It might be six years before studies are completed and actual cleanup of the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. site can begin, government officials explained Thursday night during a public meeting at Columbia Falls High School.

But the first step for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency is to get state support in the form of a concurrence letter from the governor or the director of the Montana Department of Environmental Quality, according to Rob Parker, an environmental engineer at EPA’s Region 8 office in Denver.

“We need community feedback so it doesn’t look like the federal government is making unilateral decisions,” he said.

About 50 people attended the meeting, including state Sen. Dee Brown, R-Coram, Rep.-elect Zac Perry, D-Hungry Horse, and members of the Columbia Falls City Council.

Also attending were CFAC environmental manager Steve Wright, CFAC spokesman Haley Beaudry and Amanda Ludlow, a principal scientist at Roux Associates in New York, the company hired by CFAC to make an environmental assessment of the plant site.

Once the EPA hears from the state to proceed, the agency will take steps to put the CFAC site on the Superfund program’s National Priorities List, which will bring more money and technical resources to the cleanup effort, Parker said. That step must be “fully documented to justify the decision,” he noted.

“We expect the potential responsible parties will attack the documentation, so it’s likely we’ll need to fill a few data gaps,” he said.

The earliest the EPA could propose listing the plant site is spring 2015, Parker said. 

The proposal would then be published in the Federal Register for a nationwide public review process. 

After that, the federal agency would conduct a remedial investigation of the site that could continue over several seasons of data collection, followed by a feasibility study. The collected data would be used to support a record of decision document that would justify a cleanup. 

A remedial design would need to be completed before actual cleanup work begins.

Based on what has happened at other Superfund sites in Montana, it could take two to three years to get going and two to three years to complete the studies, depending on the cooperation of the responsible parties, according to Julie DalSaglio, the director of EPA’s Montana office in Helena.

“Up-front negotiations could take time — we have a suite of potentially responsible parties,” she said.

It could take several seasons to understand the geohydrology of the site, DalSaglio said. Cyanide has leached out of the plant’s landfills into the underlying groundwater.

“Groundwater remediation takes a lot longer to do,” she said.

The EPA has taken the lead on the cleanup now that CFAC has announced it has broken off negotiations with the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. Parker said EPA personnel are currently searching for the responsible parties.

Jenny Chambers, administrator of the Department of Environmental Quality remediation division, had been in talks with Glencore, CFAC’s parent company, ever since the state agency submitted an administrative order July 31 outlining work plans and funding for a remedial investigation.

She said she was waiting for feedback from Glencore, but in late August the Swiss-based commodities trader told DEQ that further talks must be held with CFAC, not Glencore. CFAC never signed off on the order, Chambers said. Two days before Thursday’s public meeting, CFAC broke off talks with the state.

“We didn’t see eye-to-eye on some things,” Chambers said, including authority for work plans and who paid for what. Toward the end, attorneys did all the talking, not environmental managers, she said.

Certain cleanup steps could be speeded up if there is evidence of a human health hazard, Parker said. Additional sampling of residential wells near the plant this fall did not turn up contaminants that exceeded thresholds for drinking water, but if they did the EPA could use emergency funds to provide clean water to affected residents, he said.

Looking to the future, Flathead Basin Commission Chairman and former Glacier National Park Superintendent Chaz Cartwright asked when public input would be taken for a “vision” of what the  landscape should look like after the cleanup.

 Brown responded by noting that “Montanans take their private property rights seriously,” and that the CFAC site was owned by Glencore.

Letters of support for a remedial investigation of the CFAC site can be sent to Rob Parker, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, Region 8, 1595 Wynkoop Street, Denver, CO 80202-1129 or parker.rob@epa.gov or to Jenny Chambers, Montana Department of Environmental Quality, 1100 North Last Chance Gulch, P.O.  Box 200901, Helena, MT 59620-0901 or jchambers@mt.gov.

For more information on the cleanup, go online to www2.epa.gov/region8/columbia-falls-aluminum-reduction-plant.