Yvette Ramirez-Ammerman is trying to comprehend why some of her
neighbors don't appear overly concerned about the poison in the ground
around them. She sits in her bright, airy, and immaculate home,
rocking Alyssa, her 3-year-old daughter on her lap.

"I won't ever be able to understand the denial," she says.
Maybe it's simply a function of time. Ramirez-Ammerman has only lived
in El Paso for about three years. When it comes to the toxic metals in
the soil, it appears the city has been in denial for well over a century.

A bulging blue folder rests on the table in front of her. It's filled
with documents of lab exams and visits from soil remediation crews.
It's not what she expected when they moved to El Paso from Albuquerque
after her husband received a posting at Fort Bliss. This July morning
Ramirez-Ammerman is eight-months pregnant and her face glows with an
inner-life that seems at odds with the story she relates.

The Ammermans chose a home in Kern Place, a neighborhood of stately
old houses just up the hill from downtown. The real estate agent never
mentioned problems with the land. Just the same, Ramirez-Ammerman
called the health department to see if there were any concerns. There
were none, they informed her. "I wish I had gotten it in writing," she
says with a frown.

It took a while to transform the house into a home. "When we moved
here, there was no landscaping," she says. "Zero."

The task of overseeing the work kept her and her daughter close to
home. "It was Alyssa's first year and we would play in the mud, and I
never thought about it," says Ramirez-Ammerman.

That is, until stories on local television and in the El Paso Times
began to describe how officials from the Environmental Protection
Agency (EPA) had fanned out to take soil samples in central El Paso.
They were searching for elevated levels of lead and arsenic. Any
readings of more than 500 parts per million for lead and 20 parts per
million for arsenic were cause for concern. The team focused its
investigation within a few miles' radius of one of El Paso's signature
landmarks, the old smokestacks from the ASARCO smelters, the last of
which had been taken offline only a few years before.

Just to be safe, Ramirez-Ammerman brought Alyssa in for a lead test.
The then 1-year-old girl's blood had 6 micrograms of lead per
deciliter. Lead is so toxic that it's measured by the amount of
micrograms in a tenth of a liter of blood. The Centers for Disease
Control and Prevention (CDC) decided in 1991 that anything above 10
could be dangerous. Alyssa seemed to be in the clear.

Then EPA officials contacted the Ammermans and asked if they could
take soil samples outside the house. The results are dated December 4,
2002. In the backyard, the regulators found "acceptable" levels of
lead but slightly elevated levels of arsenic. The results in the front
yard were more alarming. Lead levels were 250 parts per million above
the limit and arsenic was more than double the standard at 43 parts
per million. A month later, the Ammermans took Alyssa to a military
doctor for an arsenic test. The doctor did a full heavy metals
screening Alysa's lead blood level had gone up to 8. Two months after
that, it shot up to 15.

Since the family's brush with the toxic metals, Ramirez-Ammerman has
educated herself about child lead poisoning through conversations with
scientists in the field, government documents, and research on the
Internet. She relates that many scientists believe the 15-year-old
lead standard is set too high. Some studies have shown that there are
harmful effects at 5 micrograms. Research has indicated that minor
amounts of lead in infants and toddlers can lead to nervous system
damage, neurological disorders, loss of IQ points, lowered attention
spans, behavioral problems, and even an increase in delinquency.
Economic status can be an important determinant in the extent of the
damage, since proper nutrition and landscaping can help minimize risk.

"Over the last three or four decades, we've learned more and more
about the effects of lead," says Dr. Phillip Landrigan, professor and
chairman of the department of community and preventive medicine at the
Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York. "As we develop sharper and
sharper analytical tools, we keep discerning effects at levels we used
to think were safe."

Landrigan believes it's only a matter of time before the standard
amount at which lead is considered officially dangerous is lowered.
"It probably would have been reduced a year or two ago," he says "but
the current administration anticipated the decision was about to be
made and quickly reshuffled the membership of the advisory committee
at the CDC to remove some pediatricians and put on people who had ties
to the lead industry."

