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QuickTake:
At the EPA’s first community meeting since declaring J.H. Baxter & Co. a Superfund site, west Eugene residents learned the cleanup is shifting from visible pollution to unseen underground contamination. Many, already facing serious health issues, heard for the first time how extensive the toxic mess has become.
Leslie Leonard and her husband, Lee, live about a mile from J.H. Baxter & Co. — a defunct wood-treatment plant so polluted the Environmental Protection Agency recently declared it a Superfund site.
On Wednesday, July 16, Leslie Leonard finally saw what lies beyond the chain-link fence, where 80 years of toxic production took place at the now-shuttered facility along Roosevelt Boulevard in west Eugene.
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Leonard.
She recently survived cancer of the uterus, a disease no one else in her family has ever had.
Leonard was among many in a crowd of nearly 100 people Wednesday night who have suffered unexplained health problems as emissions, smelling like a chemical soup, drifted through the community for years.
The company used pesticides with chemicals linked to cancer, reproductive harm and immune system damage.
During Wednesday’s public meeting in the cafeteria of Cascade Middle School, environmental officials from several government agencies gave a video presentation to show residents where those emissions came from — the above-ground pollution they had seen and smelled for years.
But now, the officials said, the focus is shifting to underground contamination, including a hidden plume of toxic chemicals that has been fluctuating beneath the site for decades.
It may be farther away from the site than first thought in waterways, something to be studied as the Superfund process takes off this fall.
From air to earth
“Has anyone seen this before?” EPA coordinator Randy Nattis asked the stunned crowd as he narrated a nearly 10-minute video walkthrough of the site, showing endless waste and crumbling infrastructure.
Long, horizontal cylinders — called retorts – once operated like a larger-than-life pressurized crockpot to treat wood with chemical preservatives, to help the wood resist decay.
Liquid waste collected at J.H. Baxter. Credit: Environmental Protection Agency 
A crew member takes apart a cylinder once used to preserve wood at J.H. Baxter. Credit: Environmental Protection Agency 
Two crew members onsite at J.H. Baxter during demolition. 
Containment efforts to prevent waste from spreading. Credit: Environmental Protection Agency
“It’s crazy. It’s a lot here, a lot of pipes, everything was full,” said Nattis, who choked up during his presentation.
Nattis has worked on Superfund projects across the country. Properties that reach Superfund status have some of the most egregious pollution in the country. Fewer than 1% of known toxic sites receive this level of federal attention.
Nattis told Lookout Eugene-Springfield that the Baxter site is especially challenging because it was mothballed, meaning the facility was abruptly shut down with pipes still full of chemicals, as if it might resume operations.
When crews, wearing hazardous materials suits, first opened the retorts they found layers of toxic sludge — liquid, solid, liquid. They spent months cleaning up the mess, black ooze staining their white suits, before finally cutting the retorts into chunks as sparks flew. More than 500,000 gallons of waste was removed and hauled to an EPA-approved disposal facility.
“As we’re doing the worst of the worst, of course, we’re still going to run into other issues,” Nattis said. “As you can imagine, it’s old pipes, this contamination of sludge. This is why it’s a Superfund site.”
Examining plume and creek contamination
Nattis’ colleague Annie Christopher, a remedial project manager, outlined the next phases of the cleanup, now under her watch. Christopher said the EPA will next conduct a feasibility study to assess the contamination for a plan forward, both on and offsite at J.H. Baxter.
During an EPA meeting in August, the agency said a preliminary analysis included sampling in Amazon Creek, which flows near the Baxter site, and in its diversion channel, which drains into Fern Ridge Lake. The EPA is working to map the pollution, factoring areas where elements pose unacceptable risks to humans and the environment.
“It could be a groundwater plume that’s extending off the property,” she said. “Sampling and data will confirm what exactly is included in the site boundary.”
The Oregon Department of Environmental Quality has quietly monitored the subterranean plume of chemicals since 1986. At the meeting, neither DEQ nor EPA officials would say exactly what chemicals are in the plume or how large it is, telling Lookout Eugene-Springfield they didn’t have the data on hand.
Such plumes typically form when chemicals drip and leak into the ground, then slowly migrate in the direction of groundwater. The plumes can then fluctuate during heavy rain.
‘Tip of the iceberg’
EPA officials were vague about exactly what health assessments might help determine whether Baxter’s pollution is linked to the cancer cases and other illnesses residents have experienced.
The Oregon Health Authority conducted limited cancer investigations but said available emissions data were insufficient to establish a causal link. Again and again, residents have told officials their own experiences should be counted as evidence and enough to get help.
“The data is in the people,” said recently retired Beyond Toxics executive director Lisa Arkin.
Arkin worked for years with residents-turned-advocates like Arjorie Arberry-Baribeault, whose daughter was sick with Hodgkin’s lymphoma — a cancer that weakens the body’s ability to fight infections — in 2018.
Around the time of her child’s diagnosis, workers at J.H. Baxter were illegally boiling off toxic wastewater into the air. They did this for at least 136 days during 2019, according to an investigation by the EPA. Since the early 2000s, community members and teachers in west Eugene have been contacting Beyond Toxics with concerns about pollution and children’s health.
Location of the J.H. Baxter & Co. site
“I hear the fear. I hear the anxiety. I hear the anger, but it’s directed at the wrong people,” Arberry-Baribeault told the unsettled room, alluding to the unspoken presence of J.H. Baxter president Georgia Baxter-Krause, who has been fined and sentenced to prison for environmental crimes.
“We’re celebrating what’s going on here right now with change,” she said.
Arberry-Baribeault, who now lives in Portland, has used her own journey to support others, like Leonard, who is on her own path to remission.
That kind of solidarity and knowledge-sharing has helped people feel less alone — both now and in what could be years of work and discovery ahead. As her husband, Lee Leonard, put it: “It’s just the tip of the iceberg.”
A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the last name of EPA coordinator Randy Nattis. This story has also been updated to clarify sampling locations.
