Billie Woods Interview, Part 1 of 2

  • DT: My name is David Todd. I'm here for he Conservation History Association of Texas. It's October 17, 2003. We're near a small town called Rosanky, which is about ten miles south of Bastrop. And we have the good fortune to be interviewing Billie Woods who has been a co-founder and leader of the group called Neighbors for Neighbors, which has been very active in trying to protect the-resources of Bastrop and Lee County and-and Milam County from some of the lignite mining and smelting and-and utility pollution that's been happening there over the past number of years. And I wanted to thank her for taking the time to talk to us. 00:02:10 - 2263BW: My pleasure.DT: Billie, I was hoping that you might tell us how you first got acquainted with the outdoors and interested in its protection, if there's a-a time in your youth that you could point to. 00:02:28 - 2263BW: I would just say that my parents were both-liked to spend time outdoors. We never went camping or did anything like that. But my dad had squirrels that would eat out of his hand. We always had pets. My dad was very big into sciences really, into astronomy, and he-he was an optometrist and so, you know, obviously he was interested in various sciences, but he also like subscribed to National Geographic from before I was born right up until he died. And so I think I was exposed just a lot to different ideas even though despite the fact that I grew up in a very conservative town, and household really, in Northeast Texas, a little town called Henderson, ten thousand people. My dad had the 00:03:30 - 2263only telescope in town. He was the only optometrist in town. But we traveled a fair amount. We went to Japan. We went to various places. The Philippines. So I think I just had a lot of exposure to different ways of life, to sciences, even though it wasn't my thing. They were both very concerned about doing the right thing by animals, and by people. And, you know, other than that I cannot really say that there was a-some kind of turning point where I had this awakening about the outdoors or the environment or-or trying to protect things. It just seemed liked that's the way it was in my household. I mean my mother to this day, she's eighty-years-old and she recycles, you know. So I think the more that they became aware of things it-it wasn't kept a secret, you know. And they would participate. So, you know, I think it just rubbed off.DT: So there's no definite epiphany but just...00:04:44 - 2263BW: No.DT: ...something that, I guess, by osmosis you picked up and...00:04:51 - 2263BW: I think so. I think I-you know, they were very religious Baptist, and the Texas Baptist-this is probably contrary to what most people think, but I think the Texas Baptist in general had more of a belief and separation of church and State and being stewards-being stewards of the land. It wasn't talked about as environmentalism, you know, back then. It was-it was taking care of nature and taking care of what God has given you kind of thing. These are all gifts and-and we were put here to-to take care of them. And so I think that was the attitude in my home as I was growing up, and-and, you know, here's how I turned out. I don't know.DT: You turned out to be a very accomplished pianist and harpist, and I'm curious how somebody of your training and background then becomes an expert and certainly a very a concerned person about mining and air pollution and ground water extraction and pumping. How did you first become acquainted with the problems at Alcoa?00:06:20 - 2263BW: Well, I'm ashamed to say that it's because it ended up on my doorstep, you know. I wish I could say that I just really kept up and was aware and-and was environmentally active, you know, all along. I did, you know, pay my dues to the Sierra Club and Environmental Defense and Worldwide Life Fund, you know. I would send them money and I recycled and all of that, but I was not an activist, you know. I did not go out and talk to people. I did not try to participate in any kind of protest or anything like that anywhere. So it literally wasn't until it ended up on my doorstep that-there's the epiphany, is, you know, it has to hit you in the face, I guess, for most people which is kind of sad, but I-but I think that's probably reality. And that's what happened. Alcoa and San Antonio drew up a contract saying that San Antonio would lease their lands to 00:07:26 - 2263Alcoa for mining purposes essentially in exchange for water because San Antonio was, you know, very-very thirsty. And it was announced in the papers January of 1999 that this contract was signed the very last day of 1998, which is interesting because it-they sort of rushed that through to beat the convening of the legislature because they, I think, knew there was going to be a lot of discussion on the water legislation and I think they wanted to have a so-called grandfather contract and-and hoped