Text Message from a Toxic-Waste Site

Along the north shore of Tacoma, an
irregular blip of land made largely of industrial waste extends out
into the water. That industrial waste is slag from a nine-story copper
smelter that used to stand here. For most of the 20th century, that
smelter produced 10 percent of the nation’s copper. The lucrative
by-products of the smelting process—gold, silver,
platinum—were stacked in sheets and ingots, and resold all over
the world. The smelter was also the nation’s only domestic producer of
arsenic, refining and reselling it for insecticide, rat poison, and
fertilizer—and resulting in massive amounts of slag laced
with arsenic and lead. Vats of this molten waste were carried out in
little hopper carts and dumped directly into Puget Sound with a hellish
hissing and steaming. The slag was so hot, people say, it continued to
glow orange underwater for long, dramatic minutes.

Enough of this industrial lava went into the Sound that it created a
shelf of land, acres on which ASARCO—the corporation that owned
the smelter—built more massive furnaces. The City of Tacoma
noticed this unusual form of industrial land growth and suggested
ASARCO build a marina. ASARCO agreed, and now there’s a very nice,
well-protected, 23-acre marina made of ossified poison.

This blip of land sits in its own tiny town—surrounded by the
city of Tacoma—called Ruston. Founded in 1890 by the
industrialist W. R. Rust¹, the 0.3-square-mile company town could afford its own
mayor, town council, police force, and fire department because the
smelter paid its weight in taxes.

Bill Baarsma, the current mayor of Tacoma, worked at the smelter as
a young man, like his father before him. He remembers it as a 24-hour
inferno—buildings as big as football fields with enormous
furnaces and ladles of molten metal swinging around, conveyor belts of
slag, deafening engines. Fair-skinned white men were never assigned to
work in the “arsenic kitchen” because the toxic gases would burn and
blister their skin. Trains stopped at the smelter and disgorged boxcars
full of metal to be melted down and purified: guns, wiring, the entire
guts of the decommissioned Nike missile system. One time, Baarsma heard
explosive popping from one of the furnaces. They’d just poured in a
load of live ammunition.

“Occasionally, things would start blowing up,” Baarsma says, “and
you’d get the hell out of there.” Furnaces would explode in the night,
and nearby residents would lie in the dark and wonder who’d died.

Like many people in the area, Baarsma has unusually high levels of
arsenic and lead in his yard. “We’re just careful,” he says cheerfully.
“We wear gloves when we work in the yard, and we don’t let the
grandkids play outside.” Baarsma’s father was so full of arsenic, he
could taste it when he ate. He used to do a magic trick where he gouged
a finger into one nostril and poked it out the other. “As a kid, I
couldn’t figure out how he did it,” Baarsma says. “But he had smelters’
nose—Lord knows what burned that hole in his septum.” Baarsma’s
father died of lung cancer at the age of 58. “It was tough, man,”
Baarsma says quietly. “It was real tough. When I visit that site, I see
ghosts.”

Soil tests by the Washington State Department of Ecology show
arsenic fallout from Ruston over 1,000 square miles in three counties.
In 1983, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) declared the smelter
a Superfund site, and ASARCO invested over $100 million in cleaning it
up before going bankrupt. The town of Ruston was stranded without a
major source of income, and the EPA was stranded with a 97-acre slab of
industrial waste. The plan was to cap the site and hope for the
best.

That slab of industrial waste happens to have some of the best views
anywhere in the Northwest—Mount Rainier, Vashon Island, otters
messing around in Puget Sound—and is a quick trip to either
downtown Tacoma or Point Defiance Park. It’s a perfect place to build,
say, luxury residences, if you can forget it’s a Superfund site.
Developers had been drooling over the land for years, and Ruston hoped
somebody could move in and pay the taxes that would continue to support
the town in the manner to which it had become accustomed.

Mike Cohen—who’s built custom homes in Thurston County,
casinos in Lakewood and Renton, a Comfort Inn in Kent, and storage
facilities in Puyallup—was one of those droolers. For years, he’d
drive down to Ruston, look through the hurricane fence around the site,
and dream of building something big. “But then I’d look at those
smelter buildings,” he says, “and say to myself: ‘No way.'”

In 2000, the world copper market had
crashed, and by 2006, ASARCO—saddled with 20 other Superfund
sites and several environmental lawsuits—was desperate to
sell.

