[waves lapping]
- NARRATOR: Back in the early 1990s, a series of events
took place that would lead to the largest clean-up
of hazardous waste in Texas history.
It was nothing short of a shotgun wedding between
Alcoa and five government agencies,
forced to work together to fix a serious problem.
And in the beginning, no one had any idea how
things would turn out.
Our story starts in Lavaca Bay.
The year is 1993.
[ominous music]
- TV VOICE: Port Lavaca, Texas has long been the home
of both fishing and chemical industries.
In the late 60s and early 70s, the Aluminum Company of America,
Alcoa, dumped as much as 67 pounds of mercury a day
into Lavaca Bay, contaminating what was once
a public food source.
- The Health Department closed portions
of the bay in 1988 for fin fishing and shell fishing.
And the information that we have from the Health Department
is that one heavy meal for a pregnant woman
could cause birth defects.
Oh, no.
They didn't know.
I don't think they knew.
- NARRATOR: Raenell Silcox is a Parks & Wildlife attorney.
She worked on the case throughout the 1990s.
- I don't think they knew that mercury bio-accumulates.
That it doesn't go away.
It never goes away.
It just keeps accumulating in your body.
- Yea, the levels that we found in Lavaca Bay
were the highest we've seen anywhere within the state,
even to this date.
- NARRATOR: Kirk Wiles is an investigator with the
Texas Department of State Health Services.
- In those early days, there really was not a lot
of information out on mercury contamination in seafood.
It was a hotly debated issue.
[ominous music]
- The Texas Department of Health has closed this area
because of mercury contamination from,
from Alcoa Aluminum Plant.
- I believe in good, sound scientific data
and the data tends to indicate there is a problem
and this is why the health department did close down
this area to fishing.
- KEVIN: Those yours?
- TV VOICE: The stakes are high in Port Lavaca
and throughout the state.
Texas residents face difficult dilemmas.
- JIM GREEN: I have three children and I have one boy
that's 13, I have one boy that's 11,
and I have a little girl that's seven.
It bothers me greatly that because I chose to live here
and the lifestyle that I have may be affecting
my children now.
And that bothers me a great deal.
- COMMERCIAL VO: ♪ Alcoa can't wait. ♪
We've got to conserve energy and natural resources today.
We can't wait for tomorrow.
- When I first began back in 1975, trying to deal
with the issue of fish contamination in Lavaca Bay,
industries in the area were in probably a state of denial.
- NARRATOR: But vast improvements in the field of
toxicology meant that industry could no longer ignore
how pollutants impacted the environment.
And increased public awareness created pressure on companies
to act more responsibly.
Meanwhile, nothing was being done to clean up the bay.
- We had a large portion of Lavaca Bay that was closed
to any consumption of fish.
And where do we start?
- NARRATOR: Ken Rice is the Natural Resource Damage
Coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
- We've been working on this project for over
15 years, and the turning point came about when this
particular site was declared a Superfund site in 1994.
- TV VOICE: Though many people believe the mercury has
stayed in the local area, the full extent of the pollution
is unclear.
Comprehensive and expensive studies are needed to determine
the scope of the problem.
- KEN: To determine how we will restore this area, or if we
restore this area, the cost to go in here to get contaminated
sediment and put the bay bottom back to what it originally was,
you're talking
- BIOLOGIST: Total length nine seventeen,
species code six twenty five.
- KEN: The technology may not be there, right now.
But through these test studies and things,
we'll come up with it.
Nobody ever said this job would be easy, though.
We were very right in saying this was not going
to be an easy job.
It's been a long road.
It's been a difficult road.
- NARRATOR: The clean-up of Lavaca Bay was shaping up
to be complicated and expensive.
And the legal logistics overwhelming.
Three state agencies, two federal agencies, and Alcoa.
As many as 50 people at the negotiating table.
- Um, yes.
In the beginning, it was, pretty difficult.
- Arguing.
And hashing things out.
- Adversarial.
- Walking away from the table.
- Acrimonious.
- Coming back to the table.
- Well, something had to be done.
- I don't know what exactly happened to change that,
but, well, I think part of it was Ron Weddell.
- There were times when I wasn't sure it was going to work.
I was afraid that we were going to have to just walk away
and call it quits and turn it into a battle where the lawyers
could make a lot of money.
- NARRATOR: About the time Ron Weddell got involved,
the people at Alcoa did something unexpected.
They owned up to the problem and vowed to clean up the bay.
- COMMERCIAL: ♪ Alcoa can't wait! ♪
- RON: Because we're an old, old company, we have a
lot of legacy projects.
And what I mean by that is when these plants operated in the 40s
and the 50s and even the 60s, there were no regulatory
restrictions on what needed to be done.
And in fact, the whole art of toxicology was poorly,
poorly understood.
In the early 1990s, we'd come to the realization that we were
going to have a lot that we would need to do.
- NARRATOR: The negotiators used a new approach called
Habitat Equivalency Analysis, in which environmental damage
is compensated through habitat replacement projects.
- And it was a breakthrough, it was a huge breakthrough.
You know, when you start talking about money,
especially when you're dealing with corporations,
that's when everybody gets nervous and upset.
So if we leave it just discussing acreage and projects,
people get, they start to get excited.
- NARRATOR: In the Alcoa case, all sides agreed
on a course of action.
Nearly a million cubic yards of contaminated sediment was
dredged from the bay floor.
That's enough to fill up two-thirds of the Astrodome.
The sediment was contained within this 500-acre island
next to the Alcoa plant.
Further south, an 11-acre oyster reef
and a 70-acre marsh were constructed.
All paid for by Alcoa.
- 130 million dollars is probably a good estimate.
Nobody ever gave me a blank checkbook.
But they always gave me a big checkbook, as long as
I was doing the right thing with the money.
- RAENELL: When a corporation can put their name
on a beautiful project, like the marsh, or the piers and docks
that they built, and have their name connected with something
positive like that that's helped people, then I think that's
good for them and it's good for the community, and...
- Once there's buy-in by the company,
and they're involved in the restoration and they see
what we're trying to do, that's when they learn
to appreciate the environment.
Take Port Lavaca, for instance.
It is an industry town.
These people are dependent on jobs.
However, they want quality of life as well.
They want clean air, clean water.
And this is a model for any area that works with industry.
- RAENELL: Most people would probably say that today compared
to 20 or 30 years ago, our water is cleaner,
and our air is cleaner.
But that doesn't mean that you can stop.
I mean, that doesn't mean it's anywhere near clean enough,
or, I mean obviously it's not.
We still have problems.
- NARRATOR: But from now on, environmental negotiation may
get a lot less contentious.
What started out in 1993 as a shotgun wedding
between industry and government has slowly matured
into a bona fide marriage, for better or for worse,
through good times and bad.