Millennium says clean up on track; fate of coal terminal still murky

Officials at Millennium Bulk Terminals say they have undone a big part of the damage left behind by Chinook Ventures at their West Longview riverfront site, where they plan to expand imports and add jobs to the area.

However, Millennium's more controversial plan — building a coal export dock about 100 feet from the Columbia River — is months away from completion and likely will again face opposition from environmental and neighborhood groups over health and transportation issues.

"Our goal is to do it right and get the right permits," Kristin Gaines, Millennium's vice president of environmental planning and services, said during a Wednesday tour of the 416-acre site.

Chinook, the previous tenant, had been fined hundreds of thousands of dollars for failing to secure building permits, improperly operating aging equipment and spilling chemicals into the Columbia River.

Millennium removed Chinook's unpermitted conveyor system, which stretched for hundreds of feet along the dock and waterfront. The company expects final approval for the dock from the state's Department of Ecology in January, Gaines said.

"This closes out the Chinook violations of the illegal in-water activity," she said.

For the past year, Millennium has been leading the cleanup of the former Reynolds Metals aluminum site, which Pennsylvania-based Alcoa Corp. has owned for 11 years. The soil and groundwater had been contaminated for decades by Reynolds.

Millennium and Alcoa are planning to send a draft cleanup plan to Ecology before March. The company expects the full cleanup to costs tens of millions of dollars.

Millennium has completed other cleanup projects in the last six months, including:

• Hauling away 430 spent anodes, weighing more than a ton each, from the Reynolds pothouse, clearing the biggest hurdle for demolishing the 1940s-era buildings, Gaines said. The anodes contain toxic chemicals that were used to heat and manufacture aluminum.

• Tearing down a wastewater treatment building where the roof caught fire this summer. The wastewater treatment system was not damaged, and the company plans to replace the building next year, Gaines said.

• Working out an agreement to remove 110,000 tons of petcoke, a byproduct of petroleum refining, that were left onsite by Chinook. The petcoke, owned by Chevron, will be trucked to the Port of Longview and shipped to Asia, Gaines said. Chinook had stored the material onsite and uncovered, where it could leach into groundwater.

For most of the year, Millennium has been importing alumina, the raw product of aluminum, for Alcoa's aluminum smelter in Wenatchee. The company hopes to diversify and import cement and other bulk goods for the construction and manufacturing industries, which will add jobs at Millennium and create work for union longshoremen starting in January, Gaines said.

Millennium also has been unloading and storing about 9,000 tons of coal monthly, which Weyerhaeuser Co. uses to power its Longview mill, but the company is aiming to operate a much larger coal-export facility.

 

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