So Cohen stepped up, laid his money on the table, and began one of
the most audacious real-estate projects in the state. In a complicated
deal between ASARCO, federal bankruptcy court, and the EPA, Cohen
bought the site and its liability for cleanup. Cohen and his investors
paid $20 million to ASARCO and $5.5 million to the EPA (it had a lien
on the property), and he plans to pay $30 million for infrastructure
(sewage lines, roads) and $30 million for the rest of the cleanup.
Cohen says he also reimburses the EPA $25,000 a month for its oversight
costs.

Cohen is betting he can transform almost 100 acres of Superfund
land—slag, polluted soil relocated from yards in Ruston, and a
hill covering a 25,000-cubic-yard container full of the smelter’s most
toxic waste, including the remains of the arsenic kitchen—into a
luxury waterfront village. The village, called Point Ruston, will have
36 custom homes, over 1,000 condominium units, a four-star resort
hotel, a shopping district, 250,000 square feet of office space, and a
mile-long waterfront promenade.

Cohen, in effect, has decided to become an alchemist. He’s trying to
turn lead into gold.

At full capacity, Point Ruston would triple the current population
of Ruston. The first building has yet to be completed, the national
real-estate market has soured, and Cohen is floating on a raft of
controversy—protests, lawsuits—but people are already
buying his dream.

On a recent visit to Point Ruston’s sales office, a restored ferry
moored in Tacoma’s Thea Foss Waterway, a middle-aged couple pored over
a floor plan while their son fidgeted and their salesman hovered, his
face stuck in a tight smile. The couple wanted to know about the
imaginary privacy of the imaginary porch of the imaginary condo they
were thinking about buying. So far, according to Cohen, 35 condos at
Point Ruston have been sold. Another sign that the world has turned on
its head: Rich people want to live—to host dinner parties, to
read magazines, to check e-mail, to watch TV, to have sex with each
other, to raise their families—on a slag heap.

Not everybody is buying the dream. One
afternoon last December, a group of activists drove into the wealthy
Thurston County cul-de-sac where Cohen lives and inflated a big brown
rat. Nearly two stories tall, the rat sat upright with red eyes,
festering nipples, menacing claws, and lips peeled back in a
sharp-toothed snarl. The activists had come to hand out leaflets to
Cohen’s neighbors telling them they live next to a greedy, deceptive
bully and to give Cohen their “Grinch of the Year” award. (Cohen, it
happens, was on vacation.) Activist Jacob Carton, a community organizer
for Jobs with Justice—a nonprofit that coordinates unions,
churches, and student groups to fight for social-justice
causes—wrote in the labor newsletter the Tahoma Organizer that Cohen won the award for “getting rich off union-busting,
corrupting our local democracy, tax-payer subsidies, and taking
advantage of immigrant workers.” Carton’s most serious allegation:
Cohen is exposing workers and residents next to Point Ruston to dust
laced with arsenic and lead, and the EPA isn’t doing anything about
it.

Another organization—a union called the United Brotherhood of
Carpenters—is also angry with Cohen and the EPA. “Remember, this
is George Bush’s EPA, where little bluebirds chirp on every hill and
every industry self-polices,” said Eric Franklin of the carpenters’
union. “That’s how those assholes thought. And [Cohen’s] son is an
attorney. If we were saying anything that was untrue, why haven’t we
been sued?”

Twenty days after that boast, they got sued. Cohen filed suit
against the United Brotherhood of Carpenters and Jobs with Justice,
accusing them of defamation, property damage (slashing tires and gluing
locks shut), and trespassing. Cohen is asking for $20
million—about what he paid ASARCO for that 97-acre plot of
land.

Jobs with Justice and the United
Brotherhood of Carpenters have been running separate but parallel
campaigns against Point Ruston, protesting outside the construction
site, the floating-ferry sales office, and Cohen’s home. According to
Cohen’s lawsuit, activists have held up large banners with
inflammatory—and false, Cohen says—implications. One large
banner read: “IS MIKE COHEN Poisoning Our Community?” Activists handed
out leaflets outside the sales office claiming Point Ruston has:

A view to die for. Buyer beware. Pt Ruston is built on one of the
most toxic sites in the nation that made rat poison. The rats at the
EPA and the City of Tacoma aren’t keeping us safe from the poisons
that will remain next to the condos.

