When the British-born industrialist Robert Lanyon traveled to Pittsburg in 1877, the city's zinc smelting industry was born.
Shortly after building his own Pittsburg Zinc Smelter, his brother S.H. Lanyon and two nephews, William and Josiah, followed suit. And while there were other smelters built throughout the city, it's within 500 feet of the three Lanyon smelters that the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency will test local soil for possible lead contamination next month.
Zinc smelting
Because coal mining was prevalent in the Pittsburg area, the city was a premier location for zinc smelters, according to the Kansas Department of Health and Environment.
Zinc smelting is the process of using extremely high temperatures to convert zinc concentrates into pure zinc. In this area, the primary zinc ore was sphalerite, which was about 60 percent zinc by weight. It took about four tons of coal to smelt one ton of sphalerite, which is why building a smelter near coal mines rather than zinc mines "makes sense," according to KDHE.
Zinc smelting was dangerous, however. Along with releasing sulfur and oxygen oxides, which irritates the eyes and lungs and creates acid rain, burning 28 tons of coal per day also created large amounts of soot. That soot was generally contaminated with elevated levels of lead, cadmium, arsenic and zinc.
But airborne pollution wasn't the only potential health risk. Smelting operations also left large volumes of solid waste, which also could be contaminated with sulfur and heavy metals, including lead. While some of that waste was reprocessed for its iron, gold, silver or copper content, much of it remained at the smelter sites even after production stopped and the smelters closed, allowing wind and precipitation to spread it to surrounding locations.
KDHE begins local tests
As part of the department's statewide effort to test grounds surrounding former zinc smelters, KDHE officials visited Pittsburg in 1987 to collect soil samples at the former Pittsburg Zinc smelter sites. Subsequent assessments took place in 1994 and from 2001 to 2005.
During much of the early tests, KDHE officials did not move off the site of the former smelters. Rick Bean, KDHE remedial section chief, said the initial main priority was the actual smelter sites.
"We were just finding out if there was lead contamination at the smelter sites," he said. "The investigation builds from there.'
Bean said KDHE officials, earlier this decade, began finding indication that surrounding properties may be subject to lead contamination that had spread from the smelter sites. However, the investigation into those properties was not always full steam ahead, as time and money constraints often put a hitch in KDHE's plans.
"A lot of these investigations take a lot of money," Bean said. "And there are hundreds to do across Kansas. We may have something planned for a year, but then something else may come along and we have to shift our resources."
Another factor that slows the process is KDHE's policy of trying to locate a "responsible party" before any remediation action is taken.
"It takes time to do this, but we always try to identify if there are any responsible parties out there," he said. "If it's a company that caused it and it's still around, we want to work with them from a state standpoint through some sort of enforceable agreement. We don't want to involve the EPA if we don't have to."
However, for the Lanyon smelters, Bean said, "We didn't find any responsible party to address the darn thing." So in the fall of 2008, KDHE officials made their referral to the EPA.
