Private and public failings leave toxic stench in Sheridan

Late last month, one of North America’s largest treated-wood producers pleaded guilty in Yamhill County Circuit Court to 10 misdemeanor counts of unlawful water pollution, based on a legacy of toxic emissions on a plant site upstream from a South Yamhill intake supplying drinking water in Sheridan.

If that doesn’t shake your faith in state and federal agencies pledged to protecting public health and safety, consider what longtime radio host Paul Harvey famously called “the rest of the story.”

- Taylor Lumber & Treating, which opened the plant in 1966, so polluted land and groundwater near the river that the federal Environmental Protection Agency declared it Oregon’s first official Superfund cleanup site in 2001.

The EPA not only went on to spend 10 years and millions of dollars on a cleanup, but also banned future on-site use of pentachlorophenol, commonly known as PCP. The cleanup also targeted creosote and a zinc-arsenic compound known as ACZA, used in earlier years, but PCP had by then become the industry’s go-to treatment compound.

- A Federal Register posting at the time noted: “EPA has found wood-treating chemicals such as creosote, pentachlorophenol (PCP) and arsenic in surface soil, subsurface soil, groundwater and in the nearby South Yamhill River, which could contaminate drinking water supplied to the residents of Sheridan.”

That means the danger to local drinking water should not have come as a surprise to anyone, having been officially documented by environmental officials a quarter of a century ago.

- In a bankruptcy auction in 2002, Taylor was acquired by Pacific Wood Preserving, which billed itself as the industry leader in low-environmental impact wood preserving. It signed an agreement promising to avoid pentachlorophenol in favor of copper naphthenate.

But when copper naphthenate became increasingly scarce and uncompetitive, Pacific petitioned the EPA and DEQ to resume pentachlorophenol use in 2011 and, astonishingly, both the federal agency and its state counterpart agreed. Their leading concern appeared to be potential loss of 40 to 50 local jobs, down from Taylor’s peak of 350 in the 1980s, not to the potential danger to public health.

- Two years later, Pacific sold the local operation to a subsidiary of Stella-Jones, which employs more than 3,000 workers at 44 wood treatment plants in the U.S. and Canada. But outside of the nine-year copper naphthenate interlude, Taylor, Pacific and Stella-Jones established a lengthy record of repeated toxic waste violations.

What’s more, fines were typically assessed months if not years after the fact, typically minuscule in comparison to revenues and profits, and typically further reduced in negotiations triggered by appeals. Meanwhile, the companies were allowed to continue operating as usual, even, in Stella-Jones’ case, during the three-year investigation producing the misdemeanor charges.

- The pentachlorophenol the EPA and DEQ deemed environmentally benign enough for resumed use upstream from a Sheridan water intake in 2011 was considered too detrimental for continued use anywhere in the U.S. in 2022. It is now slated for total national phaseout by 2027, after being linked to cancer and liver damage, and generating dioxin and furan byproducts posing even greater risks.

Canadian-based Stella-Jones has been phasing out PCP in favor of diesel oil infused with 3% dichlorooctylisothiazolinone, known as DCOIT. But DCOIT is not particularly environmentally friendly either, and has been the subject of damaging local spills in its own right.

- Local crayfish trapper Mike Hailey, who filed a 2023 complaint after crayfish disappeared from a stretch of river near the site, but never heard back, accused environmental agencies of keeping the public in the dark. A DEQ representative responded, “We’ve been trying to make sure that all those who need to know about this know.”

Considering the fact it took a major investigation by Kaylee Tornay and Aspen Ford of the nonprofit InvestigateWest to document the sorry record laid out here, we beg to differ. It sounds more like the fewest possible number of people were kept informed, probably to the least extent possible.

Let’s leave the old “need to know” standard to the CIA, where it actually makes sense.

If it weren’t for the InvestigateWest team, whose findings appeared in the news section in Wednesday’s edition, the guilty plea to the misdemeanor counts in court might be all the rest of us had to go on. That’s not right by any measure.

The legacy of private local operators is marked by repeated violations dating back almost 60 years, all with very little real consequence, save for that falling to the taxpayer for the Superfund cleanup. And it has been aided and abetted by lax oversight, lenient sanction, misplaced priority, bureaucratic delay and unseemly secrecy by the government agencies we depend on for our very health and safety.

We deserve better.