to not be affected by any regulations that would come down on how much you might be able to pump or-or what have you. So it was-you know, that just slapped us in the face and I one day went out to my mailbox and there was a flier that some neighbor of mine, I don't even know who, had put on there, and it wasn't very well done, and it wasn't very fancy, it was all black and white, you couldn't even tell what the picture was. But it said, you know, "Have you heard?" you know, "This is awful happening right here in our backyard," you know, "Please come to a public meeting to learn," you know, "about this and what we can do about it." And that was my introduction. DT: Maybe you could give us a little context and background. You said that San Antonio is thirsty for water. What's going on down there? 00:09:06 - 2263BW: Well, my understanding about what's happening in San Antonio is that they've been getting their water all these years from the Edwards Aquifer, and the Edwards Aquifer Authority is starting to cut them back so that they are-are essentially in search of water from other places to replace their loss from the Edwards Aquifer. So they've literally been going, you know, all over the state, particularly the Central Texas area, looking for other sources of water. And this happens to be one of them because the City of San Antonio owns about eleven thousand acres-contiguous acres, about a mile from my house. So-and Alcoa is running out of Lignite over at Sandow and so, wow, you know, how convenient. And they have to-during their mining operations they have to depressurize the aquifer which means they have to pump tens of thousands of acre feet to 00:10:16 - 2263relieve the pressure coming from underneath the hole that they dig because otherwise it would cause the-the walls to cave in and the floor to heave and-and-and flood the mine and obviously anyone working there would be in peril. So they have to engage in this de-watering and depressurization practice to safely get to the lignite. What has happened in this case is not so much that oh, well this mining water is just going to go down the creek unless somebody takes it, but that San Antonio wants a whole lot more. So for example, the proposed Three Oaks Mine would only need to pump only ten thousand acre feet a year for mining purposes, but San Antonio wants anywhere from fifty thousand to a hundred and twenty thousand or more acre feet a year. And so their contract was very open-ended and allowed them to get as much water as they wanted for fifty years. So it was a pretty big deal. Our aquifer only can sustain itself-well, let 00:11:45 - 2263me-let me restate that. Its recharge from rainfall is only something like sixty-two thousand or sixty-eight thousand-acre feet a year. The current usage is, I don't know, twelve or fourteen thousand. Bastrop County is growing by leaps and bounds, so the-the projections of water needs in the future at least double that. And then if you add, you know, the San Antonio water on top of it plus the mining water, very quickly we exceed what the aquifer can sustain. So that's-that's been the-the real driving force I would say in that-of the interest in the community and why this got so much attention, I think fewer people are as concerned about mining as they are about losing their water and probably rightly so, even though mining is just a horrible practice in and of itself. It's environmentally devastating. DT: Why don't we talk a little bit about the history of mining in this area and what you can say brought us to this point. You mentioned the Sandow Mine and-and Alcoa and, I guess, TXU and some other operators have been interested in this issue for a while.00:13:07 - 2263BW: Well, there is a lignite belt that runs right along with the aquifer-the Carrizo-Wilcox Aquifer, kind of across-diagonally across the state of Texas. We're sort of in the middle of it. And-so that's, you know, if you go up-follow it up into East Texas you'll-TXU in particular has several lignite mines up there, and one of them actually right outside my hometown. And then of course Alcoa has had the Sandow mine over there, gosh, since the mid '50s and actually there was lignite mining there prior to Alcoa but it was not strip mining. It was the underground shafts, you know, the mineshafts. And-and I believe that that was started by a man whose last name was Sandow, and-his first name escapes me right now. So mining has been going on in Milam County around Rockdale for-for, you know, decades and decades and decades, before Alcoa ever even existed over there. DT: What exactly is lignite? It's a type of coal, is that right?00:14:26 - 2263BW: Yeah. Lignite is a very soft, brown coal. It is just in between the stage of peat and hard, you know, what you would think of as hard coal. So it's very soft. It's very crumbly. It's not real stable. It takes a whole lot of it to get a sufficient number of BTUs to produce, you know, a