In February, the United Brotherhood of Carpenters posted a
nine-minute YouTube video with anonymous immigrant workers worrying
about what they’ve been exposed to at Point Ruston. Over a soundtrack
of mournful horns, three workers in silhouette say (in Spanish with
English subtitles):

When we were given name tags in the office, the owner of Rain City
told us if any of the guys at the job site ask questions we have to
tell them that we took all the necessary training. We also didn’t
like that we were forced to use the names on the badges that they
gave us and not to use our real names… We were sent there to start
the footing where most of the contamination occurs. The rumor is that
after we are done they are going to lay us off and we will be taken
out of the site and other people who is [sic] not contaminated will
be brought in so the only people who will be affected on that job is
[sic] us.

The video sparked investigations by the Washington State Department
of Labor & Industries (L&I). L&I found Point Ruston and one
of its contractors, Rain City, guilty of skirting a few regulations.
During the first investigation, according to internal L&I
documents, Rain City owner Ed Diamond confessed to handing untrained
workers—who were uninformed of the site’s dangers—other
peoples’ safety-training badges and asking them to pretend they’d been
trained. (“Never received training,” one set of L&I field notes
from an interview read. “It cost too much money.”)

Other L&I internal documents reveal that some workers were not
wearing air monitors to test their exposure to lead and arsenic, and
that workers were not provided with the results of their urine tests
for toxins. Four workers eventually tested over allowable limits for
arsenic. L&I concluded that Rain City had committed “serious” and
“willful” violations—had, in fact, cut corners and potentially
compromised the safety of their workers to maximize profits—and
fined Rain City over $36,000. (Kevin Rochlin, a project manager for the
EPA, called the violations “deplorable” and said he was surprised
L&I hadn’t fined Rain City more heavily.)

The United Brotherhood of Carpenters filed a subsequent complaint
with the National Labor Relations Board, alleging that Rain City
identified, demoted, and fired workers who appeared in the YouTube
video.

“National Labor Relations Board ruled against Rain City for $40,000
in back pay,” Franklin said. “It’s rare that the labor board comes in
and slaps somebody that hard.” Rain City was also asked to post a memo
of promises. Promise number four: “WE WILL NOT assign you to more
arduous work, demote you, lay you off, or fire you because you complain
about working conditions to a union or outsiders.”

In the wake of the scandal, Point Ruston replaced Rain City with
Diamond Concrete—a new company created by Ed Diamond, one of Rain
City’s previous owners.

The carpenters’ union declared a labor victory, but the YouTube
video stripped them of some credibility, making claims that were never
substantiated. The silhouetted workers complained that “something like
acid comes out and all people get headaches,” of “burning in the
throat” from poisoning, and that “slag and thousands of tons of smoke
have poisoned everything within a five-mile radius of the plant.”
(Poisoned everything? That’s just hyperbole.) I asked Jimmy
Matta, of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters, several times to
substantiate those claims about acid and poisoning—with a doctor,
a witness, a document, anything—and he did not. Rochlin, from the
EPA, said that the headaches and burning throats were “inconsistent”
with the chemicals at the site and speculated they could have been
caused by diesel fumes.²

Matta also suggested that a 30-year-old Point Ruston worker died
because of site conditions. “They say he died of a heart attack,” Matta
said in an interview. “He was a 30-year-old construction worker, and
those guys are healthy. There was never an autopsy, and the worker’s
body was flown back to Mexico.” According to that worker’s death
certificate, he died of a heart attack due to pneumonia, and doctors
found a pulmonary embolism—blood clots in his lungs. (The worker
could have died of a pulmonary embolism because of inhaled poisons. Or
he could have died from a pulmonary embolism just because. People have
pulmonary embolisms for all kinds of reasons, from inflammatory bowel
disease to smoking to taking birth-control pills.)

Ed Diamond, of Rain City/Diamond Concrete, happened to be sitting
with me on a plane ride from Arizona recently. (Small world.) I asked
about the dead worker. Diamond said he was just an alcoholic in poor
health. I asked what he thought of the United Brotherhood of
Carpenters. He dismissed them as using the social-justice talking
points as weaponry in an internecine labor fight. Diamond
said—echoing what Cohen has said—that the carpenters’ union
wanted in on the Point Ruston project and were rejected. (Franklin, of
the carpenters’ union, has denied this.)

