Opinion ID: 2716431
Heading Depth: 2
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: The Smelter

Text: About a year after the Golden Spike linked the coasts in 1869, the Omaha Smelting Company began construction on land leased from UP near the eastern terminus of the Transcontinental Railroad. See 1 Omaha: The Gate City and Douglas 1 The Honorable Laurie Smith Camp, Chief Judge, United States District Court for the District of Nebraska. 2 The Honorable Joseph F. Bataillon, United States District Judge for the District of Nebraska. -2- County Nebraska 226 (Arthur C. Wakeley ed., 1917). Both Omaha and the smelter grew rapidly; within two decades the smelter’s initial capital stock of $60,000 increased to $2.5 million, with over 65,000 tons of ore (then worth $14 million3) smelted in 1890. See Lawrence H. Larsen et al., Upstream Metropolis: An Urban Biography of Omaha & Council Bluffs 118 (2007); Nebraska: A Guide to the Cornhusker State 232 (1939). Control of the smelter passed to the American Smelter and Refining Company in 1889, and by the 1920s it “was reputed to be the nation’s largest lead refinery,” “produc[ing refined lead,] copper, gold, and silver,” and employing hundreds of immigrants who “spoke a total of fourteen languages.” Larsen, supra, at 118, 206; see Nebraska, supra, at 232. Amid the Great Depression, the smelter continued to produce 150,000 tons of “desilverized lead” a year, making it “one of the largest smelters in the world.” Nebraska, supra, at 220, 232. In 1958, the smelter still had the largest lead refining capacity in the United States: 180,000 tons per year. See United States v. Am. Smelting & Ref. Co., 182 F. Supp. 834, 851 (S.D.N.Y. 1960). Beneath the smelter’s soaring smoke-stacks—one of which in 1939 was “said to be the highest self-supported metal stack in existence,” Nebraska, supra, at 232—lay a darker story. An early twentieth century study of the “chief centers of the [lead] industry,” including Omaha, found the lead poisoning rate for workers in 1912 was “a little over twenty-two for every 100 employed.” Alice Hamilton, Lead Poisoning in American Industry, 1 J. Indus. Hygiene 8, 10 (1919). Approximately sixty years later, we upheld a finding by the Occupational Safety and Health Review Commission “that airborne concentrations of inorganic lead at” the Omaha smelter 3 By comparison, last month the average official cash price for a ton of lead on the London Metal Exchange was $2,188.33. See Average Official & Settlement Prices US$/tonne for the Month of July 2014, London Metal Exchange (July 31, 2014), www.lme.com/~/media/Files/Market%20data/Historic%20Data/July%202014. xlsx. Multiplied by 65,000 tons, this price suggests the smelter’s 1890 output would be worth approximately $142 million today. -3- seriously threatened the lives and health of employees. Am. Smelting & Ref. Co. v. Occ. Safety & Health Review Comm’n, 501 F.2d 504, 506 (8th Cir. 1974). The smelter “historically discharged wastewater containing lead and other pollutants directly into the [Missouri] river”—potentially “several thousand pounds of lead and other heavy metals and pollutants . . . annually.” Armstrong v. ASARCO, Inc., 138 F.3d 382, 384 & n.3 (8th Cir. 1998). Not until 1994—after lawsuits by citizen plaintiffs and the EPA—did Asarco agree to “limitations on the levels of pollutants [the smelter] was permitted to discharge into the river.” Id. at 384-85. According to the EPA and the State of Nebraska, lead emitted from the smelter also blew downwind and landed in residential areas of Omaha, contaminating soil. Screening in 1997 and 1998 found approximately 21% of children in the area had elevated blood lead levels—associated with lowered IQ, troubled behavior, impaired hearing, and stunted growth. See Agency for Toxic Substances & Disease Registry, Dep’t of Health & Human Servs., Public Health Assessment for Omaha Lead 11, 15 (2005). Asarco closed the smelter in the late 1990s, paying for remediation and donating the land to the City of Omaha to use as a riverside park. Yet approximately 10% of children in the area still had elevated levels of lead between 2000 and 2002. See id. at 23.