Article published Sep 16, 2007

25 years later: Pollution permeates a generation's memories of the Big Stack

By RICHARD ECKE

Tribune Staff Writer

Gone are the days when the Anaconda Co. smokestack in Great Falls belched smoke and most residents turned a blind eye to the pollution emitted by the industrial plant.

For a good chunk of the 20th century, the smelter and, later, metals refinery, in Black Eagle were the community's largest employers. In its final 30 years, its mostly union members earned increasingly higher wages and benefits from one of the state's most powerful companies.

The metals refinery was shut down by its parent company, Arco, in 1980, and the company paid for an explosives expert to blow up the 506-foot-high brick smokestack on Sept. 18, 1982.

This year, on the 25th anniversary of the stack's destruction, there are prospects of a new 400-foot smokestack being erected eight miles east of Great Falls along the Salem Road.

No one associated with the Highwood Generating Station has suggested placing the coal-fired power plant on the former Anaconda Co. grounds, where the new smokestack could have replaced the old one. The Anaconda Co. site has problems, including its status as a state Superfund site because of all those years of pollution.

Supporters of the Highwood station say the facility would be one of the country's cleanest coal-fired power plants — much cleaner than its counterparts in Colstrip in southeastern Montana.

Many environmental activists say cleaner is not good enough, especially with heightened concerns about greenhouse gases contributing to global warming.

A different time

Great Falls residents are more particular about their air and water quality than they were 50 years ago, when a stack belching smoke was a sign of prosperity and jobs.

"Most of my life I lived with the stack," said 80-year-old John Stevens of Great Falls. "It never bothered me at all. I smoked cigarettes that did more harm to me than a smokestack ever would."

Stevens, who has emphysema, quit smoking 25 years ago.

Area residents might have known there could be harm from the Big Stack's smoke, although Edward Rehor of Great Falls, a painter at the Anaconda plant from 1952 to 1980, doesn't recall anyone at the refinery talking about air pollution.

"It was a big stack," Rehor said in an interview. "We never were affected by it."

Rehor did note that people downwind from the stack might have been exposed to toxic materials.

Any air pollution blew "to the northeast or whatever and that was the end of it," he said. "I don't think there were any complaints by farmers or anybody."

Of course, the Anaconda Co. was an economic powerhouse in those days.

"That was the big thing in Great Falls," Rehor said. "There's a possibility that everybody kept their mouths shut."

Rehor remembered talk of mercury and lead running off from the plant and into the Missouri River. He said the company built a small dam near the facility's zinc plant to keep toxic materials out of the Missouri. Employees — and even company brass — called it "the God Dam," Rehor said with a chuckle.

Those were different times, Rehor added. He recalled one area of the plant where workers cut sheets of asbestos, which was later found to be a cancer-causing material.

"When I first started there we felt that we could eat asbestos," Rehor said. "It was like a fog in there, and nobody had a mask on."

He said employees also "used to play with mercury," another toxic substance, and once accidentally shattered a five-gallon container of acid. Both the mercury and acid were flushed into the sewer system, he said.

"During those years, there was no control on that stuff," he said.

Times have changed.

"Now if you do something like that, you'd go to jail," Rehor said.

'Within the shadow of the stack'

Great Falls native Tim Gregori grew up in Black Eagle, and graduated from Great Falls Central Catholic High School in 1968.

"I grew up within the shadow of the stack," Gregori said last week, adding that one of the "eeriest sights" in those days was when no smoke poured out of the stack.

"When there was nothing coming out of the stack, it meant there was a strike," he said. And that meant his father, grandfather and other relatives were out of work until a pact was reached.

Gregori said there was "a fairly strong movement" to try to get the company to reduce its pollutants. He recalled tasting sulfur when winds shifted in Great Falls.

"We knew it was probably not the greatest thing for our health," he said.

Late Tribune reporter Ronald J. Rice once wrote of tasting fumes from the stack when winds shifted.

"Windshifts to the northwest would drift the material across the river and into the Legion baseball park," Rice wrote in 1982. "The bitter, metallic taste seemed to cling to the gums inside the mouth and, if the individual received a really good shot of it, the taste would be present at least through the next day. No amount of tooth-brushing or mouth-washing would remove it."

Metals from the Anaconda Co. plant also polluted the air and water to varying degrees.

"There was cadmium, indium, zinc, copper, lead, mercury, silver," Gregori said. "You can go through the whole periodic chart. It was up on that hill."

After graduating high school, Gregori worked at the smelter in the summers of 1968 and 1969. One of his jobs was to don a rubber suit and unload arsenic fumes. Once, some of the fumes escaped and burned Gregori on his arms, creating blisters.