Last June, according to Cohen’s lawsuit, Matta (from the carpenters’
union) and Diamond (then from Rain City) met in a sandwich shop on
Ruston’s only commercial street. Allegedly, Matta tried to convince
Diamond to hire laborers from the United Brotherhood of Carpenters.
From the lawsuit:

Diamond listened to Matta’s comments and then asked: “How does this
benefit my company?” Matta responded: “I will stop harassing you,
leave you alone, and not spank you.” Matta continued by stating that
this was not the first time that he had “spanked” someone… Matta
stated that Rain City was the union’s number-one target and that he
was going to “get Rain City.”

Cohen says the protests—people showing up at Point Ruston with
banners, leaflets, and air horns—began a few weeks later. The
YouTube video surfaced a few months later, prompting the L&I
investigations.

Jobs with Justice, the other vocal critics of Point Ruston, is
slightly harder to dismiss as having ulterior motives. Whereas the
carpenters’ union stood to gain something from Point Ruston and didn’t
get what it wanted (according to the lawsuit, anyway), Jobs with
Justice is a bunch of sincere do-gooders with beards. Where Jimmy Matta
comes across as a fast-talking negotiator, Jobs with Justice’s Jacob
Carton is methodical and pious. During one of our conversations, he
impressed upon me that even moderates were involved in the fight
against Point Ruston, not just “people who go to sleep every night and
wake up every morning thinking about how to get justice like I do.” He
also impressed upon me that the United Brotherhood of Carpenters is not
a Jobs with Justice member organization. (It turns out that a local chapter of the United Brotherhood of Carpenters—local 1797—is, in fact, listed on Jobs with Justice’s website as a member organization.)

Carton dresses in black jeans, a button-up shirt, and tortoiseshell
glasses. He has the soft speech and seriousness of a true believer,
building rhetorical mazes that end in questions that only have one
answer, like when he’s talking about trying to get Cohen to build
low-income housing so all the janitors, dishwashers, groundskeepers,
and other maintenance workers won’t have to drive into work every day:
“So why would you want to put taxpayer money toward a luxury
development that’s only going to increase traffic congestion, which is
bad for the environment, and sprawl for workers forced to live on the
outskirts of a city?” (There is no low-income housing planned for Point
Ruston.) “Why would you want to publicly subsidize something that’s
only going to hurt your community?”

Well, when you put it like that, it does sound a little
stupid.

Among other tactics—the protests, the leaflets, the inflatable
rat—Carton and a few others snuck aboard the
ferryboat-turned-showroom during a Point Ruston sales-pitch cruise. In
the middle of the presentation for prospective buyers, Carton, his
colleague Adam Hoyt (also bearded), and the others began asking,
according to Cohen’s lawsuit, “inflammatory questions that contained
false allegations and suggestions intended to intimidate and discourage
potential buyers.” Carton says they got themselves on the invitation
list legitimately (although he admits he came as someone else’s “guest”
and shaved his beard), merely asked questions about Point Ruston in
moderate tones, and didn’t cause a scene.

That embarrassment to Cohen and Point Ruston happened in March. By
April, Cohen had filed his lawsuit against the United Brotherhood of
Carpenters and Jobs with Justice, as well as Jacob Carton, Adam Hoyt,
Jimmy Matta, and another carpenters’ union member named Jimmy Haun.

The suit doesn’t faze Hoyt. Jobs with Justice has been sued before,
recently for racketeering—which Hoyt calls “ridiculous, since we
don’t profit off anything we do”—by the Smithfield Packing
Company and the Tomlinson Linen Service. (Tomlinson won the Grinch of
the Year award in 2008 and has since settled the suit. Hoyt’s lawyers
advised against discussing all the terms, but Hoyt says Jobs with
Justice paid no money, ended their campaign against Tomlinson, and
reserved the right to pursue campaigns against them in the future.)

Hoyt believes these suits are tactical, deployed by business owners
to silence activists and drain their comparatively meager resources.
(According to tax returns, the national chapter of Jobs with Justice
operates on a $1.2 million budget. The local chapter operates on
$211,000.) “Michael Cohen says our free speech has had a $20 million
effect on his $1.2 billion investment?” asks Hoyt, a steel and
construction worker who volunteers with Jobs for Justice. “He’s just
trying to silence our community organizing and drag us through the
judicial system, where he has the financial advantage.”

