This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2008, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
LITTLE COTTONWOOD CANYON - The well-trimmed yards and high-priced homes obscured an ugly fact for many years about the neighborhood at the canyon's opening. Three defunct smelters had fouled the landscape with dangerously high levels of arsenic and lead.
But now the polished image matches the reality. Dangerous dirt has been scooped out and hauled away from 29 homes. The landscaping has been replaced.
"This was a very difficult Superfund cleanup," said Thomas D. Daniels, who oversaw three years of gritty work and delicate compromise for the Utah Divison of Environmental Response and Remediation.
Cleanup crews from Daniels' agency and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency are planning a cleanup for a few remaining hotspots in undeveloped areas. By 2010, they hope to have finished that work done, too.
Daniels said the team took great pains to keep the community informed and to accommodate their requests as best as possible. In some cases, crews even hand excavated around old trees that homeowners wanted to preserve.
"We do what we can to make everyone happy," Daniels said.
"It just became a juggling act between what's best for the community and what's best for the property owner."
The top 18 inches of contaminated soil was removed from affected properties. And sometimes it was treated to stabilize the heavy metals, before being disposed of in the county landfill.
Initially, some homeowners feared the cleanup. They worried that being part of a Superfund project would damage property values and blight the community's reputation.
In the end, though, many decided it was better to get rid of the lead and arsenic contamination so their neighborhood could get a clean bill of health. In fact, the environmental agencies wound up adding eight homes to their cleanup list rather than the 21 initially planned in 2004.
The contamination came from crude silver and lead smelters that operated between 1871 and 1874 and were shut down by 1879.
The Davenport smelter operated in an area just behind the fenced property previously inhabited by the Jeffs polygamist clan. The Flagstaff smelter was on a plateau just over Little Cottonwood Creek from the La Caille grounds.
And environmental investigators ultimately discovered a third smelter, used by McKay & Revolution Silver Mining Co., at the Davenport site.
The contamination was contained in the bricks and soil they left behind, though it sometimes seeped several feet below ground. It presented a health risk especially to children who played in the tainted soil.
Lead is linked to high blood pressure and an inability in adults to absorb vitamin D. In children, especially younger ones who are more likely to put dirty hands in their mouths, high levels of lead in the blood are blamed for neurological damage and problems such as shortened attention spans and lower intelligence.
Too much arsenic can mean skin, liver, bladder and lung cancer, as well as skin and gastrointestinal problems, according to the EPA.
"It needed to be cleaned up," said Daniels. "It was a time bomb."
One complication the cleanup faced was a tight budget. More than a decade ago, Congress let lapse a tax that funded the Superfund. And, in the years since, the agency has been reluctant to promise funding to any cleanup that didn't address a pressing health hazard.
The Flagstaff-Davenport cleanup was able to secure $10 million for the work, said Duc Nguyen, the EPA's on-site coordinator for the cleanup.
Several homeowners who opted to allow their lawns to be dug up have written to officials to thank them for a job well done.
One wrote: "I know it's not easy to work with all of us, and we felt you handled it in a very professional manner."
"Thank you again for everything!" another said.
For the agencies, the praise is especially sweet because they can say they closed the case on one of the toughest cleanups they've had to do in Utah.
Cleaning up
Duc Nguyen, who oversaw the cleanup for the EPA's Region 8, keeps tabs on some key accomplishments:
* It cost $9,950,000 for the work done from 2004 through last month.
* Trucks hauled away a total of 52,243 cubic feet of dirt .
* About 40 percent of that was treated to stabilize the dangerous metals, which otherwise would have had to go to a specialized hazardous waste landfill.
* The cost of sending a ton of cleanup dirt to the county landfill is $28.
* The cost of sending a ton of untreated dirt to a hazardous waste landfill is $129.