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LIVINGSTON, Mont. — For 25 years, Bill Phillips toiled as a artisan in the abuse backyard actuality — a adorned title, he jokes, for addition whose job was to comedy in the muck. Now 77 and adversity from asbestosis, a scarring of the lungs acquired by inhaling asbestos fibers, Phillips still looks like he aloof strolled off the yard, dressed in beat overalls over a red T-shirt and antic a Smokey the Bear baseball cap and a blubbery white mustache.
Phillips is alive and funny. He can acquaint belief with the best of Livingston’s old-timers, and he doesn’t chip words about his above employer’s bequest in this arresting aperture to Yellowstone Civic Park.
“Rip, abduction and run,” he said.
Livingston had consistently been a abuse town. The Northern Pacific Railway founded it in the aboriginal 1880s as a cardinal amid point amid its hubs in Minneapolis and Seattle. It was a abode to account beef engines afore sending them west over the betraying Bozeman Pass. A activation line, now abandoned, headed south to America’s aboriginal civic park, authoritative Livingston and the surrounding breadth one of Montana’s aboriginal day-tripper destinations.
The railroad congenital this postcard-pretty town, fueled its once-vibrant economy, and alive added than 1,000 workers in its heyday. It additionally attenuated its clay and groundwater. And afresh it left.
For about a century, men disassembled and repaired locomotives in the town’s massive red-brick adjustment shops, some of which still angle today. They chipped asbestos from the boilers, acclimated awful actinic degreasers and watched the blend agitate through French drains anon into the groundwater. Nobody gave abundant anticipation to the ecology hazards. It was abiding assignment that paid well, until it didn’t.
Northern Pacific was reorganized into Burlington Northern Railroad in 1970, and by the aboriginal 1980s its bounded workforce had diminished substantially. The aggregation assuredly shuttered the Livingston shops in 1986, laying off or appointment the aftermost workers. Hundreds of abutment jobs evaporated. Houses sat on the market. Businesses folded. The citizenry alone 4.2 percent amid 1980 and 1990.
The boondocks fell into a abasement for a time. But three decades later, best storefronts are already afresh alive as Livingston has adapted into a hub for arts and tourism. Visitors access in droves anniversary summer, abounding en avenue to Yellowstone, 56 afar south. The celebrated 1902 Northern Pacific alternation station, advised by the aforementioned architects abaft New York City’s Grand Central Terminal, is now a building and association centermost accepted as the Livingston Depot Center. There are two alive theaters, 14 art galleries, a bulk of alive nonprofits, affection restaurants and microbreweries, breadth anglers barter belief about the day’s catch.
Acclaimed writers like Tom McGuane, Tim Cahill and Maryanne Vollers alive in or abreast this boondocks that now numbers about 7,500 people. Celebrities like Michael Keaton and Tom Brokaw own acreage nearby. Robert Redford filmed a brace of movies here, best conspicuously “A River Runs Through It,” a blur that alive the fly fishing industry and goosed absolute acreage prices so acutely that the Montana Administration of Commerce coined a new appellation for it: “A River Runs Through It Syndrome.”
But the debris of the railroad industry still lie below the arcadian apparent ― a baneful carrion that has attenuated the groundwater for decades. Livingston’s automated accomplished larboard abaft a two-mile continued alias of agent ammunition and chlorinated solvents, alternating with lead, asbestos and a bulk of added pollutants.
Old railroad workers accept no curtailment of actual about their canicule alive the yard. One that surfaces consistently involves “Track 11,” the abuse extreme from the aliment shop. Aback oil central a agent adaptable became attenuated with baptize or sand, workers would about pump it out and deliver the lubricant. But on a bound schedule, they’d put the alternation out on clue 11, Phillips said. “They’d grab you and say, ‘Go bottomward to the east end bottomward there and beating the bung out of that son-of-a-bitch and accessible the valve on it and you ride it aback and alternating until it is empty. OK?’”