good amount of electricity for them to operate with. And that's all they use it for. They-they have three power units over there that this was how they generated their electricity in order to power the smelter where they smelt aluminum and make atomized aluminum that fuels the space shuttle, for example. They have-that used to be the largest smelter in North America. It is now I think second, and will be ever less than that within the next few years. They're cutting back. But they have had 00:15:41 - 2263the Sandow Strip Mine and, I believe that that strip mine all in all is about twenty thousand acres roughly. It is linked to the-the proposed Three Oaks Mine, and the Three Oaks Mine would be sixteen thousand acres. Now their mine plan currently only calls for actually mining of about five to six thousand acres, but they would have the option of extending that throughout that sixteen thousand acres. So-it-it's enormous. I mean, it's-the sixteen thousand acres itself is like seven miles-seven or eight miles long and it's sort of a-an oval shape and, I don't know, five or six miles wide.DT: And this is a strip mine. Can you describe what a strip mine is...BW: Sure.DT: ...and what sort of machinery they're talking about?00:16:38 - 2263BW: Well, it requires a whole lot of very heavy equipment. The thing that stands out the most are the drag lines. They have two of them. The drag lines are-the boom alone is three hundred and sixty feet. It stands about twenty stories tall. I forget how many hundreds of cubic yards the bucket digs out. And the drag line is by and large used not so much to dig the lignite but to remove what they call the over-burden, which is just the earth-the dirt-the layers of dirt. So it is the machine that takes, you know, just these huge chunks of-of dirt out of the ground and dumps it aside, and they can dig down to two hundred-two hundred fifty feet with this machine. And over at Sandow some of the lignite is a couple hundred feet deep. So they-it's-it's an enormous pit. I mean it is just-it's enormous. It'll be, you know, five hundred yards long and I don't know how 00:17:55 - 2263many hundreds of yards wide, but I've-I've seen it and it is-it's just mind-boggling. It's really mind-boggling. Then they have, you know, the other equipment-bulldozers and such. They have somewhat like eighty pieces of-of heavy equipment in addition to those drag lines that actually remove the lignite, dump it onto a conveyer belt, it goes to a little thing-facility called a crusher, so it, you know, processes it, and then it goes onto the conveyer belt right to the plant where they then have some stockpiles of it. But by and large they have to use it fairly quickly because when it sits out it-it degrades and it just takes more and more and more of it to burn. It is the dirtiest source of fuel available-lignite. It-it burns about as well as burning dirt. So they'd be better burning cow patties. DT: There's not a lot of BTUs coming out of it...BW: No.DT: ...per ton.00:19:03 - 2263BW: It's not at all like western coal. Western coal is dirty enough. But it takes-I have heard-I've heard, and I have not confirmed this-I have heard that it takes one-seventh of the amount of western coal to generate the same amount of electricity as it does lignite. So you can imagine. You know, you have to mine seven times as much, you know, if that figure is right. But...DT: Is there a reason they use such an inefficient source of fuel?00:19:32 - 2263BW: It's what's here. It's simply because it's here. And I think they just have a mentality of well, you know, it's a resource that's available and it's our responsibility to make use of it, you know. We're just letting it go to waste if we don't we don't tap into it. I don't-I can't figure that part out myself. DT: You-you said it's not only inefficient but that it's a pretty dirty fuel. Can you talk about some of the coal combustion waste problems you've seen?00:20:04 - 2263BW: Sure. It's dirty-it-it burns-as it burns it's very dirty so the emissions from it are worse than emissions from western coal or natural gas or even oil. As they burn the lignite, you know, there's just-just as though you were burning wood in your fireplace, you know, you have ash afterwards. It doesn't all combust, right? So it's the same thing with the lignite. They-they burn it in the boilers and there ends up to be a big pile of ash on the bottom. There's various kinds of ash. There's bottom ash. There's fly ash. If there are scrubbers on a unit then they have the sludge from the scrubbers that-that sort of trap some of the emissions that also is-is a waste product. Fly ash, they tend to take that and do what they call recycling which simply means they take it and send it to someone else to make other things out of it like bricks, drywall, shingles for roofs, they 00:21:19 - 2263use it on roads, etc. So they like for people to believe that, "Oh," you know, "this is so harmless that