The Ammermans didn't wait for the EPA. They removed Alyssa from the
house and tested everything: the dust under the windowsills and inside
air ducts, the water, her toys, and exposed paint. Nothing inside the
house had elevated levels of lead. The EPA offered to clean up the
soil in the front yard but not the back, where Ramirez-Ammerman says
her daughter played. "It wasn't in the front yard where she was
exposed," she says. "She played in the backyard but [the level they
found] wasn't high enough."

It would take six months for the EPA to complete its clean-up. Rather
than simply trust the agency, the Ammermans covered every bit of soil
in the yard with gravel and a whole lot of sod. "If we hadn't had that
second test, we wouldn't have known, and she would have been exposed
like crazy," says Ramirez-Ammerman.


am standing in the old Smeltertown cemetery when Juan Garza lends me
the book Metal Magic: The Story of the American Smelting and Refining
Company. It's a blazing hot July afternoon, and the desert landscape
offers no respite. Stretching out for several acres are gravesites in
various states of advanced decay. A few are fenced-in monuments with
clear inscriptions but many more are broken crosses next to
coffin-shaped dimples in the dusty, bleached-brown soil. In the
background, several hundred yards away, are the ASARCO smokestacks.
Garza is one of a number of El Pasoans who have educated themselves on
the history of their industrial neighbor. This cemetery, the last
remnant of Smeltertown, is an important marker in that story.

According to Metal Magic, the American Smelting and Refining Company
began as a stock speculation scheme in 1899. The book, published 50
years later to celebrate ASARCO's golden anniversary, noted that some
of the same players who created ASARCO were also involved in "the
mother of all trusts," the Standard Oil Company. Part of the original
combine included the El Paso Smelting Works. When that facility was
built in 1887, on a tract of more than 600 acres along the Rio Grande,
there was not much to the city of El Paso. The ore came by railroad
from the Santa Eulalia mine in northern Mexico. At first the facility
just processed lead, but a couple of decades later, ASARCO added a
copper smelter. In the 1940s, the company constructed a secondary zinc
fuming operation, which lasted until 1982. (The lead smelter ended
operations in 1985 for lack of material; the final smelter, for
copper, was sidelined in 1999 when prices for the metal dropped too low.)

As early as the 1920s, ASARCO—and many people around the nation who
lived near its facilities—knew that what came out of the smelters
could make people sick. The most readily apparent danger appeared to
be from sulfur dioxide, which had a tendency to kill the crops in
adjacent farmland. The terrors of lead and arsenic were not well
understood. Airborne exposure had yet to be studied.

ASARCO hit upon a remedy to its pollution problem that served many
industrial facilities well for the next 50 years. Up until 1925, most
stacks rarely exceeded 200 feet. As the result of litigation in the
1920s, ASARCO made a practice of raising its stacks to above 400 feet.
Dr. Landrigan remembers that the early scientists at the EPA used to
joke about it. "[They'd] say that the solution to pollution was dilution."

In 1949, ASARCO added several hundred feet to the El Paso stack.
Almost 20 years later, it constructed an 828-foot stack as the
centerpiece of its operations. The company was a solid corporate
citizen in El Paso back then, and a handmaiden to the city's growth.
It donated land near the smelter for the campus of the University of
Texas at El Paso (UTEP), which started in 1914 as a mining and
metallurgy college. ASARCO created a community for its workers. It
rented them land on its property so that the workers could build
houses. They called it Smeltertown. A current ASARCO official says
there was even a company store (but no paved roads despite the pleas
of residents).

ASARCO needed all the good will it could generate, even back then. It
proved useful for the company to maintain relationships with the
staffers in the city's health department. (One sanitary engineer for
the health department was rumored to have taken a forced retirement in
1970 when it came out that he also drew pay as an ASARCO consultant.)
Periodically there would be complaints to city authorities about the
sulfur clouds. Residents would flee into their homes to escape the
yellow smog. It was rumored that ASARCO routinely waited until evening
for its big releases or until the wind was blowing toward Mexico just
across the river from the plant. Ironically, the way El Pasoans cool
themselves may have increased their exposure to toxins in the air,
notes Garza. In desert areas like Arizona, New Mexico, and El Paso,
evaporative coolers known as swamp coolers have been prevalent for
well over half a century. Unlike air conditioners, which circulate
air, swamp coolers draw air from the outside, add moisture, and pump
it into the house.