Phillips said he already banned instructions, and aback he alternate to assignment the abutting morning, addition abroad had done the job. He recalls award some 200 gallons of alpha oil on the ground. That was in 1972, not continued afterwards the Ecology Protection Agency was aboriginal created. By that point, they’d been auctioning oil and chemicals for decades, Phillips said.
Livingston isn’t the alone railroad boondocks in Big Sky country breadth Burlington Northern larboard a mess. There are 18 state-recognized superfund sites angry to the company’s operations.
Doug Thomson, 71, spent 34 years with the railroad, about a third of them alive in the acrylic shop, breadth he said men generally anesthetized out from the baneful fumes. Aback workers accomplished stripping bottomward a locomotive, there’d be a blend of chemicals and acrylic on the ground.
“Shit all over the place,” Thomson said. Workers would booty a big burden corrupt and aerosol it out the door; admiral generally said things like “it’ll absorb in,” or “it’ll evaporate,” he said. The railroad’s attitude was “cavalier,” Thomson said ― what it did in Livingston was its business, because it was there first.
“There is a little bit of aggregate guilt, because I knew better,” Thomson said on an August afternoon at his home, aloof a stone’s bandy from the abuse yard. “But they didn’t absolutely accord you any alternatives. … What are you declared to do with it? Booty it home with you?”
Dick Murphy, who started alive for the railroad appropriate out of aerial school, said he witnessed abounding ample agent spills at the abuse yard’s fueling station, breadth the aggregation would generally ample several locomotives at once. Aback automated shut-off valves didn’t assignment — Murphy said this happened generally — and workers weren’t advantageous attention, ammunition would overflow. Agent would avalanche bottomward the breadth of the backyard aback into the bang afore anyone noticed.
Murphy, Phillips and Thomson were amid a baddest few to aboriginal allege out about apathy at the backyard aback in the 1970s, earning themselves reputations as troublemakers. Though America was alpha to deathwatch up to the threats of automated abuse at that time, the railroad remained a able force.
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It wasn’t until 1977 that the Montana Administration of Ecology Affection started arise bottomward on violations at the abuse yard. The accompaniment filed a accusation gluttonous $340,000 in civilian penalties, eventually extensive an acceding for the railroad to pay a abate amends and change its practices.
In the mid-1980s, canton advisers apparent that the aggregation had for years been carriage barrels of baneful decay to the canton landfill. The analysis triggered an analysis that ultimately angry up a alias of agent that had blood-soaked through the clay and was amphibian on the groundwater. Estimates for the bulk of ammunition below the apparent assorted widely, from 150,000 to 1.6 actor gallons. A additional alias of airy amoebic chemicals, some advised acceptable carcinogens, continued about two afar east from the Livingston complex, ablaze beneath the Yellowstone River.
In 1988, two borough wells on the northeast end of boondocks were shut bottomward afterwards testing absolute for contaminants, and the railroad was affected to pay about $2 actor to dig new ones alfresco the impacted area.
More lawsuits followed. Esplanade County, of which Livingston is the seat, in 1997 sued the railroad ― which by afresh had alloyed with addition aggregation to become Burlington Northern Santa Fe ― over the auctioning at the landfill. In 1999, a board awarded the canton $14.7 million.
C&P Packing, a adjacent slaughterhouse, claimed the railroad’s abuse had larboard its own acreage unusable. BNSF ultimately bought the acreage and the slaughterhouse bankrupt down, dabbling its workers. The aggregation additionally bought and razed a beach cabin and bivouac beyond from an unlined pit breadth carrion was stored. A cardinal of Montana abuse workers accustomed settlements over claims that they suffered academician accident from acknowledgment to adverse degreasers.
“I accumulate cat-and-mouse for the shoe to drop,” Thomson said of his own health.
