EAST HELENA — Not a lot of new information was disseminated Wednesday night here at Asarco’s annual meeting.

Demolition work at the lead smelter is just about wrapping up for the year, after a work season that didn’t begin until August this year, noted Iver Johnson with the Department of Environmental Quality’s hazardous waste section. The delay came because the state needed to do a historic survey of the property, which cut back on the amount of work that was done.

However, Asarco still managed to remove three large processing units, plus various buildings. That equated to more than 30,700 tons of hazardous waste and contaminated debris being dumped into a nearby high-tech landfill and almost 1.6 million pounds of scrap iron and stainless steel being recycled.

“That’s a big chunk of recyclable metal,” Johnson said.

East Helena resident Joe Cohenour said he heard concerns that some of the recycled material that was trucked off the plant has hazardous materials blowing off of it. But Jon Nickel, Asarco’s environmental manager, said it was all cleaned prior to being recycled. He said what people probably saw was insulation coming off metal from a $1 million structure Asarco built but never used.

“We had an operation that we were going to put into use before shutting down … but after constructing it for more than $1 million, we never flipped the switch,” Nickel said.

Johnson noted that this year they cleaned and demolished the blast furnace flue and monier flue, which carried hot air from the blast furnace to three bag houses, where the air was filtered. Those bag houses also were torn down, as was the former acid plant, the old carpenter’s shop and a used oil storage shed.

Neither he nor Nickel could say when the four smokestacks that tower above East Helena will be torn down. That initially was slated for this year, but was pushed back after the starting date for work last summer was postponed.

“We had anticipating blowing those stacks this year, but had to prioritize,” Nickel said.

Below the lead smelter, the arsenic and selenium groundwater plumes migrating northwest off of the plant site, which carry high levels of the two elements, haven’t fluctuated much, Nickel said.

Nickel noted that they monitor about 30 residential wells in the community annually, and three on Gail Street, which are in line with the plumes, are tested monthly. They also check 119 monitoring wells twice a year, as well as take surface samples of Prickly Pear Creek in five locations.

“We’ve been sampling for a long time and basically, they are unchanged,” Nickel told about 25 people gathered at the East Helena volunteer firehall. “That’s good news in that those water sources continue to be isolated from the plumes.”

While arsenic occurs naturally in low levels in water in the Helena area, and selenium is present naturally in some environments, both are byproducts of the lead-smelting process. The five underground plumes — one containing arsenic and two with selenium in the “shallow” aquifer between 6 and 30 feet underground and two similar plumes about 30 to 60 feet below ground under East Helena — have elevated levels that could be dangerous to humans or animals if consumed.

For example, a monitoring well in the intermediate aquifer below Second and Main streets contains arsenic at 10 parts per million, which is about 1,000 times the maximum contaminant level of .01 ppm in municipal drinking water, according to the most recent round of tests done in May 2008.

Selenium was detected in a similar-depth test well last spring at 0.28 ppm, which is five times above the maximum level.

Asarco has installed two slurry walls on the plant site, anywhere from 33 to 47 feet deep. The company, working with the Environmental Protection Agency, hope these walls will cut off the source of the arsenic.

“Judging from the indicators, it looks like the slurry walls are working,” said Bob Miller, a hydrologist for Asarco. “We haven’t solved all the problems, but they’re performing as they’ve been designed to perform.”

They’re continuing to search for the source of the selenium. Asarco said test results point toward the slag pile, but their investigation is continuing.

Reporter Eve Byron: 447-4076 or eve.byron@helenair.com