Los Arcos residents chronicle ailments & lawyer up; TCEQ winds up antimony soil contamination investigation; Anzon Divestitures builds sky high piles of road material

By María Eugenia Guerra

After the completion of a state funded clean-up of antimony-laced soil from the streets of Los Arcos, residents of the Hwy. 59 colonia continue to chronicle the incidence of respiratory illness, eye irritation, and rashes from exposure to a soil mix that also contains Dolomite lime and ferrous sulfate heptahydrate. The soil, which came from the old Anzon smelter that backs up to Manadas Creek as it meets the Mines Road, was spread pro bono on the streets of Los Arcos in mid-March 2005 by Webb County Judge Louis H. Bruni and soil and trash hauler Gerardo Resendez.

While some Los Arcos residents are in the process of working with a McAllen attorney who takes environmental cases, the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ) takes to completion the investigation it initiated just before a June 16, 2005 meeting with the residents of Los Arcos.

Final documents from that investigation, according to Andrea Morrow of the TCEQ's public information office, will “list possible responsible parties and identified violations.” Morrow said the investigation report should be completed by early August and that it would list further action such as an issuance of a Notice of Violation or a Notice of Enforcement Action. Possible action, Morrow said, could include penalties and cost recovery for the cleanup.

The mid-June investigation conducted by the TCEQ strike team evaluated samples from Los Arcos and the Anzon smelter site now operated by AI Divestitures.

Results of those samples ordered by Webb County and the TCEQ at Los Arcos yielded antimony levels as high as 3,500 mg per kilogram, levels alarming enough for the TCEQ to order an emergency excavation and clean-up of the streets. The criteria for examining the potential danger of antimony in the environment is the federal non-waste water application guideline that permits a leachable amount of 1.15 mg of antimony per liter. Applying that compliance criteria in the code of federal environmental regulations, samples at Los Arcos yielded leachable antimony at different sites at 7.46, 8.92, 5.67, 10.9, and 9.53.

Samples taken from the massive piles of AA Base product (as it is called by AI Divestitures) at the old Anzon smelter site evidenced antimony levels of 989 mg per kilogram and a total leachable value of 4.83 mg per liter, well in excess of the 1.15 mg per liter regulatory standard set by the federal government.

Upon order of the TCEQ, nearly a thousand cubic yards of contaminated soil -- the largest-ever recorded dumping of hazardous materials in local history -- was excavated and removed from the streets of Los Arcos. Though the TCEQ asked AI Divestitures in a demand letter to AI's contractor John Sullivan to conduct the cleanup at Los Arcos, AI elected only to accept the removed material from the state-lead removal and not participate in the cleanup.

AI Divestiture's vice-president Jamie Kalanta, in response to questions posed by LareDOS, answered through Laredo attorney Margaret Jones Hopson of the firm of Jenkens and Gilchrist.

Kalanta clarified for LareDOS that the demand letter was not sent to Anzon directly, but was sent to a contractor for the company. “We have informed TCEQ that we will cooperate with them in addressing any issues of concern to them,” Kalanta said.

In an overview provided to LareDOS of AI Divestitures' role in the production of its AA Base material and its operations in Laredo , Kalanta wrote, “Earlier this year and without the company's knowledge, approximately 72 cubic yards of our processed material apparently was delivered to Los Arcos and used to improve a road. We understand that a local company that purchases some of our product and resells it to others donated the material at the request of a local official.”

Kalanta said that though Anzon accepted nearly 1,000 cubic yards of material from the streets of Los Arcos, only 72 cubic yards originated at the Anzon site.

The AI AA Base, according to Kalanta, is typically composed of 78% soil containing approximately 0.3 to 0.05% antimony, 8% ferrous sulfate heptahydrate, 10% Dolomitic lime, and 4% water. Kalanta said the soil comes from the Anzon site itself, and that ferrous sulfate heptahydrate and lime “make the process of stabilizing the material possible. By mixing them with material on our site and soil, the antimony is bound to the soil, minimizing its ability to migrate to surrounding soil and water.”