All of the men he formed with in the acrylic boutique are now dead, he said. “When you formed in the atramentous mine, you knew what you were walking into. Aback you were alive in that place, you didn’t apperceive what [chemicals were] afterward you around,” he said.
As the acknowledged battles waged on in court, the accompaniment ecology affection administration was alive with BNSF to investigate the ambit of the contagion and appear up with a remediation plan.
In 1994, the federal Ecology Protection Agency proposed advertisement the circuitous on its Superfund list, the affairs amenable for charwoman up the nation’s best attenuated sites. But it backward off the account because no Montana governor had requested it be added.
In 2001, the Montana DEQ appear a abundant cleanup plan that it said “protects accessible health, safety, and welfare, and the environment.” But in 2006, aghast with the apathetic clip at which the railroad was affective advanced on the plan, the administration beatific a letter to then-Gov. Brian Schweitzer (D) auspicious him to footfall in and end negotiations with BNSF. Schweitzer did.
“What we’ve gotten for decades is delaying, delaying, delaying,” Schweitzer told a affair of Montana’s Abuse Account Competition Council in March 2006, as the Billings Gazette reported. “Instead of lawyering, let’s go get that agent out of the ground. Let’s apple-pie up that aquifer, and we’ll accelerate them the bill.”
Today, decades afterwards Livingston abstruse about the blend its admired railroad larboard behind, the cleanup continues. Katie Morris, the activity administrator for DEQ, said the majority of the contagion has been addressed. A 6-acre cinder pile, breadth the railroad had discarded austere decay for years, has been capped, locking in abode ample amounts of asbestos.
In May, DEQ accepted BNSF permission to activate disassembling its petroleum accretion system, a alternation of 40 wells and a baptize analysis ability that came online in 2007 and ran for seven years. Some 50,000 gallons of agent accept been removed from the groundwater, and bioventing wells will abide in abode to acquiesce for accustomed breakdown of the actual fuel, according to the state.
The bigger job larboard to accouterment is the underground alias of solvents, best importantly tetrachloroethylene, bigger accepted as PCE, a airy and alarming actinic acclimated in degreasers and dry cleaning. Baptize and Ecology Technologies, a Butte, Montana-based ecology consulting close is arch that assignment beneath the blank of the Livingston Restoration Group, a board apery dozens of bounded landowners who acclimatized a accusation with BNSF in 2012 for $36 million.
David Erickson, the firm’s administrator and arch hydrogeologist, said a lot of advance has occurred at the armpit over the aftermost three years, as his aggregation has started putting the adjustment money to work. To accouterment the plume, which Erickson said is acceptable the better bread-and-butter discharge in Montana, the aggregation is application a alternation of bang wells to pump air bottomward to the top of the basement and force the PCE in the groundwater to the surface. There, a array of exhaustion sucks up the vapors. For the aerial levels of PCE trapped in the bedrock, the aggregation has angry to anaerobic bacilli that augment off the solvents.
“It’s like a accommodating association of bugs bottomward there,” chief hydrogeologist Pat Thomson said.
Erickson, who served as an able attestant for the plaintiffs, credits the accusation for assignment assuredly accepting done in Livingston.
“We had a ambition to apple-pie it up for the citizens,” but BNSF “was in the bean-counter apple breadth their ambition was to administer this liability,” he said. “With that aborigine accusation and a armamentarium to apple-pie it up, we’ve done added to remediate solvents in the aftermost three years than [the railroad] has done in the aftermost 20.”
Erickson estimates alive remediation will abide for addition bristles to eight years, followed by addition 20 years of alive monitoring. He already considers Livingston a success story; no best are chlorinated solvents abrogation the site.
In August, the EPA withdrew the Livingston railroad circuitous from application for Superfund designation, citation BNSF’s charge to complete the remediation accomplishments set alternating by the state. DEQ accurate the move.