The first serious challenge ASARCO faced from El Paso authorities
didn't come until 1971. The city and the state air control board
started to study readings of the emissions from the smelters. They
wanted the information for a lawsuit against the company over the
sulfur dioxide releases. In the course of taking depositions and
testimony it came out that ASARCO was also releasing massive
quantities of heavy metals. Dr. Bernard Rosenblum, head of the city
health department, looked into it. His investigation determined that
the smelter had emitted 1,012 metric tons of lead, as well as 508
metric tons of zinc, 11 metric tons of cadmium, and 1 metric ton of
arsenic from its stacks between 1969 and 1971. Rosenblum estimated
that 2,700 people between the ages of 1 and 19 in a four-mile radius
around ASARCO had blood lead levels at or above 40 micrograms. (It's
unclear whether his calculation included the Mexican side.)

The doctor desperately tried to get the attention of authorities
outside El Paso to tell them about the situation. He wrote to everyone
from the EPA to Texas Senator John Tower. Finally, his distress signal
was heard by the CDC in Atlanta. In early 1971, the CDC dispatched two
young doctors to investigate. One of them was Phillip Landrigan, a
young second-year officer in the U.S. Public Health Service.


e expected that maybe 2 or 3 percent of the children whose blood we
got would have levels above 40 micrograms," remembers Landrigan,
sitting in his spacious office in New York this past August. (Since
his first trip to El Paso, the scientist has become one of the world
experts on child lead poisoning.) Instead, Landrigan and his colleague
found that more than half their subjects had elevated lead levels.
They went back to the CDC and sold their bosses on a larger study.
After extensive testing, a team of about a dozen scientists determined
that 59 percent of those children from 1 to 9 years old living within
1.6 kilometers of the smelter had lead levels high enough to be
considered dangerous. They also found high levels in the soil
considerably beyond the 1.6 kilometer radius. There was no doubt in
Landrigan's mind that the major source of the contamination came from
the smelter stacks.

ASARCO to this day denies that it is responsible for heavy metals
contamination in El Paso. "This is an urban area," says Lairy Johnson,
an environmental manager at the smelter. "There is going to be lead."

After the study, the CDC sent Landrigan overseas. During that time,
ASARCO and the city fathers took action. In February 1972, ASARCO and
the city settled the lawsuit. They decided that contamination from the
plant had affected only Smeltertown. Since ASARCO owned the land, it
just needed to evict the workers to solve the problem. Some of the
families had lived in Smeltertown for generations. No matter. Lawyers
settled on a formula of payouts, ranging between $500 and $7,000,
based on blood lead level, according to Mary Romero, an academic who
wrote about the community for a collection of essays called The
Chicano Struggle. "Negotiating evictions as the method to reduce lead
exposure was an important compromise because it restricted
responsibility and obligations to a manageable level," wrote Romero.
"Evacuation abrogated the city's responsibility to provide services to
Smeltertown and ASARCO's responsibility to decontaminate the area."

To make everything copacetic, the company provided its own scientist,
Dr. James McNeil, to contradict Landrigan and the CDC. In one paper,
McNeil went almost to comic lengths to not name the company as a
responsible party. Analyzing children's blood tests from El Paso, he
wrote: "A unique group of children discovered accidentally presented a
naturally occurring experimental model for the study."

McNeil blamed the elevated lead levels on economically impoverished
children eating lead-based paint. He stressed that blood lead levels
in the range of 40 micrograms to 80 micrograms were perfectly safe if
a child had good nutrition. "From a practical standpoint, the problem
with Smeltertown has been eliminated," he wrote. "The village is gone.
Former residents have been scattered throughout El Paso, their rent
has gone up
and their money for food has gone down."

When Landrigan returned to the United States he put together a
proposal for a study of the smelter area based on new research which
indicated that child lead poisoning, even at low levels, could harm
the nervous system and brain function. ASARCO and the city fathers had
other ideas.

