The Big Dump

[May 7th, 2008]

Amid Sauvie Island’s bucolic mix of agriculture and nature preserves is an unlined industrial waste dump that may soon get twice as big and be active twice as long as originally planned.

In March, Multnomah County approved doubling the size and lifespan of the dump on Sauvie Island—a spot 10 miles west of Portland in the Columbia River. And next week, a county hearing officer will hear an appeal of that decision from a nearby, outraged landowner.

Yet not many people even know a dump exists on the island.

“I had no idea it was there,” says Metro Council President David Bragdon, whose agency is charged with preserving the region’s natural areas and owns 120-acre Howell Territorial Park in the island’s center.

Since 1977, Esco Corp., a locally owned steel manufacturer with foundries in Northwest Portland, has been dumping used sand, furnace slag and used foundry bricks on about 25 acres the company owns at the southern tip of Sauvie Island—about a mile from the island’s popular pumpkin patch that attracts thousands each October.

Each day, the company sends 16 truckloads of material from its mill to the dump. In 2006, the company dumped 17,400 cubic yards of material—or enough to cover a city block about 12 feet high, on the island.

Esco spokesman Carter Webb says using the property for dumping predates Esco’s ownership.

“Before we owned the land, the Army Corps of Engineers dumped dredge spoils there,” Webb says.

Although Esco boasts of recycling foundry wastes at facilities in Mississippi and Ontario, Webb says that’s not possible here.

“There are no opportunities to put [the materials] to an alternate use,” Webb says.

At issue in front of the county, which referees land-use issues for the 15,400 acres of Sauvie Island in Multnomah County (about a quarter of the island is located in Columbia County), is Esco’s request to increase the height of the dumped material. The increased height will have the effect of doubling the remaining life of the facility from 20 years to about 40 more years.

The increased fill could total up to 500,000 cubic yards, which Jeannine Rustad—a planner working on an appeal of the expansion—says is “greater in equivalent volume than ‘Big Pink,’ the largest building built in the history of Portland.”

The man paying Rustad is Jeff Joslin, who owns 120 acres next to the dump. Joslin, who ironically has been a land-use planner for the City of Portland for 15 years, argues along with a small group of neighbors calling itself Sauvie Island Friends for Environmental Responsibility that under county regulations, Esco had no right to increase the height of the dump.

A previous county permit let the company dump material to a height no more than three feet above Gillihan Road. Esco now wants to pile material to a height 14 feet above the levee that rings Sauvie Island.

Joslin says the noise and dust caused by Esco’s daily run of waste-laden trucks is an annoyance and the prospect of a mini-Mount Slagmore rising above the island is disturbing.

But what concerns him most are the unknowns. The Esco property drains into Joslin’s land and that scares him. He cannot prove specific damages, but says he suspects that years of dumping have led to a concentration of dangerous heavy metals in the ground.

In 2004, a monitoring well showed what the state Department of Environmental Quality called an “elevated uranium” level. But the regulatory agency then tested nearby drinking water and found it safe.

County planner Don Kienholz noted those findings in his March approval of Esco’s request. “DEQ has participated in the public meetings and has evaluated and determined the fill is safe, non-hazardous, and has not affected the drinking water,” Kienholz wrote.

Esco’s Webb says all materials are tested and there is no evidence the company is doing anything harmful.

Joslin and a hydrogeologist he hired say the monitoring wells and DEQ’s oversight are inadequate.

“Esco acknowledges that contaminants released by the waste have entered groundwater under the landfill,” wrote hydrogeologist Dennis Dykes in a November 2007 assessment Joslin presented to the county. “Unfortunately there are significant gaps in the site characterization, which have led to incomplete, speculative and contradictory conclusions about the risks presented.”

Joslin says that at a time when the city and local companies are facing tens or hundreds of millions in costs to clean up the toxic legacy of uncontrolled dumping along the Willamette for much of the 20th century, it makes no sense to expand an unlined industrial dump a stone’s throw from the river’s edge.

“This is not a NIMBY [not in my back yard] issue,” Joslin says. “I’ve brought in bona fide experts to examine the issues here and the reaction from the county is imperceptible.”

The county commission hasn’t been involved in the battle, says Commissioner Maria Rojo de Steffey. “Other than reading the planner’s decision, I don’t know much about it,” she says.