Heading off a supermess

Biggest chore in harbor cleanup is staying out of court

By Nick Budnick

The Portland Tribune, Jan 5, 2007, Updated Oct 30, 2009 (1 Reader comment)

L.E. BASKOW / Portland TRIBUNE

Work by the state Department of Environmental Quality to prevent creosote from leaking into the Willamette River was under way in 2003, but much more needs to be done to rid the river of the toxic substances that earned it a Superfund designation six years ago.

Several suspected Portland-area polluters and owners of contaminated property received an unexpected holiday greeting last week — bearing a Seattle postmark and sent by Uncle Sam.

Rather than a cheery Hallmark message, however, the envelopes bore a warning from the regional office of the Environmental Protection Agency that time is running out for companies that have not yet accepted responsibility for cleaning up the Willamette River’s highly contaminated Portland Harbor.

The harbor is a six-mile stretch of river that is home to, among other things, major-league toxic substances like arsenic, PCBs, DDT and ammonium perchlorate, a rocket fuel from days gone by.

Six years ago the poisonous goulash, much of it in groundwater or bonded with sediment on the river bottom, put Portland on the federal Superfund map of the nation’s most contaminated sites.

But besides some preliminary work — such as sampling sediment, as well as the tissue in fish, clams and crayfish — not much of the actual cleanup work expected to be necessary has actually taken place. Rather, the companies thought to be responsible have been haggling over who would pay the bill.

Now, however, negotiations between the companies appear to have reached a turning point, one that comes with high stakes for the city of Portland as well as the companies involved.

“The severity of contamination in the harbor presents a risk to long-term human health and the health of the whole aquatic system,” said Travis Williams of Willamette Riverkeeper, an environmental watchdog group. “There’s a tremendous upside to getting this done in a timely fashion and getting it done right.”

Besides health concerns, there is the matter of cost, which would be inflated if the talks now under way disintegrate into large-scale litigation. Dean Marriott, head of Portland’s Bureau of Environmental Services, said the city, which already has spent $11 million on the cleanup, is hoping the process does not devolve into litigation, “because it’s way more time-consuming and expensive than the alternative.”

14 of 70 have come forward

Already, about $42 million has been spent on various cleanup activities around the harbor.

Because the main studies of the contamination, let alone a cleanup plan, are not done, no estimate on the total price tag has been set. Observers privately say it could run to $500 million or more.

To date, about 70 companies, agencies and individuals have been notified that they may bear legal responsibility to help pay for the cleanup. But only 14 of the entities, calling themselves the Lower Willamette Group, have accepted that responsibility by voluntarily helping fund the studies and limited cleanups that have taken place thus far.

The coalition, which includes the city of Portland as well as the Port of Portland, has been negotiating with a group of companies calling itself the Blue Water Group, which thus far has not joined in the ongoing cleanup.

The latter group includes companies like Schnitzer Steel and ExxonMobil, the oil conglomerate. Members of both groups are well-represented by some of the top law firms in Portland.

When contacted by the Portland Tribune, participants in the negotiations, as well as government regulators, mostly declined to comment or offered only scant details as to what is taking place behind the scenes.

But it appears that the two groups have been engaged in what appears to be a legal contest equivalent to a combination of dodge ball and three-dimensional chess. The ball they are dodging on behalf of their clients is the cost of the cleanup — or at least as much of it as they can possibly avoid.

In October, in a Multnomah Circuit Court courtroom, the Lower Willamette Group raised the stakes by entering into a settlement with the state Department of Environmental Quality.

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