In March of 1972, the El Paso Pediatrics Society made the following
announcement. "From the statistical data available to us there is no
evidence that there is a lead intoxication problem outside
Smeltertown." Two months later, the Lead Surveillance Committee of the
El Paso County Medical Society met. Doctors James McNeil, Bernard
Rosenblum, Jose Alva, Jose Roman, and Jorge Magana formed the
committee. This medical group advocated an end to blood lead sampling
outside Smeltertown. The last order of business at the meeting was to
reject a $50,000 grant from the CDC for Landrigan to do more studies.

Upon arriving in El Paso, Landrigan received a letter from Rosenblum,
canceling any continued investigation. It said the El Paso Board of
Health had instead decided to accept McNeil's study, funded by an
industry front group called the International Lead Zinc Research
Organization. "First, there was disagreement as to the validity of the
studies," Rosenblum wrote, explaining their rationale. "Secondly, Dr.
McNeil's studies are being [privately] funded where your studies would
be done at taxpayers' expense."

Landrigan protested to the Office of the Texas Attorney General. "I
don't know who spoke to whom, but within a day or two the invitation
was reinstated and we got to work," he says.

Their work, published in the medical journal Lancet, showed evidence
of neurological problems in children who lived near ASARCO, even in
some with no obvious symptoms of lead poisoning. Still, McNeil
continued to be a contrary force. He did his own study of IQ, funded
by ASARCO, that found no evidence of a negative effect, according to
Landrigan. "He dogged our heels for the next couple of years until he
finally faded from the scene," says Landrigan. "We would go to
meetings and present our paper, and he would jump up from the audience
and claim that we had done our study wrong, and a scientific debate
would ensue. That sort of unpleasantness lasted for a couple of years,
but ultimately, his paper was never published anywhere except some
local journal. Ours was published in a journal of international
repute. So I think it's fair to say that at the end of the day, we won
the scientific battle."

The attention from Landrigan's team helped force ASARCO to install
more pollution controls on its smelters. The scientists returned to El
Paso about five years later and found that the lead levels had gone
down. "They weren't what you would call normal," he says, "but they
were certainly lower than they had been."

Landrigan then turned his attention to studying lead poisoning in
other communities in the United States and abroad. For the next 20
years, El Paso slid back into business as usual. The controversy over
ASARCO appeared to have died along with Smeltertown.


he combination of a craggy face, long wiry white hair, and an
unwavering intensity sometimes gives Taylor Moore the aspect of a
hermit-turned-street preacher. But since returning to El Paso in 1999,
after a 50-year absence, the retired trial lawyer has become one of
the consciences of the city, a muckraker who has amassed an impressive
library of documents relating to ASARCO. The 72-year-old Moore's
investigations into the company and its corrupting influence on local
authorities have transformed the debate on the smelter forever.

Looking for something to do after his return to town, Moore took a
Texas Master Naturalist class with a focus on geology. He didn't know
much about ASARCO other than the bad reputation it had contributed to
El Paso. Wherever Moore traveled, he says, people identified El Paso
as that smelly, polluted place. He didn't know at the time that only a
few years before his return, the Texas Department of Health had
investigated an apparent cluster of multiple sclerosis cases around
the smelter. Their report concluded: "We found a statistically
significant two-fold excess of MS based on 14 cases of definite and
probable MS." Nothing happened beyond a confirmation of an excess of
the disease. There appears to have been little public disclosure of
the study.

As part of his schoolwork, Moore offered to help a UTEP professor on
an environmental task force formed by then-mayor Ray Caballero. The
professor had a stack of historical documents relating to ASARCO that
needed to be read and organized. Moore sat down with the pile and came
across the letter in which the city's leading pediatricians had tried
to run Landrigan out of town. These days, he calls it "the wiggle
letter," because when Moore shows it to people in authority they start
to wiggle nervously. "It's damning and so I started to look at what
other critics were doing about ASARCO," he remembers.

It seemed to Moore that everywhere it had operated, ASARCO had
problems. The list of cleanups exceeded 40 sites, spread out over the
nation: Montana, Arizona, Idaho, Missouri, Illinois, Nebraska,
Oklahoma, Washington, and Colorado. In many of the communities ASARCO
had operated for more than a 100 years—the first 70 without any
regulation to speak of—and residents had tremendous loyalty to the
company. However, the good will evaporated as studies showed elevated
levels of contamination, and the company acquiesced only to piecemeal
remediation or fought such efforts outright in court.