Hoyt and Carton say they’re not categorically opposed to developing
the site. “It would be better for something to be built there,” Hoyt
says. “We just want it to be done safely and done right.”

In 2006, Bob Ashmore was driving home from
work when he saw dust coming off the ASARCO site. Point Ruston workers
were demolishing the foundation of ASARCO’s old arsenic smokestack. He
didn’t like the looks of that dust—there should’ve been sprays of
water to keep it from blowing around. Ashmore is a lifelong
construction worker with hazardous-waste training and a degree in civil
engineering. He also worked on an ASARCO cleanup in Everett in 2001,
and, he said in a sworn declaration filed with the Pierce County
Superior Court in 2008, “I have first-hand knowledge of the seriousness
of the hazards contained on ASARCO smelter and arsenic production
sites.”

He called a Point Ruston contractor, who said they were having
trouble with a meter on the fire hydrant. When Ashmore got to his home
in Browns Point, across Commencement Bay from Point Ruston, he says he
kept watching dust blow off the site.

Over the years, Ashmore called in concerns about Point Ruston’s dust
and silt fences (plastic barriers to keep dust from blowing off-site)
to the state Department of Ecology, the county health department, and
city council members, all of whom told Ashmore to call EPA project
manager Kevin Rochlin. Rochlin, Ashmore says, “did not return many
phone calls and responded to only one e-mail that did not answer my
inquiries.”

Mike Tallman, who lives near the old arsenic kitchen, says
quantities of dust from the demolition of its foundation blew onto his
property and he had to badger Rochlin to test them. Tallman’s yard,
like many yards in Ruston, had been dug up and hauled away by the EPA
after it tested too high for arsenic and lead, then backfilled with
clean soil. (This April, the EPA announced it would spend around $7
million of its federal stimulus package cleaning up Ruston and another
$5 million cleaning a Superfund site on Bainbridge Island.) According
to King County Public Health, soil around Puget Sound averages 7 parts
per million (ppm) of arsenic. The strictest state standard for arsenic
says residential areas should not exceed 20 ppm and industrial sites
should not exceed 200 ppm.

Tallman’s property had been cleaned by the EPA to the 20-ppm
standard. His new dust from the Point Ruston project tested at 209 ppm.
He wrote some letters and left some phone messages.

Rochlin responded that the EPA has set an “action level” of 230 ppm
at the Point Ruston site—and that he hadn’t found more than a few
teaspoons of dust on Tallman’s property anyway. Tallman countered that
Rochlin hadn’t shown up to test until after a windstorm had blown it
all away.

The way Kevin Rochlin at the EPA tells it,
the 97-acre shelf of dirt and slag is almost squeaky clean. We met in
his downtown Seattle office, where he handed over lab results from air
monitors around the site (to measure dust blowing into nearby
neighborhoods) and air monitors worn secretly by construction workers
at Point Ruston. The results from January through March of this year
show almost comically low levels of arsenic and lead. Washington State
gets interested if between 5 and 10 micrograms of arsenic are floating
in a cubic meter of air. Most of the Point Ruston measurements showed
fewer than 0.05 micrograms per cubic meter. The highest was 1.1.

The action levels set by the EPA—levels at which the EPA and
Cohen start to talk about what should change to prevent further
exposure—are half of what a worker is allowed to be exposed to
during an eight-hour workday over a 30-year career.

Curiously, Rochlin failed to mention that the personal
air-monitoring results come from a period when Point Ruston workers
were doing surface work. They’d finished digging foundations and
working in the dust, where most of the toxins sit. He also failed to
mention that Rain City was fined—and Point Ruston was
cited—by L&I for failing to monitor its workers’ exposure to
airborne arsenic. L&I also found that Rain City failed to “inform
employees about the nature, level, and degree of exposure to hazardous
substances they’re likely to encounter” and failed to give workers
their urine-test results for arsenic exposure.