we even put it right out on the road. You drive on it everyday." And-and I don't know that it's harmless, you know. But bottom ash for sure contains heavy metals. We did some testing over at Sandow as part of a contested case hearing. We-we had a court order that allowed to go and take some samples-soil samples, surface water samples, ground water samples, and test them for various things. And bottom ash, we were able to-to take bottom ash samples and test those. And we found various things that were not pleasant. Dioxins and thallium were the two major constituents that we found. Thallium is similar in toxicity to something like mercury. Dioxin-if you say PCBs to somebody they go, "Oh!" you know. Well dioxin is like that, you know. It's kind of like PCBs where it just kind of hangs around and doesn't really dissipate. And 00:22:43 - 2263it's highly toxic, particularly the wildlife, but it's toxic to humans, too. And has been associated with some infertility problems, endometriosis in women, things like that. So anyway, all that stuff is contained in the bottom ash. Alcoa's practice of dealing with their bottom ash is to just simply go and dump it into the mine pits. And believe it or not that's legal for them to do. Simply because they own that property the law states that you can dispose of your own industrial waste on your own property within fifty miles of where it's generated. And the plant-their power plant in their Sandow Mine is, you know, connected so it's definitely within that legal limit provided that they have classified the waste properly, and that's in question. We don't know about that. They have claimed that it is inert, which means it's as harmless as dirt. We have-if-if-we have reason to believe because we've found dioxin that that is a misclassification. And if 00:24:01 - 2263that's true then they cannot or should not have ever been just dumping into the open pits. That's called "open dumping" and that would be illegal. But the main problem is really not so much the Alcoa units because they don't have any pollution controls for their air emissions on those units. So most of the pollution goes up the stacks and into the air, so that's not a good thing either but it's not a waste issue. But TXU also has a fourth unit over there and they do have scrubbers-pollution controls on that unit and they do not own any of the surrounding property. They only own the property that their boiler sits on. So Alcoa is taking their waste, which is much more toxic, and disposing of that as well into those open mine pits.DT: The scrubber sludge...00:25:04 - 2263BW: The scrubber sludge, TXU's bottom ash. I am not at all sure of what they're doing with the smelter waste. That's a whole-whole 'nother issue that we're not even real clear about what's happening. I mean that's where they have asbestos lining the pots in the pot rooms, and those get old and occasionally they have to break the as-asbestos out of those pots and reline them and, you know, that's just a horrible process. And they have exposed many, many, many people over the years to asbestos. Many of them have asbestosis that-or mesothelioma, which is a lung cancer that can only come from exposure to asbestos. And it's not just the people that work there. They take it home on their clothes. Their wives do the laundry. And their wives are dying from it because 00:26:02 - 2263they're inhaling those fibers off the-off their husband's clothes. So it's-you know, it's just a nasty process over there. I don't care how you look at it, whether you're looking at the waste issue, the smelting process, the burning of the lignite, the mining of the lignite, what's happening to the ground water. And that's the other thing with the waste issues is that because it's going-being dumped into those mine pits-if you remember, I said those pits can be two hundred feet deep and that they have to de-water the aquifer. There are water lenses throughout that mining area as well as the water table underneath, and those water lenses are also part of the aquifer, and when they dump that in there it's going right, you know, into that. So...DT: Have you found any leachate...00:27:03 - 2263BW: Yes we did-we found thallium in our ground water testing. We-we chose one well that was in the vicinity of where we believed that they were burying some combustion waste. And there was a stockpile of something on the ground near it that we never did really understand what that was. It wasn't lignite. It could have been some kind of waste. We don't know. But at any rate the test from that particular well came back with thallium anywhere from fifty to a hundred times the-the drinking water 00:27:44 - 2263standards. And that was not the only well that we-that we found-found that in. So indeed the ground water is being contaminated by this practice. So, you know, it's just-as far as environmental issues go this is like all of them wrapped into-into one. It's been very