May 22, 2005

NW NATURAL AGAIN ASKS TO DELAY CLEANUP
Summary: For more than 10 years, records show, regulators have told the utility to dig out a tarry mass polluting the Willamette River
The federal government says a toxic tar reef that juts into the Willamette River near downtown Portland poses such "an unacceptable risk to human health and the environment" that it should be dug out this summer.

But on May 6, NW Natural, the gas company responsible for the pollution, suggested postponing the removal for three years while it looks for a way to clean up the tar and nearby ground pollution all at once.
While regulatory agencies have yet to examine the merits of the latest proposal, it continues a pattern of delay that has frustrated them for years.

The utility's request for more time comes a year after NW Natural -- under pressure from the federal government -- agreed to remove the tar body, suspected of releasing tar balls and cancer-causing chemicals into the Willamette. The Environmental Protection Agency wanted the tar body, the most visible feature of industrial pollution that has made a 6-mile stretch of the river a Superfund site, removed last summer.

Public documents spanning more than a decade -- including a May 13 EPA letter to NW Natural that cited the unacceptable risk to human health -- show that NW Natural has repeatedly delayed cleanup-related work to remove tar from the water and adjoining land, despite directives from federal and state officials. Meanwhile, the consultants' reports pile up and the tar remains, like a tumor on the Willamette's spine.

The rectangular-shaped tar mass covers one-quarter acre and is as much as 10 feet thick. Nearly one-third of it is exposed during low water, and the black, crumbly surface is solid enough to walk on.

"It's been too long already," says Travis Williams, Willamette Riverkeeper executive director and one of the community advisers monitoring the Superfund cleanup. "This site has been known about for years, there was a commitment to do it a year ago and NW Natural is a healthy, robust company that has the ability to get it done.

"There is no excuse to wait."

NW Natural says it will take out the tar, but that it needs time to form a comprehensive and cost-effective cleanup plan. "We said we don't understand it well enough to remove it right away," the utility's Bob Wyatt says of last year's delay. In the meantime, NW Natural has suggested covering the tar with sand while it conducts further study.

In the end, NW Natural's ratepayers may pay part of the cleanup bill. In its 2004 annual report to the Securities and Exchange Commission, NW Natural estimated costs for removing the tar body and cleaning pollution at the neighboring site ranged from $4.3 million to $12 million. The company expects insurance to pay $8.3 million, and it will ask the state for permission to charge ratepayers the rest.

The pollution costing the company millions now is a byproduct of highly profitable use that lasted for decades.

In 1913, the Portland Gas & Coke Co., known as Gasco, began manufacturing gas from oil on the Willamette's west bank, between what later became the Fremont and St. Johns bridges. Within a decade, the plant was making the lowest-cost gas in the nation by selling byproducts.

The work created huge volumes of waste that Gasco dumped directly into the Willamette and, after 1941, into four settling ponds. Once pipelines brought natural gas to the Portland market in the 1950s, Gasco closed the plant and changed the company name to NW Natural Gas Co., later shortened to NW Natural. The company still stores liquid natural gas and has two tenants on the site. It sold the site's southern portion, later developed by Siltronic Corp., which makes the silicon wafers that computer chips are printed on.

But the tar remained.

Pollution spreads
By the 1970s, tar waste from the four ponds had been mixed with soil and spread between the Siltronic and NW Natural site. Test drilling in 1998 encountered tar and tar oils at 60 feet. Tar oils have turned up in two neighboring wells near the river at 120 feet.

In 1993, NW Natural entered a voluntary cleanup agreement with the state.

On June 1, 1998, state Department of Environmental Quality managers threatened to turn the Gasco site over to the federal government because NW Natural had made little progress studying the pollution.

The EPA moved to list the entire Portland Harbor -- a 6-mile stretch of the Willamette that brackets the Gasco site -- for a Superfund cleanup. NW Natural was among seven parties, including the Port of Portland and the city, to fight the federal intervention. The Portland Harbor Group said the EPA would make cleanup too time-consuming and costly.

"We feel very strongly that we want an Oregon solution," Gregg Kantor, then NW Natural's spokesman, told The Oregonian in November 1998.

Once the EPA assumed cleanup oversight in 2000, the company joined the Lower Willamette Group, eight companies along with the city of Portland and the Port of Portland. Together they have spent more than $19 million on studies.

"We acknowledged there's some work to do there," says Steve Sechrist, a NW Natural spokesman. "We're trying to be good guys, basically. That's pretty much how it is."

Onshore at the Gasco site, where the state continued to press for more action, NW Natural's attorneys and consultants continued to resist. On Aug. 8, 2002, DEQ managers wrote in a memo, "In spite of seven years of investigation at the former Gasco site, no meaningful cleanup efforts have been initiated to date."

DEQ increases pressure
The company did perform some work -- including a four-month experiment on whether fungus could remove the benzene in the waste to nondetectable levels and options for stabilizing the riverbank.

But by Jan. 28, 2004, DEQ again notified the company that its failure to install key groundwater monitoring wells called for stronger measures. "If NW Natural remains unwilling to perform this work, which DEQ believes is necessary to ensure protection of human health and the environment, we will consider all available and appropriate enforcement actions," wrote James M. Anderson, DEQ manager of the Portland harbor. The company recently submitted a plan for the requested work, which is under review.

Until the EPA made it an urgent matter in an enforcement agreement on April 28, 2004, NW Natural was not planning an early removal of the tar body, according to a letter that Wyatt, the company's environmental-compliance specialist, sent the EPA. That would mean waiting until at least 2008.

In the agreement, the EPA said the tar body, and the chemicals leaking from it, presented an "imminent and substantial" health threat to humans, aquatic animals and birds.

Nobody knows precisely how much threat the tar and its chemicals pose to boaters, swimmers, industrial workers and wildlife. But tar balls have turned up downstream, and flooding can accelerate the flow of chemicals from the tar body into the river. Even under normal river conditions, the EPA has concluded, "significantly high levels" of carcinogens are dissolving from the tar body into the river.

The cancer-causing chemicals found in extremely high concentrations in the tar include certain polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. Chemical concentrations of PAHs in some tar-body samples exceed by more than 1,000 times the levels at which they are suspected of causing harm in fresh-water environments.

Benzene is another carcinogen present at the site. Other poisons detected include arsenic and cyanide.

The EPA's Sean Sheldrake, the project manager for early action at Portland harbor, says analysis by NW Natural's consultants show toxic levels so high that "if you have an organism on the tar body, it would likely die."

NW Natural's Bob Wyatt and Sandi Hart, the company's manager for risk, environmental and land, say the cleanup is proceeding much more quickly than at comparable Superfund sites. They say the utility wants to ensure it doesn't spend millions on a partial solution only to find out that work has to be redone at additional expense.

The EPA managers say the tar body must be removed and doing it sooner will not only eliminate a threat, but will also help answer the question that the state and NW Natural have disputed for years -- whether toxic chemicals are flowing into the river from the Gasco land.

Brian Cunninghame, who represents the Confederated Tribes of Warm Springs' interests in the Superfund site, says the tribes have been frustrated by delays. But he says their biggest concern is that the contamination be removed entirely.

"When they do the job," he says, "we'd just as soon have them finish completely instead of just doing a part."
Alex Pulaski: 503-221-8516; alexpulaski@news.oregonian.com
Julie Sullivan: 503-221-8068; juliesullivan@news.oregonian.com