Rochlin was careful, during our interview, to delineate between the
EPA’s responsibility for public health and L&I’s responsibility for
worker health. Rochlin didn’t have to tell me about Point
Ruston’s failure to monitor worker exposure to arsenic and lead while
digging the foundations and elevator shafts, but it also seems a bit
disingenuous to hand me results from air monitors secretly worn by
workers—”my spies,” he chuckled as he passed them across the
table—without mentioning that they come after the digging by
workers who were not being monitored and, worried about their exposure
to arsenic and lead, weren’t given their urine-test results. It’s not
hard to understand why some people feel like the EPA, their ostensible
watchdog, is a little too defensive of Mike Cohen.

It also doesn’t help that Point Ruston pays the EPA $25,000 a month
to cover oversight costs and that Point Ruston employees pull the
cassettes from their own air monitors to send to the lab for testing.
Those are standard practices in the industry—the Washington State
Department of Ecology confirmed this—but they do give one pause.
As does the fact that Citizens for a Healthy Bay, a citizen watchdog
group that works with the EPA to independently review Point Ruston’s
air-monitoring results, once took a $2,500 donation from Point Ruston.
The little things add up. People get suspicious.

Yet another tentacle of controversy: There may be a leak in L&I
who tips off Point Ruston and/or its contractors when an inspection is
about to happen, allowing the business to hustle potentially
problematic workers off the site. On the afternoon of July 23, 2008,
L&I began its inspection of Point Ruston and its contractor Rain
City to determine whether they were employing improperly trained
workers. According to internal L&I documents, that morning “a large
group of Rain City employees, including those not trained, were told to
gather their tools and they were sent to another work site. Shortly
after they left the site, another group of Rain City
HAZWOPER-
trained employees arrived.” A few hours later, L&I
arrived to begin its investigation. Elaine Fischer, a spokesperson at
L&I, suggested the YouTube video (released two days before the
inspection) might have spooked Rain City into switching work crews.

A few months later, on December 9, L&I visited the site to
investigate whether Point Ruston was withholding arsenic- and lead-test
results from its workers, who had requested to see their files. That
morning at 6:00 a.m., Jobs with Justice’s Carton got a call from a
minister who said some workers were told to not come to work that day
because U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement was planning a raid.
Jobs with Justice organized a rally to observe the raid, but no raid
materialized. Instead, L&I showed up for an unannounced site
inspection.

Cohen calls the possibility of an L&I leak “absolutely beyond
absurd.” L&I’s Elaine Fischer had no explanation.

One recent afternoon, 75-year-old James L.
Wingard gives me a driving tour of Ruston. He points out the few bars,
the sandwich shop, the knickknack shop, the closed-down casino, and
tells me who lives in which house and how much their land is worth.
Property values have risen almost 400 percent since Wingard was a
kid.

“This is the lot I wish I’d never sold,” Wingard mutters, stopping
in front of large house on a hill. Who’d he sell it to? “Dan Albertson,
Tacoma attorney, the number-one enemy of Ruston.” Albertson is on the
Ruston Town Council and the leader of a political faction that, in
Wingard’s words, “wants to kill businesses, wants to kill this town,
and is so bloody nasty and mean that somebody needs to fight them.”

Eight hundred people live in Ruston, and there are 800 different
stories about what’s happened here. Sitting over an afternoon beer and
a few spent pull tabs in the Ruston Inn, a resident named Dan declines
to give his last name. “I’m not supposed to be here,” he says. He has
lived in the area most of his life, is currently unemployed, and thinks
it’s simple: The town likes its independence. Ruston was willing to put
up with the smelter because it gave the town an allowance to pay for
its pride. When the smelter closed, people panicked and wondered how to
make municipal ends meet. Albertson and a cadre of antidevelopment
newcomers got elected by a fluke, Dan says, riding a wave of community
disgust for a condominium called the Commencement—a big,
contemporary (some might say tacky) building that overlooks the Point
Ruston site. But those newcomers turned out to be “assholes” (Dan’s
word) more concerned with keeping Ruston quaint than “keeping Ruston
Ruston.” Meanwhile, the budget crisis got worse. Many old-timers love
Ruston and have warmed to the idea of Cohen as a town savior.

An informal survey of residents supports Dan’s version. Old-timer
Wingard calls Cohen “a hero.” Steve Fabre, owner of the casino (who is
suing the city for steeply raising his taxes), calls Cohen “the genuine
article.” Town treasurer Karen Carlisle says she hopes “Point Ruston
can generate enough revenue to keep us Ruston.”

