The Asarco smelter has belched toxic metals over Denver’s Globeville neighborhood for more than a century, and its shuttering will be a relief.
An industrial vestige from days when mining helped open the American West, the plant has polluted the soil and groundwater in the adjoining neighborhood. Asarco’s recent bankruptcy filing raised concerns that the company would walk away from the final cleanup responsibilities at the 90-acre site. The Sierra Club contends the company is using bankruptcy to discharge cleanup liabilities estimated at $500 million to $1 billion for sites across the country.
However, a key Asarco official told The Post Tuesday that a plan is in the works to sell the Globeville property, which is located near the intersection of Interstates 25 and 70.
Tom Aldrich, Asarco’s vice president of environmental affairs, expects his firm to announce a proposed sale of the property to a commercial developer sometime in the next week. The plan, which must be approved by bankruptcy court officials, would include provisions to cover the $10 million to $15 million of remaining cleanup work.
We’ll withhold any conclusions until details are released, but we’re encouraged that a sale could provide for both cleanup and property redevelopment. The alternative is bleak. Although the Globeville cleanup plan follows Superfund standards, the site never was officially added to the national priorities list, said Victor Ketellapper, of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. These days, getting on the list and waiting for Superfund money is like hoping to win the lottery.
A tax on the oil and chemical industries that went to the nation’s best-known environmental cleanup fund expired in 1995, and Superfund has seen only nominal budget increases, while needs have expanded. John Huggins, Denver’s economic development director, said cleanup at a site like Asarco’s is key to redeveloping the land.
Globeville residents have waited long enough. Lawsuits filed in the 1980s yielded settlements largely forged in the 1990s that replaced the topsoil in residents’ yards. Asarco announced it would stop processing toxic cadmium in 1993, but by then the damage was done.
We’re hopeful the development deal Asarco is working out will be the start of a new identity for a community that has been dominated by the company and that suffered environmental indignities that linger yet today.
