Caroline Fraser

Yeah.

They closed the plant in 1986.

Yeah.

They claimed that they cleaned the inside of the smokestack, but –

So, yeah, in Tacoma, they carted away tons of soil.

They took, you know, they went into people's yards.

They tested all of the yards and told people, OK, you're going to have to replace the soil.

And so, yeah, they went in and they, by this point, ASARCO had declared bankruptcy and the EPA eventually had to take over the whole thing.

But they, you know, the EPA got an unprecedented environmental bankruptcy settlement out of ASARCO, which was close to $2 billion.

I think it was the highest settlement that they'd ever gotten.

But it had to clean up about 20 different Superfund sites, including the one in Idaho, in Coeur d'Alene, which they've been working on that for decades.

years and still haven't finished.

But in Tacoma, they actually did replace the soil in many, many people's yards.

But, you know, they run out of money.

I mean, I think on places like Vashon, a lot of that was on the southern part.

I think you could request soil replacement in some of these places, but it wasn't necessarily guaranteed, depending on where you live.

Yeah, and of course they have to take that soil somewhere.

So in Tacoma, they took it to some special landfill.

But, I mean, one of the really crazy things that happened as a result of closing the smokestack there was that they took that arsenic kitchen that I was talking about, the one that had been up in Everett, and some of the most contaminated parts of the buildings that were part of the whole smelter compound,

And the Osarko promised that they were going to take all that stuff and put it somewhere else.