In 1999, Grupo Industrial Minera Mexico won a bidding war for ASARCO
with an offer of $2.2 billion and an agreement to assume the
conglomerate's sizable debt. The merger made Grupo the third-largest
copper producer in the world. Ironically, the company had once been
part of ASARCO, but the Mexican government forced the multinational to
sell its holdings, creating Grupo.

Almost immediately after Grupo acquired ASARCO, the price of copper
dropped precipitously. Suddenly, it became an open question whether
the communities throughout the United States that needed money from
the company to clean up its toxic legacy would get it. Many feared the
company would roll all its liabilities into a shell business and then
try to cast it off. In order to put its house in financial order,
Grupo wanted to sell one of its more lucrative mines. The Justice
Department put a halt to the sale, as it entered into negotiations
with Grupo in 2001 to establish a trust fund to pay for remediation.

Moore eyed the negotiations with suspicion. The Bush administration
had close ties to ASARCO and the lead industry. James Connaughton, the
chairman of the White House Council on Environmental Quality, which
helps set federal environmental policy, had previously worked as a
lobbyist for ASARCO. The Justice Department's top environmental
lawyer, Thomas Sansonetti, had worked for a Wyoming law firm that had
long represented ASARCO. When this became public, Justice Department
officials announced that Sansonetti had recused himself from any
dealings with the company.

In August 2002, the Justice Department reached a settlement. ASARCO
agreed to create a $100 million trust fund to remediate its
contamination. At least $1 million a year would be earmarked to El
Paso cleanup. Some estimates put the clean-up costs for all the ASARCO
sites as high as $1 billion. Just the price tag to clean a site in
East Omaha, Nebraska, where ASARCO is accused of contaminating about
20 square miles is expected to cost more than the amount of the entire
trust fund.

t took a research team spearheaded by environmental chemists from New
Mexico State University in 1999 to discover elevated levels of heavy
metals on the UTEP campus. Once again, El Paso's toxic legacy was back
in the local news. The scientists found lead levels of more than 2,200
parts per million. University officials downplayed the finding, saying
it posed no threat to a student body unlikely to put dirt in their
mouths. Subsequent tests of the university's daycare center showed
normal levels. ASARCO blamed the contamination on brick plants in
Juárez and car emissions. (Later it would put the onus on a company
that bought and crushed the slag that resulted from ASARCO's ore
processing.) Ambient air monitors in the area failed to pick up
increased toxic metals in the dust that periodically swirls through
campus. The city had existed with these lead levels for decades, so
why be concerned now?

Still, pressure from Mayor Caballero and state Senator Eliot Shapleigh
(D-El Paso) brought the EPA in to do more testing. At a public
meeting, agency officials unveiled a plan for massive sampling. "It
was a huge surprise to everybody," says Tracy Yellen, president of the
Kern Place homeowner's association.

By July 2002, the EPA had identified ASARCO as a potentially
responsible party for the contamination. "We do not believe EPA has
demonstrated that there needs to be any clean-up much less that ASARCO
is responsible for the metals found in the soils," the company responded.

By September 2004, the EPA had tested more than 3,638 residential
properties. A total of 1,082 showed contamination. At press time, 578
properties had been cleaned and 504 are awaiting EPA action. The
estimated cost to clean each property is calculated to be as much as
$30,000. Although the EPA has received $2 million from the ASARCO
trust fund for the remediation and has spent several million dollars
more of tax-payer dollars, the question remains, how will El Paso pay
for a complete clean-up? EPA officials suggest that one way to finance
it would be to declare the affected areas a Superfund site.

However, homeowner groups and ASARCO have resisted this suggestion.
The company will tell anyone who listens that the Superfund
designation decreases property values, stifles economic development,
and takes decades to complete. ASARCO believes the EPA is overcharging
for the clean-up and that there are less costly ways to remediate.
Furthermore, the company, along with the city, has pushed for state
regulators to raise the lead level it uses to determine what
properties need to be cleaned. The EPA has operated under a standard
of 500 parts per million of lead. The new standard, if accepted, would
be 640 parts per million. ASARCO calls the new standard a "site
specific" one. A higher standard would also mean fewer properties to
clean.

