory for Point Comfort. Waechter said the agreement came only after the company solicited extensive input from the community.

“If we were really off-base we would have heard about it a long time ago,” he said. “The community there is not only happy but is excited about this.”

Not Wilson.

Over the last two decades, Wilson has become something akin to the Erin Brockovich of Lavaca Bay, a full-time thorn in the industries’ saddle. She once tried to sink her shrimp boat in the middle of the bay to draw attention to pollution.

Wilson says the agreement does not go far enough. Among other things, she said, it should have incorporated a widespread assessment of the health of area residents and should have included more provisions to protect commercial fisheries, which she says have been decimated.

“All of these corporations were allowed to come in, and what do we have now? We’ve got a Superfund site. We’ve got fishery closures. We’ve got dolphin die-offs. This has been a dirty little secret down here. And this is a Band-Aid solution.”

Jim Blackburn, a Houston attorney who has fought for Lavaca Bay’s cleanup, said the settlement should have forced Alcoa to not only remove contaminated soil from the bay but transport it away from the coast.

However, regulators and company officials insist the soil deposit on the island-disposal facility will be designed to withstand a powerful storm. Blackburn said he had “a lack of faith that our engineering capabilities are greater than a hurricane.”

“We have essentially allowed Alcoa to claim Lavaca Bay as their own disposal site,” he said. “We basically gave away one of our resources.”

Waechter disputed that assessment.

“There is nothing perfect in this world,” he said. “But this is not a walk-away deal. This is not like cleaning up a landfill and off you go. We live there. If there is a problem, we can’t walk away from it.”