Congratulations to Great Northern Paper employees and to the towns of Millinocket and East Millinocket. The Brascan takeover of the paper mills has been finalized and that is very good for the hard-working employees at the mills and for Maine’s economy. However, the news is not all good. The multiple corporations that have owned Great Northern Paper over many decades (Inexcon, Bowater, Georgia-Pacific, etc.) have been polluting the air, land and water in their seemingly honest effort to bring paper products to market for profit.

That’s general public knowledge, yet almost everyone seems to be apathetic about it. We’ve all seen the billowing smoke above the mills and many of us can remember when the stacks were raised taller so the pollution could be carried elsewhere by prevailing winds. What is not so obvious is the pollution we can’t see.

Over the past months, the Dolby landfill threatened to foil the Brascan takeover and, more recently, bark piles and the Red Lagoon were called potential deal breakers. Where are these places and what’s their problem?

Launch a canoe on Quakish Lake off Route 11 just outside of Millinocket and paddle a short distance east, to arrive at Stone Dam. Left of this dam, there’s a breach allowing small boats to pass safely into Ferguson Lake. On the far side of Ferguson Lake, there’s a GNP road, which is closed to the public. On the other side of this road is Shack Hill where there’s a bark pile, loamy, soft and decomposing. It looks innocent enough, like a small mountain of perfect garden mulch. Cranes and bulldozers mine the stuff and, where it’s dug up, the bark is a rich color brown. Bark stripped from pulpwood has been deposited here since well before the 1950s.

The Shack Hill bark pile abuts the Back Channel of the West Branch of the Penobscot River. At the river’s edge, the rocks are tainted rust red from the stuff that leaks continuously from the heap, which is a tannic leachate. Emerging from various areas along the edge of the pile, adjacent to the river, is an assortment of rusted iron, pieces of stainless steel, masses of melted plastic, chunks of yellow sulfur, slag and many empty, rusted steel barrels. Some of the barrels are in sight of Ferguson Lake.

Concerned mill employees told me that, as recently as 1990, hundreds of barrels were bulldozed into the pile. Over the years, reports of the existence of these barrels were sent to the Department of Environmental Protection by concerned citizens, but nothing was done. Some mill employees have a rough idea that the barrels are near the bottom of the Shack Hill bark pile, but no one knows exactly where. Finding them would be like finding a needle in a haystack. I also discovered that there are many other bark piles throughout the town of Millinocket.

Farther down river, at the GNP clarifier building, where pulp by-product is stripped of its harmful chemicals, there are two large man-made lagoons bubbling with white, frothy foam. In a strong south wind, the foam is known to blow about. DEP records show that citizen-generated reports were filed about white foam drifting through the streets of Millinocket. Nothing was done. The foamy lagoons are enclosed by a cyclone fence, rimmed with barbed wire and posted with no-trespassing signs. The lagoons are less than one-eighth mile from Millinocket Stream near its entry into the West Branch of the Penobscot River.

The processed sludge from the clarifier building is transported to the Partridge Brook Flowage Terminal (better known as the “Dolby landfill”) located between Millinocket and East Millinocket. This landfill is a large hill created by clarified pulp, the result of decades of dumptruck transport. On the perimeter road that surrounds the hill, a liquor oozes into a ditch and cement tubes with iron grates vent gases that emerge from the pile. The smell is nauseating. At this site, there’s another man-made lagoon filled with brown liquid. Partridge Brook Flowage drains directly into Dolby Flowage then into the West Branch of the Penobscot River. Since 1991, GNP has been charged $3,900 in fines under a consent agreement with the DEP, which, I guess, is the paltry price one must pay to pollute.

I have recently visited all the sites mentioned. They frighten me for what they are and for what they have the potential to become. Brascan has not inherited them. Under existing state law, Brascan is allowed to compile a list of contaminated sites that they won’t be held responsible for. This is called indemnification. The DEP has even extended the time (beyond one year from the takeover of April 29) for Brascan to come up with a list that lets them off the hook for past and present environmental sores.

Brascan “carved out” (did not purchase) the Red Liquor Lagoon, the bark piles and the Dolby Landfill. Nonetheless, Brascan will most certainly be contracting to GNP for the use of these facilities so paper can be made the way it has been made for decades.

GNP, which still owns the facilities, is bankrupt, so it’s unlikely that money can be collected from them for a cleanup. What I can’t figure out is how they were able to claim bankruptcy in the first place, when, in February 2002, they received $156.5 million from Great Lakes Hydro America, LLC (which, coincidentally, is owned by Brascan) for the sale of six hydro generating facilities and 11 water storage dams on the Penobscot River, plus 16 employees, 126 megawatts of power capacity and 20 MW of power transmission connection to the New England power grid. What happened to all that money and why can’t some of it go toward saving lost jobs, re-establishing lost retirement benefits, and cleaning up the ailing environment that surrounds the mills?

Last year, Dana Bisbee, a lawyer who now works for Brascan, was acting commissioner of New Hampshire’s Department of Environmental Services. As a public servant, he helped to broker a deal for his state to seize, by eminent domain, miles of polluted riverbed along the Androscoggin River where defunct mills were to be reopened, coincidentally, by Brascan. This company tried, but was unable, to get the same type of deal in Maine.

Where does all this leave us? Are these nonpurchased, contaminated facilities eligible as federal Superfund sites, to be paid for by the public? Perhaps this would be appropriate since we, the public, are the ones using the sexy, glossy paper that comes from the Millinocket and East Millinocket mills. Or, perhaps, part of the $156.5 million that the now bankrupt GNP received from Brascan for the sale of the dams or part of the $91 million that they just received for the sale of the mills should go toward a cleanup.

Or maybe no one really cares. After all, people aren’t choking to death on the side of the Penobscot River.

John C. Frachella is the director of the Bangor Children’s Dental Clinic.