Though Kalanta downplayed the toxicity of ferrous sulfate heptahydrate by saying it was “commonly used in a number of agricultural products,” the compound's Material Safety Data Sheet lists acute and chronic health hazards as “irritation to trachea and lungs, breathing difficulty, irritation to skin, very irritating to eyes, gastrointestinal irritation, shock liver damage, tachycardia and death. Symptoms of overexposure include stinging of eyes, breathing problems, stomach ache, acidic or sour taste.” Many of those symptoms mirror the health complaints of the residents of Los Arcos.

Describing his company's operation in Laredo , Kalanta said, “AI Divestiture's Laredo operation recycles material generated from historical operations at the site. We process soil that had been previously contaminated with antimony to meet the stability standards set by the TCEQ. After processing, the material is sold and distributed for use as a road bed material and for other construction projects.” He called the AA Base “an effective and environmentally stable construction material” that “meets TCEQ standards for leachability.” He said that AI tests samples from every 1,000 tons that is processed, testing that exceeds the TCEQ's standard of testing from every 1,500 tons.

Kalanta declined to discuss the findings of TCEQ testing at the Anzon site, tests that documented leachable values of 4.83 mg per liter, well above the 1.15 mg per liter regulatory standard. He wrote, “As a precaution we voluntarily stopped selling this product and will not start selling it again until we have fully reviewed the current situation. Having said that, let me emphasize that the product has been treated and stabilized to meet TCEQ standards.”

For the most part, Kalanta's answers were issued in veiled corporate-speak, rarely offering a direct answer to a direct question.

AI Divestitures may have put a halt to selling the product for the time being; however, aerial photos of the old smelter site taken by LareDOS show a flurry of activity in the building of stockpiles of AA Base exposed to the vagaries of wind and weather. If, as Kalanta wrote, AI's “only operation at the site is to treat the material from past operations to a condition that meets TCEQ standards,” are there piles of hazardous materials on the site subject to runoff?

What is to keep any of the soil mix (that bears antimony, lime, and ferrous sulfate heptahydrate) from becoming airborne in the stiff winds that routinely sweep across this region? Does the retention pond on the site have the capacity to capture runoff from the piles and the site in general to keep it from Manadas Creek and the Río Grande ?

Does the TCEQ accept that wind and rain do not move the material in those piles and that the retention pond built in the mid-1990s keeps from Manadas Creek antimony, lime, and ferrous sulfate heptahydrate, as well as soils saturated with oxides, the flame retardant compound Ongard, and other chemicals used over decades in smelter operations?

And what of the dump site next to the retention pond documented in a December 1996 addendum to the Baseline Risk Assessment by Geraghty and Miller, a site includes that includes waste, plant trash, buried drums, empty bags from the smelter's bag house, antimony bags, pallets, and construction debris? What had been in those drums: what was in the bags from the bag house? How much of that dump percolates into Manadas Creek, a water of the State of Texas that drains into the Río Grande ?

“Since signing an agreement with the TCEQ (at that time the Texas Natural Resource Conservation Commission) in 1995,” Kalanta said, “we have made cleaning up the facility a high priority, as demonstrated in our investments to date of more than $12 million and by working closely with the TCEQ. We are removing any antimony contamination by treating the materials to standards set by the TCEQ. The result is that site is being cleaned up so it can be returned to productive use and potentially polluting material is being recycled into a useful product.”

The agreed order that Corporate citizen Anzon, Inc., signed in 1995 was entered without any factual or legal admission of liability or violation by Anzon of the Texas Solid Waste Disposal Act or the Texas Water Code. Anzon was ordered by the TNRCC to “manage all newly generated waste materials” in compliance with the Texas Water Code. The TNRCC also ordered Anzon to submit closure plans for the facility.

For its decades of environmental assault on the watershed of Manadas Creek, Anzon was fined a paltry $6,000 (of which $3,000 was deferred), and gave the Río Grande International Study Center a $2,000 donation and an inoperative atomic absorption spectrophotometer.