The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency announced Wednesday that it will list part of the Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. property as a Superfund site this week.

With the 960-acre site’s listing on the National Priorities List to become official on Friday, the remediation of the property will come under the auspices of the Superfund program, which investigates and cleans up contamination at sites that pose a risk to human health and the environment.

CFAC and its parent company, Switzerland-based global commodities corporation Glencore, announced early last year the plant would not reopen. From 1955 to 2009, the plant under a series of owners had served as an economic powerhouse for both Columbia Falls and the Flathead Valley.

When it closed in 2009, the plant had 88 workers; at its peak the aluminum plant employed more than 1,200 people.

Citing prior environmental studies that found evidence of environmental contamination at the site, the EPA in March 2015 proposed a Superfund designation for the shuttered aluminum reduction plant.

One of the main pollutants at the site is spent potliner, a federally listed hazardous waste produced during the aluminum smelting process. According to the EPA, the material is known to contain cyanide compounds, and other potential contaminants at the site include heavy metals, organic compounds, hydrocarbons, PCBs and pesticides.

The agency has also detected contaminants in groundwater and river sediment beyond the company’s property. Samples taken from a well near the Aluminum City neighborhood plus five other domestic wells in the vicinity contained trace amounts of cyanide.

All of the samples were below the maximum allowable levels, however.

Joe Vranka, the EPA’s Superfund unit supervisor based in Helena, said Wednesday that the designation will open up federal resources for the community while providing certainty that the site ultimately will get cleaned up.

“I think what Columbia Falls can expect is that increased community involvement, or at least our interest in getting them involved in the process,” Vranka said. “One of the important requirements is what we do meets the needs of the local community. ... We can make some funds available to help with that planning process and then that feeds into the decisions we make about this.”

The types of funding available to communities affected by Superfund sites differs from site to site.

Critics have argued that federal involvement would slow the process of repurposing the industrial property and have noted that no site in Montana placed on the National Priorities List has yet been removed.

But Vranka said many of those properties have been improved significantly since their designation, citing as an example the cleanup work at the Milltown Dam that included federal grants for planning and redevelopment. With the Mouat Industries site in Columbus mostly cleaned up, he said the federal fund continues to provide the county with money to address deep soil contamination not excavated during the remediation process.

“Our goal is to get cleanup in place, to get redevelopment going. That’s happening in communities across Montana,” Vranka said. “You get a new park put in, trail systems, encourage development — those are the types of things that really start to turn those communities around.”

Federal aid may also come in the form of organizing community advisory groups and hiring experts to provide technical assistance and advice for local governments.

Upon hearing the news Wednesday, Columbia Falls Mayor Don Barnhart said he’s hopeful the listing will ultimately get the property fully decontaminated and redeveloped, noting the strategic importance of high-voltage power lines, natural gas lines and other industrial infrastructure still in place at the plant site.

“The only reason we were pushing initially to get the EPA involved, not to list it but to get it on their radar, was so that Glencore would move,” Barnhart said.

Referring to the so-called “Superfund stigma,” he added, “I’ve been around here enough that, quite honestly, I don’t think it’s going to be an issue. I think it shows that we’re getting it cleaned up.”

He also pointed out that unlike Libby, most of which is still stamped with the environmental designation, the aluminum plant is outside city limits. Preliminary testing in the past has indicated the pollution is primarily restricted to the company’s property north of town.

As the other major component of the Superfund process, the agency will also attempt to recover all cleanup costs from the “potentially responsible parties” that caused the contamination.

Aside from Superfund sites in which those companies had since gone out of business, Vranka said the agency has been successful in compelling polluters to finance remediation — even if it requires taking them to court.

“There’s no guarantee that they’re going to [pay], but by going final it allows us to access the Superfund trust,” he said. “It allows us to access public money to implement the cleanup decision should we not have a viable potentially responsible party at the time.”

However, should the agency fail to compel the responsible parties to pay, the state could be on the hook for part of the costs. In that event, Montana would be required to cover 10 percent of the cost of the cleanup — not including the site investigation or feasibility study — as well as any operation and maintenance costs, like long-term water treatment.

Vranka also said that Friday’s final Superfund designation will not affect the ongoing remedial investigation of the site, which is the subject of a consent agreement reached between the company and the federal agency last year.

The agreement obligates CFAC to determine the extent of the contamination present and to work with the EPA to develop a feasibility study. That study, scheduled for completion in 2020, will lay out a set of alternative approaches to decontaminate the property, if the investigation determines that the cleanup is necessary.

Under the agreement, the EPA provides oversight while CFAC and its contractors are responsible for completing the work. The agency also required Glencore to post a $4 million bond to guarantee the preliminary work gets done.

John Stroiazzo, CFAC’s project manager, said Wednesday that the work has proceeded smoothly this summer.

To date the company has drilled 42 new wells and refurbished 37 existing wells to monitor potential groundwater contamination, he said. Quarterly sampling, scheduled to begin next month, will continue for one to two years and surface water samples will be taken simultaneously. Soil and sediment samples were also collected this summer.

Although the company has opposed the listing proposal, Stroiazzo said it would continue working with the federal agency on the remedial investigation and feasibility study.

“From the way we understand it, all of the other [Superfund] projects that we’ve seen, these things seem to take a lot more time,” Stroiazzo said. “It’s a debatable topic, but we were able to move very quickly with what we’ve done with the EPA thus far, since the EPA brought this to us in 2015, we were able to negotiate the [agreement] very quickly.”

CFAC was only the last in a long line of property owners since the plant opened more than a half-century ago. While the company voluntarily entered into the agreement, Vranka pointed out that its cooperation is not an admission of responsibility.

“If we identify potentially responsible parties that we think can perform the cleanup under our oversight, we try to get them to agree to do it under an administrative order on consent,” he said. “Right now, we’re very fortunate in that Columbia Falls Aluminum Co. has been working with us.”

During the next year, the EPA will begin working with the county, city and community to assess their needs for a redevelopment plan.

Once the investigation process is complete, those findings and local input will be used to develop the feasibility study, which Vranka expects to be ready by 2020.

From there, it will take about six months of gathering and analyzing public comments and information submitted to the agency before it releases its preferred cleanup plan, followed by another six-month public comment and review period before the final decision.

The next step will be negotiations between the responsible parties and the EPA. Vranka said even if litigation is required, the agency can foot the bill in the meantime to begin the remediation process and attempt to recoup the costs later.

Reporter Sam Wilson can be reached at 758-4407 or by email at swilson@dailyinterlake.com.