The company deemed responsible for nearly causing an environmental catastrophe on Humboldt Bay and the Samoa Peninsula may be walking away while public agencies pick up a more than $16 million price tag for the cleanup, according to local and federal officials contacted by the Times-Standard this week.
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency has deemed Evergreen Pulp Inc. as responsible for allowing tanks filled with caustic liquors at the Samoa pulp mill site to deteriorate and fill up to the point where the next major rainfall could have caused the chemicals to spill into the nearby bay.
The EPA states it paid $15 million for the 2014 emergency cleanup — five times more than was first reported to the Times-Standard in 2014 — in which tanks containing the pulp liquors were drained and loaded into trucks bound for a Washington state pulp mill where the chemicals would be reused.
