Fading firm leaves cleanup woes

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With the HoltraChem Manufacturing Co. possibly disappearing as early as next week, state and federal environmental officials are seeking ways to ensure that the chemical plant in Orrington left behind by the company gets cleaned up.

Environmental regulators believe HoltraChem, which used tons of mercury to manufacture chlorine and other chemicals, mainly for paper companies, will cease to exist by the end of March at the latest. An assistant attorney general believes the company may disappear as early as next week.

Ed Logue, the director of the Maine Department of Environmental Protection’s Bangor office, said the company was going through the necessary steps to dissolve itself.

Articles of dissolution were filed for a portion of the company in North Carolina in August. No dissolution papers have been filed in Massachusetts, where the parent company was incorporated, or in Maine.

“We have a consistent fade going on here,” Logue said.

Assistant Attorney General Dennis Harnish was more blunt. “HoltraChem Inc. will have no more money after March 1. None [of it] will be a going entity after that date,” he said.

The president of HoltraChem, Steve Guidry, who works in North Carolina, did not return calls seeking comment for this story, but earlier this month he said concerns about the company’s financial stability were warranted.

The impending end of HoltraChem complicates planning by the DEP and U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for cleanup of the facility, but in no way means that the plant site will not be cleaned up, Logue said.

The cleanup can proceed in one of three ways.

First, because of problems with the plant in the early 1990s, the EPA developed a corrective action plan for the site and a former owner, Mallinckrodt Inc., signed on to help pay for and assist with the work required. Officials from the EPA and DEP have been in discussions with the St. Louis-based pharmaceutical and medical products company about taking over full responsibility for cleaning up the site under the auspices of the corrective action plan.

Those discussions have been “open and hopeful,” Logue said.

Mallinckrodt, which had $2.6 billion in revenues in 1999, owned the facility from 1967 to 1982. Because other past owners of the plant have gone bankrupt, Mallinckrodt is the only surviving corporate entity that bears responsibility for cleaning up the HoltraChem site.

Officials from Mallinckrodt, which was purchased last fall by Tyco International Ltd., a huge diversified company with interests in medical products, electronic equipment, undersea telecommunications systems and fire protection systems, could not be reached for comment.

However, if Mallinckrodt decides it won’t foot the entire bill or can’t come to an agreement on the cleanup process with state and federal regulators, the EPA could declare the facility a Superfund site. Under this second scenario, the federal government would get the site cleaned up and pay for it and then go after those responsible for the pollution later. Their prime target would be Mallinckrodt.This is what happened at the How’s Corner site in Plymouth, where waste oil from vehicles was dumped. The EPA is still seeking the responsible parties to pay for the cleanup.

A third- and remote – possibility is for the site to be taken over by the state as an “uncontrolled site.” This is what happened when the Eastland Woolen Mill in Corinna was abandoned. The state secured the facility and took away chemicals that were stored or used there. It then turned the place over to the federal government to become a Superfund site. The uncontrolled site provision is typically used on small facilities for a short period of time, Logue said.

He said the most likely path to be taken is to continue with the corrective action work involving Mallinckrodt.

However, DEP and EPA officials are continuing to look into other entities that owned HoltraChem and may be held liable for the cleanup. The company has two shareholders – Honeywell International Inc., a giant defense contractor, and Herbert Roskind, the company’s founder who lives in Arizona.

Dennis Harnish, an assistant attorney general in Maine, said he has been investigating HoltraChem’s corporate arrangement. He said that while Honeywell owned stock in the company, it was not involved in its day-to-day operations, so is not liable for actions taken by HoltraChem, including polluting land and water.

In addition, Harnish said, under federal law, Mallinckrodt can be held liable for the entire cost of cleaning up the HoltraChem facilities.

“They’re a very rich company,” he said. But, he said, they have not yet agreed to do 100 percent of the cleanup at the HoltraChem plant in Orrington. The company owned another plant in North Carolina, which is going through a similar process.

Harnish said Mallinckrodt could decide to sue other companies charging that they, too, are responsible for bearing some of the cost of the cleanup.

“They haven’t been energized about that,” Harnish said.

The state’s job, he said, is to negotiate a “bridge arrangement” that will ensure the facility – and the 80 tons of mercury stored there – is secure until Mallinckrodt steps up. That company’s role will be “greatly enlarged” in coming weeks, Harnish said.

“We’re definitely not going to turn our backs on the site,” he said.

While state officials are deciding what avenue to take to clean up HoltraChem, a coalition of groups calling itself the Penobscot Alliance for Mercury Elimination, known as PAME, is holding a public meeting Saturday afternoon in Hampden to raise awareness of the situation. The meeting, which will be held from 1 to 3 p.m. at the Reeds Brook Middle School, is meant to provide information to area residents concerned about HoltraChem, and to give them an opportunity to get involved in cleanup discussions, said Michael Belliveau, toxins project director for the Natural Resources Council of Maine, a member of PAME.

He said there needs to be more public involvement in the cleanup, and that the process needs to be sped up.

“To date, it’s been study and delay, study and delay,” Belliveau said.

Officials from the DEP and EPA were informed of the meeting, but representatives from neither entity plan to attend. The DEP’s Logue said he didn’t have any answers to the questions that were likely to be asked, but expected there to be other opportunities to address the public’s concerns.

The EPA plans to hold two public meetings about how to clean up the site later this spring, an agency spokesman said Friday.

A major topic of discussion Saturday is likely to be the 80 tons of mercury that remains in storage at the closed plant. One 18-ton shipment of the toxic metal was sent to India only to be refused by the Indian government after environmental activists here and abroad decried the shipment as “toxic trade.” Since the outcry over the shipment to India, no more mercury has left Orrington.

The Penobscot Alliance has long called for the permanent retirement of used mercury like that from HoltraChem rather than shipping it to other countries with more lax environmental regulations. While government officials, including Gov. Angus King, agree with this concern, there is no place to store such mercury. The military maintains a 5 million-ton stockpile, but has said it cannot accept mercury that it does not own.

To address this problem, U.S. Sen. Susan Collins has introduced legislation that would ban the sale of mercury thermometers and would require the federal government to create a task force to look into the issue of mercury retirement.

John Dieffenbacher-Krall, executive director of the Maine People’s Alliance, another member of PAME, said it was no coincidence that federal bills dealing with mercury were introduced now.

“We’ve made the situation tremendously better. We’ve informed people and exposed them to information about the dangers of mercury,” he said.

Maine residents are warned to limit their intake of freshwater fish because they contain mercury, which is known to impair brain development in fetuses and young children.

Dieffenbacher-Krall and Belliveau did meet with DEP officials last week and the agency agreed to try to provide more information about what was happening with the HoltraChem facility. They agreed to post DEP documents dealing with the plant on the agency’s Web site.

Mercury retirement will also be a topic of much discussion at a meeting of the Environmental Commission of the States in Tampa, Fla., next week. The commission, which includes the top environmental official from 52 states and territories, is slated to discuss two resolutions that call for the retirement of mercury and the reduction of mercury use.

DEP Commissioner Martha Kirkpatrick will attend the two-day meeting.