Tacoma Port of Kaiser

The Kaiser cleanup was performed as a series of interim actions, as opposed to the more conventional process of site-wide investigation, feasibility study, and cleanup action plan. The Kaiser site is very large geographically, nearly 100 acres, and several areas had unique problems.

Interim actions allowed for much more efficiency and it allowed partial areas of the facility to be utilized, once cleaned up, rather than waiting until the entire cleanup was finished to be able to utilize any of the facility.

Ecology held three comment periods associated with the Kaiser site.  These comment periods were for two Interim Work (partial cleanup) Plans. No comments were received at the end of the comment periods.

The 96-acre Port of Tacoma Kaiser (Kaiser) site is located at 3400 Taylor Way, in the Tacoma Tideflats. Kaiser Aluminum operated an aluminum smelter and manufacturing plant there for over 60 years. The mill closed in 2001. In 2003, the Port of Tacoma bought the property and began taking down the mill.

Kaiser has been a cleanup site since the early 1980s. Kaiser began several Interim Actions (partial cleanups). Now the port is in the process of completing cleanup of the whole site under legal agreements with Ecology.

Kaiser smelted aluminum in large steel pots lined with carbon known as potliner. The pot consists of a steel shell supporting brick insulation, covered with potliner. Over time, the brick and carbon lining broke down and had to be replaced. The waste, known as “spent potliner," contains carbon, fluoride salts, cyanide and polynuclear aromatic hydrocarbons (PAHs).Kaiser put the “spent potliner” on bare ground, where it was exposed to rain water. The spent potliner leached cyanide and fluoride into the storage area soils and groundwater. The Port removed soils contaminated with PAHs and the waste material that was buried on site.

Landfill Cleanup: In 2009, the port removed a rod mill, a facility that had made aluminum rods for industrial uses. One thousand tons of contaminated soil were dug up from a landfill that was next to the rod mill. The port has now cleaned up that landfill.

Rectifier Yard: An area behind the smelter contained electrical equipment used to transfer electricity to the smelting pots and the rest of the facility. Insulating fluid from some of the equipment leaked onto soil in the yard. In some cases, there were low concentrations of PCBs in the fluid, and in some cases the releases just consisted of petroleum hydrocarbons. Both were removed by the port.

Former Log Yard: An area at the north end of the facility was formerly a log yard. As was common, the log yard soils were stabilized with waste, called slag, from the Asarco smelter. This contributed to lead and arsenic contamination in the soil. The remaining smelter slag was removed by the port.

Most of the facility has been capped with several feet of clean fill, mainly clean dredged sediment from the enlargement project in the head of Blair Waterway.