difficult to deal with, very difficult to get the word out in a way that people could understand because there's so many facets and it's so complicated. It's hard to put it in a sound bite, you know, for the media when you're trying to-to let people know what's going on, so it's been difficult. DT: And you've mentioned that there were at least a couple forms of contamination that the solid waste, the fly ash, scrubber waste, the bottom ash, and then the contamination that goes into the ground water, but one form that seems to have gotten a lot of attention is the air pollution...BW: Right.DT: ...and what's been going up the stack, and I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about the air quality issues that Alcoa has been involved with.00:29:02 - 2263BW: Sure. The-the air pollution from Alcoa's three boilers, and I need to make sure that I specify that it's Alcoa's three boilers because I've mentioned the TXU unit and it does not involve that unit-hey were and are emitting over a hundred thousand tons of criteria air pollutants each year. That includes sulfur dioxide, nitrogen oxide, volatile organic compounds which people refer to as V-O-C's or VOC's-oh my goodness, it's all just left me. What's the other-what are the other two? Particulate matter-and I'm losing the last one for some reason. DT: (Inaudible) heavy metal?BW: Carbon monoxide. DT: Oh, carbon monoxide.00:30:06 - 2263BW: And, yeah, there are heavy metals but those are not criteria air pollutants. Those are toxins, you know, so-so they're classified differently, so the hundred-over a hundred-about a hundred and four thousands tons annually are these criteria air pollutants. Particulate matter, especially the very fine particulates are-go into the lungs. They have been associated with all kinds of lung disease: asthma, COPD [Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease], emphysema. Particulate matter has also been associated with heart disease, particularly fibrillations and that kind of thing, or just heart failure. Sulfur dioxide, also just horrible for-for asthma and triggering all kinds of-of lung diseases. And of course VOCs and nitrogen oxide is what forms ozone when it gets up into the atmosphere, and so, you know, everybody knows how horrible ozone is and-and all that. Their pollution is the 00:31:23 - 2263equivalent to a million-over a million cars. So that's one way that you can sort of get a handle on how bad that is, so... We discovered this really because we were-we-because we got into it because of the mining and the water issues and-and trying to convince people that the right thing for them to do would be to not burn lignite because it was so dirty, and so we needed to understand how dirty it was when it was burned and-and what effects that would have. And-and as it turns Alcoa engages in some pretty bad habits, and their bad habits tend to include skirting around the law at times. The Clean Air Act has a-a piece to it called NSR-New Source Review, you know, which says that-it-it was a way when the Clean Air Act was passed for all the older facilities to have some time to come up to modern-day pollution standards to try to reduce, you 00:32:31 - 2263know, their emissions. Unfortunately, many of these companies including Alcoa sort of took advantage of that. The idea was that as long as they were operating as they were and they didn't make any major enhancements to the facility, that all they were doing was just some routine maintenance, just to, you know, kind of keep it going on par. They really expected that by attrition these old plants would shut down and when new ones were built they would be clean-cleaner. Well, Alcoa claimed that they were doing routine maintenance when in fact they were rebuilding their boilers. We have documentation from folks who were in management positions over there at the time who were quoted as saying, "We've done everything but build it new from the ground up," you know. "We've replaced everything," you know. So anyway, they did in fact spend 00:33:35 - 2263over sixty million dollars in the '80s-mid '80s to pretty much rebuild all three of those units. They were-should have, because they did that, should have gone and gotten permits and installed the appropriate pollution controls at that time. They did not because they claimed that it was routine maintenance. So that's what we found. We found all the documentation that supported the notion that they broke the law-the Clean Air Act, and that's when we filed our citizen's suit. DT: Can you explain how you tracked down this evidence? I mean the detective sleuth work that was involved?00:34:24 - 2263BW: Sure. We had-we had a friend of one of our board members who-a young man who was a former power plant inspector. And he was very good friends with our-our-one of our board members. And he came down. His name is Adam Chambers. He came down to visit and we put him to work and said, "You know, we've