On the other side, town councilman Dan Albertson says he finds Point
Ruston “out of scale for the community,” and, regarding the town budget
crisis: “Frankly, annexation to Tacoma looks pretty attractive.”
(Regarding being “antibusiness” and “an asshole,” Albertson merely
says: “I’m just trying to represent my larger community.”)

Joan Mell, a Tacoma attorney involved in several of the town
lawsuits, laughed loud and long when I told her I wanted to write about
what’s happening in Ruston. “Just don’t drink the water when you go
down there,” she said. “They’re all on crazy juice.”

All of them—the newcomers, the old guard, the protestors, the
developers—are spinning off in radically different directions
because there’s no easy answer to the problems of this tiny town: its
97-acre Superfund site, its past full of ghosts, its wasting
pocketbook, its disproportionate pride.

Last week, I had an evening-time telephone conversation with Cohen.
He’s confounded by Jobs with Justice. “I’ve seen Jake [Carton] passing
out leaflets, and he seems so dedicated,” Cohen marveled. “This
guy is so dedicated and his cause is so shitty. I wasn’t nearly as
dedicated as him, but I stood up for causes I believed in.” Cohen
talked about attending sit-ins at Woolworth’s when the five-and-dime
still refused to serve African Americans. “People should stand up for
what they believe in,” Cohen repeated. “They know we’re not spreading
poison—we’re cleaning it up! Every day this site gets a little
bit better. What we’re trying to do, what Tacoma is trying to do, is
gently move a city from the mill era to the 21st century.”

Cohen believes he’s doing the Lord’s work. Carton believes he’s
doing the Lord’s work. But the devil is in the details, and the details
are messy. It’s hard to know whom to believe.

For a man who is the center of gravity for
so much money, power, and controversy, Cohen is surprisingly
gentle—almost nerdy—in his affect. The one time we meet in
person is at Point Ruston’s headquarters, housed in an old brick school
building. He looks like a businessman: blue slacks, a button-up shirt,
and thinning, salt-and-pepper hair. But Cohen used to be a hippie. Back
in the 1970s, he left a college on the East Coast and hitchhiked west
to follow a young lady who’d left for a farm in California. The girl
had left by the time Cohen showed up, but he befriended one of the
farm’s leaders, Robert Gilbert, and decided to stay. They grew orchards
and gardens on the farm and built a house using Sunset instructional
books. “We’d sit around at night figuring out what to build the next
morning,” Gilbert says. “We were teaching ourselves.” The two became
lifelong friends. Gilbert is now a conceptual designer for Point
Ruston, staying in Ruston one week each month and splitting the rest of
his time between California and Mexico.

In a phone interview, Gilbert talked like a benevolently bombastic
hippie, holding forth on everything from Mexican history to the
ergonomics of benches in Barcelona’s Parc Guëll to the beauty of
the octopuses in Puget Sound to the heroism of Mike Cohen. “All the
remediation that’s required?” Gilbert asked. “I wouldn’t have taken it
on. It broke ASARCO.” Gilbert said he was impressed by Cohen’s
continuing to build this enormous project—by far the biggest
gamble of his career—during the worldwide economic crisis. Like
Carton, Gilbert builds rhetorical mazes that end with questions that
only have one answer: “Even if he has to stop building because of the
economic crisis, he has finish the remediation. How about that? Think
about it. Isn’t that brave?”

Well, when you put it like that, it does sound brave.

Whatever people say about Cohen, he’s got one hell of a car. It’s a
red Land Rover with a license plate that reads: “PTRUSTON.” In the
short drive from the brick schoolhouse to his shelf of slag, Cohen
takes a phone call via crystal-clear inner-car loudspeaker. When we
finally pull onto the site and drive up into Point Ruston’s inaugural
parking garage, his rearview mirrors adjust robotically to the
tilt.

We stop by the former arsenic kitchen, where fair-skinned men
weren’t allowed to work and Mike Tallman complained about dust. Cohen
gets out of his red Land Rover and asks what they’re up to. Something
to do with learning about erosion control.

We drive to the slab, through a gate, and bounce up the road. We
pass a machine that pulls gravel up a conveyor belt into a funnel that
spreads it precisely over a square of packed earth. Cohen waves to the
workers. They wave back. I ask again about the accusations from Jobs
with Justice. “I don’t mind saying that 100 percent of that is bull,”
Cohen says. “It’s so naive to think the EPA isn’t exercising proper
oversight.”