The start of regulation

Wages and benefits were much improved at the plant by the 1970s, but more government regulation was coming, too. Rehor remembers the federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration officials coming in and telling him he couldn't use some of his painting equipment any longer.

Part of the problem for the Anaconda Co. was that it failed to upgrade its technology, Gregori said.

In recent years, Gregori became general manager of Southern Montana Electric Generation & Transmission Cooperative, which wants to build the coal-fired Highwood Generating Station.

He maintains that the Highwood plant "wouldn't hold a candle" to the Anaconda Co. facility in Black Eagle in terms of pollution.

An environmental impact statement, which has been harshly criticized by conservationists, showed the coal-fired plant "will not have an adverse effect on air, land or water in the Great Falls area." Gregori said he would like to see plant opponents counter the impact statement with facts, rather "than just an opinion."

The environmental movement began to unfold after the post-World War II prosperity of the 1950s. In 1962, Rachel Carson's groundbreaking book, "Silent Spring," discussed the effects of pesticides on birds and other world pollution problems.

Environment at the forefront

For some of Great Falls' younger residents, the environment has been an issue their entire lives.

Jayme Watson, a 31-year-old massage therapist, has spoken against the proposed Highwood Generating Station project at a few public meetings.

Watson wasn't even alive when the Anaconda Co. smokestack quit belching smoke in 1972, although the Black Eagle plant operated for another eight years.

"I never saw anything come out of that smokestack," she said. "I watched it come down."

She added that the world's environmental views are different today than they were when the Big Stack spewed smoke.

"We have a lot more information about the effects of pollution now," Watson said.

Even if the Highwood Generating Station isn't built, Great Falls can still be an energy producer, she said.

"It doesn't have to be the same kind of industry that we had in the past," Watson said. She added she believes the Great Falls area would be an ideal setting for wind and solar power.

"We're sitting on a gold mine," she said. "That's the direction that the country is headed."

Watson lived for a while in Fresno, Calif., which is sandwiched between two large, polluted urban areas.

"We got the worst from L.A. and San Francisco," Watson said, adding she rode her bicycle to work.

"I had to brush my teeth when I got to work, my teeth were so dirty," she said.

For her, the air quality in Great Falls is a refreshing change.

"That's one of the biggest reasons I did come back," Watson said.

Gregori said that pollution from the relatively dirty Anaconda Co. plant in Black Eagle didn't automatically shorten the lives of workers.

"People weren't dropping dead in Great Falls, Montana, in 1968," he said. Gregori's grandfather lived to age 93.

"His brother lived to be 88," Gregori added, noting his father is still alive at 84.

"All three of them worked at the Anaconda Company," he said.

That doesn't mean no one was harmed by the Anaconda Co. smokestack, said Anne Hedges, program manager for the Montana Environmental Information Center in Helena.

"Some people are simply more susceptible," Hedges said Friday. "We know an awful lot more of the health impacts from smokestacks."

She noted that she opposes any coal-fired plants until technology can clean them up dramatically.

"Coal is filthy," she said.

"The thing is you need power and where are you going to get it from?" asked Rehor. "You have to have power from someplace. You're either going to have coal or you're going to have nuclear. Take your pick."

He added that he thinks nuclear energy will make a comeback in this age of climate change.

Gregori recently attended a workshop in Washington, D.C., in which speakers discussed "Developing Generation in a Carbon Constrained World." He cited an estimate that the United States will require 40 percent more electricity in 2030 than in 2007.

"Where is it going to come from?" he asked.

He said the Highwood Generating Station is "the best alternative that we see at this point" for five rural cooperatives that are losing cheap federal power.

Hedges, however, sees a much different future.

"There are other ways to generate electricity that are clean," she said. "We don't need new fossil-fuel plants."

Hedges thinks renewable energy like wind and improved energy efficiency will do the trick to fulfill future power needs.

"We're going to need probably more natural gas plants," she added.

The country is so fixated on fossil fuels it has yet to jump feet first into energy conservation, Hedges said. She noted that people can use high-efficiency light bulbs and appliances, run appliances at different times of day and build energy-efficient houses and businesses to help conserve power.

Conservation experts "have a whole slew of ideas" that should be considered, she said.

Gregori said that renewable energy sources will help, but "won't come close to meeting our need."

Hedges notes that California has led the way in energy conservation, and electricity use there "is not rising."

What's left

In Black Eagle, traces of the Anaconda Co. remain, including an old white storage building and the former employees' lounge, as well as the former plant golf course, which is now owned and operated by the city of Great Falls.

Gone is the stack, the zinc plant, the general office, the swimming pool and the rest of a facility that operated for nearly a century and provided a mixed bag of economic prosperity and pollution.