been getting all this information from what was the TNRCC then, now the TCEQ, on-on this and we don't really don't know how to interpret it, and oh by the way, we've also gotten this information from the EPA in Dallas and we just, you know, we think there's something here but, you know, can you help us with it?" He spent a week working on it like twelve to fourteen hours a day going up to Dallas, going to the-the TNRCC office in Waco, 00:35:19 - 2263which Rockdale is in that region, and also the-the Austin, you know, office, and pulled all together, essentially wrote up a dossier on what they had done, that they had indeed broken the law, how many millions of dollars they had spent, all the parts that they had replaced. We went and met with the attorneys while he was here and he explained it to them and our attorney was like "Wow! Yeah. You're right." So now it's a matter of how do we put the case together. And to find someone who would take it because it was too big for just one person to handle. It was just-it was a huge, huge case. We realized we weren't going to have the, you know, hundreds of thousands that it was going to take to prosecute it, to bring it to fruition. So what we started doing then was taking it and presenting it back to the TNRCC and the EPA in hopes that they would pursue it and they 00:36:26 - 2263would file Notices of Violations and-and hold them accountable. Well, it went on and it went on and it went on, and we waited and we waited and we waited, and it didn't happen. And in the mean time...DT: Well, when is the (inaudible)...00:36:43 - 2263BW: That was in March...DT: ...general range...00:36:46 - 2263BW: When we were meeting the TCEQ and EPA, that was in March. We did our formal presentation to them in March of-let's see-I think 2001. In June of that year we were contacted by Environmental Defense who said they thought we had a case and that they wanted to pursue it and they wanted to file the citizen's suit with us. And they had the funding to do it. Public Citizen was the third party that became involved with it as well. So we joined forces with them and in October of 2001 we filed our Notice of Intent. You have to give sixty days notice to TCEQ, EPA and to Alcoa that if they don't do something that you will indeed file a suit. So we gave our sixty days notice in October, sixty days was up December 26, 2001, and we filed suit. So...DT: Maybe this would be a good time to just speculate, or maybe you can help us understand why and TNRCC, or TCAQ at this point were not able to identify these violations when they occurred, and when you presented it them they didn't find it persuasive to file suit do an agency prosecution.00:38:28 - 2263BW: Well, with regards to your last point there about that they didn't find it persuasive, actually they did. They told us they thought we were right. I don't know why they drug their feet. I don't-I'm-I'm glad that they did because if they hadn't of we would've never had a citizen's suit, and there're some things that because of our involvement were better in the settlement than they otherwise would have been. So I'm glad they drug their feet, not that that was the right thing for them to do but from our perspective it worked out better. And I-you know, I don't. Things just are slow down there, not to mention that the politics were probably not in our favor. At this point we have, you know, the Bush Administration and the White House, the Secretary of the Treasury was Paul O'Neil who was Alcoa's CEO who retired from Alcoa and became Secretary of the Treasury, the three commissioners-state commissioners for the TCEQ were all industry folks from 00:39:47 - 2263Monsanto and-I can't remember. Anyway, the-the-the politics of the situation were certainly not conducive to having the agency-the agencies, either state or federal, to go after Alcoa contributed through their attorneys a whole lot of money to the Bush Presidential Campaign, you know. I've heard numbers anywhere from eighty-seven thousand to over two hundred thousand. It's hard to pinpoint because they did it through their attorneys, Vinson & Elkins , who represent many clients, not the least of which was ENRON. So-so conditions I think politically were such that unless they were just-they really had their back to the wall, they were not going to go after it, and I don't think they ever would have had it not been for us filing that suit. As far as why they didn't find this in the first place, they have a horrible record keeping system. I mean it-it's-you know, it was spread out all the way from Austin up to Dallas and back, and-and frankly, 00:41:04 - 2263I just don't they look at things very-very much. I think they're more in the business of giving rather than enforcement, I'm sorry to say. But I think that is-I think that is how the-the deck is stacked. It's-everything is geared much more in favor of the industry than as a policing situation to protect the people, and