Behind us is a hill covered in green grass, yellow wildflowers, and
purple lupine (“I planted some flowers,” grins Tim Rusher, Point
Ruston’s safety inspector, on another visit). It’s a bucolic hill with
a view, a nice place for a picnic, and it’s filled with ASARCO’s
nastiest waste. Before Cohen bought the property, ASARCO and the EPA
cut a crater into this hill, lined it with heavy-duty three-ply
plastic, poured the worst of the waste in, crushed it down, pulled more
heavy-duty three-ply plastic on top, and sealed it—basically, a
25,000-cubic-yard Ziploc bag. The EPA recommended using malleable
plastic instead of a rigid container, which might crack in an
earthquake. Because every dump leaks—it’s inevitable—the
EPA buried a system of drainage and cisterns under the hill to collect
the hazardous runoff, which can be tested and transported to yet
another hazardous-waste site built to accommodate the poisoned water.
ASARCO and the EPA then poured fill on top of the plastic bag full of
toxins, then laid down a barrier to warn people not to dig any deeper,
and then poured two more feet of dirt on top of that. Then came the
grass and flowers.

Cohen and I get out near the shore of the construction site and walk
to the edge. It’s a sunny day. The air smells of salt. Not rotten like
a low tide, but clean. We step onto the slag, the ground made out of
industrial waste, the smelter’s irremovable legacy. It’s beautiful,
like a lava flow or clinker brick—whorled and ruddy and studded
with air bubbles from where it quickly cooled in the bay. I pick up a
piece. “It’s got a sweet, tangy taste if you want to suck on it,” Cohen
says. I almost touch the piece to my tongue and catch myself. He smirks
impishly.

Of course. This is the slag that’s causing all the trouble.

1. W. R. Rust had other business interests, a chronic nose drip, and
membership in a secret society called the Afifi Temple of the Ancient
Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine—also known as the Shriners—which claimed to have
been founded by the son-in-law of the Prophet Muhammad as “an
Inquisition, or vigilance committee, to dispense justice and execute
punishment upon criminals who escaped their just deserts through the
tardiness or corruption of the courts.” Fittingly, Rust liked to
dispense punishments to his enemies and was no stranger to courtroom
controversy. The Rust family archives—a box of brittle papers
tucked away in the special collections of the University of
Washington—are an object lesson in the misery of the rich. Rust’s
letters are tempestuous, paranoid, and terrorizing.

Among other documented legal battles, the archive covers the alleged
kidnapping of Rust’s son, a bank clerk. The accused kidnapper was found
not guilty, and Rust’s lawyer gave a shrill and defensive closing
statement, declaring that certain persons “stir up class hatred against
Mr. Rust on account of his having some money, which he earned honestly
by digging it out of the hills in Alaska and spent in Tacoma, to the
benefit of everybody.” But documents in the archives hint that that
money wasn’t all “earned honestly”—for example, the suggestion
that Rust had a man named John Tuppola committed to an insane asylum so
that Rust could take the man’s share of an Alaskan gold mine. Tuppola,
after his season in hell and litigation, won $1 million from either
Rust or the mining company. (The news clippings are unclear.)

When Rust founded the town around the smelter in 1890, he named it,
in a fit of banality, Smelter. In 1906, legend has it, his grateful
employees voted to change the name to Ruston, in honor of their beloved
plutocrat. It’s a difficult legend to believe. Rust died in 1928, and
the condolence notes—from the mayor of Tacoma, the harbormaster
of Tacoma, a clutch of lawyers on both coasts—read like form
letters. Not one note of genuine grief in the whole stack.

2. Symptoms that are consistent with arsenic poisoning: convulsions,
change in fingernail color, vomiting, hair loss. Scholars think
Cézanne’s diabetes, Monet’s blindness, and van Gogh’s
neurological problems might have been caused by arsenic poisoning from
their emerald green paints. Writer, socialite, and superwoman Clare
Booth Luce suffered arsenic poisoning while serving as the ambassador
to Italy in 1953. At first, the U.S. government suspected a foreign
plot. It was later found that the poisoning came from paint chips
falling from her bedroom ceiling.

This story has been updated since its original publication.