BNSF agent Ross Lane said the aggregation “has fabricated a abundant banking charge to remediating” the armpit and affairs to abide alive with the state. “Standards of affliction accept substantively acquired in the 100-plus years of railroad operations and we are committed to actuality acceptable admiral of the environment,” he wrote in an email.
Some, however, admiration if Livingston will anytime be absolutely rid of the mess, and accept a adamantine time dupe DEQ or the railroad.
Bob Raney was a alternation aqueduct for about 25 years and served in the Montana House of Representatives from 1985-2000. He and his wife, Jeanne-Marie Souvigney, were additionally actively complex in cleanup efforts at the railroad site. The association had to action “every footfall of the way,” Raney said. And while abhorrence brought the association together, he added, fatigue continued ago set in. Best of those who spent years in this boring action accept confused on to added things.
One accumulation still tracking the cleanup is the nonprofit Esplanade Canton Ecology Council. Executive Director Michelle Uberuaga said while the accumulation has aplomb in DEQ’s cleanup plan, it opposes EPA’s accommodation to no best accede the armpit for the federal Superfund program.
“As a community, we appetite all the accoutrement to get to the accomplishment line,” she said. “And we’re not there yet.”
Livingston isn’t the alone Montana boondocks active with a bequest of automated pollution, as Melissa Nootz, a wife and mother of two daughters, knows all too well. She and her ancestors confused to Livingston from Anaconda, about 130 afar to the west, in 2015. Anaconda is home to a ample Superfund site, with added than 300 aboveboard afar of clay and baptize larboard attenuated with abundant metals by a above chestnut smelter.
A cardinal of factors afflicted Nootz’s accommodation to move. Her adolescent babe testing absolute for animated levels of advance a year beforehand at the age of 1, she said, was “certainly not a acumen to stay.”
Nootz, 41, and her bedmate abstruse about Livingston’s contagion aback they started attractive to buy a home, and association warned her to beacon ablaze of the town’s east side. “I’m like, OK, this again?” she said. “We’re ambidextrous with this again?”
Nootz, Uberuaga and several others interviewed for this adventure accurate affair about the Trump administration’s advance to gut allotment for the Ecology Protection Agency and cycle aback its regulations, annoying about the appulse these moves could accept on communities like Livingston.
Today, a new and abundant abate company, Montana Abuse Link, runs trains through boondocks and operates the bang and automated boutique — accurate not to carbon the cher ecology bequest of its predecessor. Complaints about the aggregation are abundantly bound to cartage jams at the city’s three chock-full railroad crossings and noise. (The Murray Hotel provides its guests earplugs, with a characterization that reads, “if by adventitious you don’t acquisition alternation whistles adventurous during the night.”)
While the boondocks hasn’t yet apparent abundance commensurable to its railroad heyday, there are ablaze spots. Afterwards admiring for a time, the absolute acreage bazaar has bounced back. The alfresco amusement industry is humming. A high-tech press company, Printingforless.com, started actuality in 1996 and now employs about 250 bodies and brings in $31 actor anniversary year from audience about the world. The sawmill on the bend of boondocks is still in operation, and a new beach hospital — one that looks like a ski abode and overflows with top affection bounded art — provides acceptable jobs. It was congenital abundantly with millions of dollars of donated money, abundant of it from bodies who own melancholia homes here.
Creative types are fatigued here. But they’re award the canicule of bargain apartment are continued gone. And that agency lots of bounded administration accept a adamantine time award help.
“Economically, it’s challenging,” said Katherine Taylor, a songwriter who has lived actuality for a little over a year. “To be blessed here, you’ve got to be amorous about what you’re doing, whether it’s your job or your creativity.”
Most bodies don’t accord abundant anticipation to the abuse backyard these days. Indeed, abounding of Livingston’s adolescent association assume blind there was — and still is — a problem. An beforehand bearing of whistleblowers, association activists and attorneys fabricated it accessible for Livingston to soldier on ― for bodies to assignment and play, angle and party, after annoying about contaminants in their tap baptize or in the river.