that again goes back to politics, But, you know, we were fortunate in that after we filed suit on December 26, that on January 9th of 2002 both TCEQ and the EPA issued Notices of Violation to Alcoa for these exact same violations. And so it-it definitely gave us the credibility that would-that which was really a good thing. Alcoa had all along been say, you know, we were just these little, you know, fly-by-night, we didn't really have any members to speak of, and essentially tried to say that we were lying about-our-our base of support. And it suddenly-they couldn't really say that anymore. They really couldn't say that we were not credible, that we were a bunch of environmental wackos out here in the middle of 00:42:35 - 2263nowhere just trying to, you know, go out and hug every tree, which was certainly not the case. I mean we're by and large a group of farmers, ranchers, teachers, executives, data processing folks, lawyers, doctors, scientists. We're not at all the tie-dyed T-shirt-not to say that I don't have a tie-dyed T-shirt. Certainly I do. But we're not at all the kind of group that they were constantly trying to make us out to be. And in fact we've never considered ourselves an environmental group because, frankly, a lot of our farmers and ranchers are not environmentalists at all. And if they thought that we were going to team up with some group like the Sierra Club, they would just be, you know, appalled at this. But you know, when it's in your backyard, even when you've been against it-against environmental issues, suddenly you become environmentalists. It's-it's-it's very interesting the dynamics, you know, of what has happened in the community as a result of this. So anyway, we were back to the air. We were-we were fortunate in that we were validated by government agencies even during a political time that normally, 00:44:11 - 2263probably would have never occurred. So-and then, you know, we went through months and months and months and months of-of depositions, discovery, that whole thing, going into court, having continuances. You know, the whole bureaucratic game that you play once you get into court. And once EPA and TCEQ came along behind us and did that, suddenly Alcoa wanted to negotiate with them. They-they're attorney said it would be a cold day in hell before they would sit across the table from Neighbors for Neighbors, and that we were not to be allowed in a-in any discussions. And now to EPA's credit, not to TCEQ's credit, but to EPA's credit, they pushed very hard to have us included from the get go. They didn't have much backbone in enforcing it from the get go. They waited until they had an agreement in principal before they really put their foot down. And they came down here to meet with us and pretty much issued Alcoa an ultimatum that they would be at this meeting and they would talk to us and we would be included from that point forward. And we were. So we have now a settlement that has 00:45:48 - 2263been executed. Alcoa had to pay a civil penalty to the government of one point five million dollars, which is puny considering they-we've figured out that they probably profited by as much as seven hundred and fifty million dollars. But they also had to invest two and a half million in environmental mitigation projects. That directly affect this County of Bastrop, the County of Lee and the County of Milam. So that's a good thing. I think-I think that it is reprehensible that they were not penalized more because it certainly sends a message of, "Well, it's more profitable to break the law by far than to comply." I don't really think that's a message the government should be sending but that's definitely the message.DT: And there was not criminal prosecution?00:46:57 - 2263BW: None. No. Because we had a settlement. I think the EPA was really hungry for a settlement. They really wanted to have an NSR settlement under their belt. And they hadn't had one in two years. And out of all the twenty to forty cases they had pending, only two were in talks, and Alcoa was one of them. And they weren't making much progress on the other one. So this was really going to be a, you know, a shining jewel in their crown, you know, that they could say, "See?" You know, "NSR works." And the people who were working on this I think really were committed to getting emissions out of the air, just reducing the emissions, that that was more of what this was about than having them pay a certain amount of money, and I could agree with that. And I don't 00:47:57 - 2263think that the people who were working on it were at all supportive of the Bush Administration's, you know, Clear Skies Initiative or their essentially rolling back of the NSR provision, and I think this was going to be, hopefully a tool that they could say, "Yes, NSR works and it is effective."DT: Could you talk a little about the Clear Skies Initiative and this effort to change or phase out NSR? [End of Reel 2263]