Superfund site owners pushing back on Missoula mill remediation

Missoula, Montana sits in a dry lake bed surrounded by mountains so when this scribe lived there in the late 1970s and early 80s and the pulp mill in Frenchtown was operating the valley would fill with stinky water vapor and wood smoke creating a toxic ice fog during winter months. 

Smurfit-Stone declared bankruptcy in 2009, closed the mill in 2010 and sold it for scrap in 2011 leaving taxpayers a US Environmental Protection Agency Superfund mess polluted with PCBs and dioxins that make the Clark Fork River America's fifth most endangered waterway in 2023.

All those involved met in mid-March for the first round of discussion and ended up agreeing that sampling would occur in two phases. The first would focus on groundwater, sludge and wastewater areas, leaving the Clark Fork River and its fish and wildlife for a later, second phase. While the mill was pumping water, the groundwater dropped about two dozen feet, and now, it’s potentially filled back in at least 6 feet since the mill closed. The EPA collected one instantaneous sample twice a year most recently with the result that some wells have eight samples over time. NewFields is a representative of the potentially responsible parties that now own the property, including West Rock, International Paper and M2Green. They were not present at the meeting. The EPA takes input from NewFields because the potentially responsible parties are supposed to pay for the assessment and cleanup work. [Laura Lundquist, Missoula Current]

EPA has a lien on the property but each potentially responsible party can put up its own resistance as the agency develops a cleanup plan.

M2Green all but abandoned the site after steel prices fell around that time. Green Investment Group stopped updating its website in 2016. M2Green has since sold several parcels, prompting Missoula County to sue for back taxes in 2017 and put a lien on the remaining parcels. [Lundquist]

International Paper struggles with pollution problems of its own and WestRock stock is underperforming so it's shuttering a paper mill in South Carolina.