"The health threat is overblown," says Lairy Johnson. "It's not an
emergency."

For homeowners, it was hard to be concerned about something they had
lived with for decades. "It was a lot to swallow," says Yellen. "One
day you live in a beautiful neighborhood, and the next day you live in
a beautiful neighborhood that could be a Superfund site."

Yellen says she has received calls from seniors who have paid off
their homes and are worried about losing their equity. "I talk to
families that have kids, and they are not worried about
[contamination]," she says.

Yvette Ramirez-Ammerman understands the concerns. Lead doesn't make
you break out in boils, she notes, and it's hard to say if children
might be damaged in the future. As a military family, they move a lot
and depend on home equity. "This is our biggest investment," she says,
gesturing to her house. "But I wouldn't for a minute choose our
investment over our daughter's ability to move."

Without a recommendation from the city and the governor, the EPA will
not place El Paso on the national priority list for Superfund. Citing
ongoing negotiations over the clean-up between ASARCO and the EPA,
current El Paso Mayor Joe Wardy—who, backed by local business
interests, defeated Caballero in 2003—refused to make the request this
fall. The next opportunity won't come until the spring.


l Paso residents were so consumed by the debate over whether they
should allow parts of the city to become a Superfund site that few
noticed ASARCO's 10-year operating permit had come up for renewal
before the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality (TCEQ). Suddenly,
with copper prices rising once again, the smelter going back online
seemed like a real possibility. It wasn't lost on the company or its
allies. Among the groups who filed amicus briefs for the permit
renewal were the Texas Association of Business, the Texas Chemical
Council, and the El Paso Chamber of Commerce. Under the permit, ASARCO
would be allowed to emit a grab bag of toxins, including 6,672 tons of
sulfur dioxide and 7.69 tons of lead. The company insists that new
pollution-control devices, installed at a cost of tens of millions of
dollars, make the smelter a state-of-the-art facility. But while there
is much disagreement in El Paso over the issue of a Superfund
designation, there is more unanimity on the question of whether ASARCO
should start up again. "We've enjoyed the last few years without
ASARCO operating," says Yellen. "We've seen the air quality improve."

Renewal of air permits is usually a perfunctory exercise, without even
a contested hearing. But in this instance, the TCEQ decided to allow
for a hearing on the renewal permit. ASARCO appealed. A majority of
the El Paso city council decided not to take a position on ASARCO's
challenge. Many ASARCO opponents interpreted it as tacit approval by
the council for renewal of the permit. The specter of ASARCO starting
up again galvanized Sen. Shapleigh and local activists. The senator
grew up near the smelter and remembers it at its worst. "When the
smelter cranked up, my mother would come into the yard and tell me to
come inside," he remembers. "One could feel burning acid in the back
of the throat and see yellow flakes coming down from the sky."

City officials put the item back on the city council's agenda. The
weekend before the meeting, Shapleigh, along with community residents,
including Yellen, walked the neighborhoods urging people to turn out
for a march to city hall.

On July 20, hundreds of people, men, women, and children joined the
march. It was a demonstration the likes of which normally apathetic El
Paso had not seen in a long time. The marchers packed the council
chambers. After nearly 90 minutes of discussion, the city council
reversed its earlier decision and voted to contest the permit. (At
press time, the TCEQ had yet to set a date for the contested hearing.)
"In my lifetime, I've never seen an environmental march in El Paso,"
says Shapleigh.

Many of the marchers say the demonstration signals that a change has
come. University students, many brought into the process after hearing
presentations by Moore and Shapleigh, are getting involved. The issue
has politicized homeowner groups and raised concerns about economic
and environmental justice. The Sierra Club is planning a push on both
sides of the border to call attention to pollution. A Mexican
environmental group, Organización Popular Independiente, is trying to
educate people in Juarez, where contamination is presumed to be severe.

And maybe the value system of a city is changing. "Leaders who value
polluters and greed over people, strip mine a community's future,"
says Shapleigh. "My hope is that those folks who value our quality of
life—the people and environment of the Chihuahuan desert—will take
heart, but there is still much to do.