The Dark Side of the Rio Grande: Tika Milan Reports on Asarco's Texas Refinery

NOTE: We sent members of the I'm From Rolling Stone cast into the field to document America's eco-disasters. The result is a series of four reports from around the country. See a full-index of their work and tell us what you think here.

P erched on a hill above the Rio Grande, the smokestacks cast long shadows over both sides of the border. The giant exhaust towers belong to Asarco, one of the world's leading copper smelters. The company's refinery in El Paso, Texas, is ancient and dilapidated; its drab industrial buildings look like they haven't been upgraded since the original foundry was built in 1887. Despite the sign at the facility that reads 'Dedicated To Safety In El Paso For 110 Years,' the plant once emitted hundreds of tons of toxic chemicals each year -- including lead, arsenic and cadmium that local residents believe have poisoned children in both El Paso and the Mexican border town of Juarez.

For years, people in the city say, a yellow haze hung over everything surrounding the smelter. "We didn't know any better to question why we were getting a yellow film on our car or why we smelled sulfur in the air all the time," says El Paso Mayor John Cook. "We just accepted it as a normalcy."

Eliot Shapleigh, a state senator from El Paso, recalls growing up under the haze of the Asarco smokestack. "I remember as a kid, going to the Sun Bowl, where the big football game was played every year," he says. "We could see this yellow smoke coming out of the Asarco smelter, and it would rain down little pieces of yellow dust that almost looked like sleet or snow. This dust was sulfur and other contaminants. If it landed on your tongue, it would immediately burn you all the way down to your lungs."

Asarco produces more than 400 million pounds of copper each year, and the smelting process -- extracting metal from ore -- can release high levels of arsenic and sulfur dioxide into the air. Long-term exposure to arsenic can cause skin and lung cancer; while sulfur dioxide can often severely decrease respiratory function and trigger asthma.

In El Paso, the company also smelted lead until the mid-1970s, and a 1975 study by Dr. Phillip Landrigan, published in The New England Journal of Medicine, found that more than half the children living near the plant had blood levels of lead that were considered toxic. Lead poisoning has been linked to learning disabilities and behavior problems in children, as well as nerve disorders and memory loss in adults.

Asarco denies that it is responsible for the dangerously high levels of lead and other contaminants in El Paso and Juarez.

But charges of environmental negligence are nothing new to the company, which is currently identified by the EPA as a potentially responsible party, at 37 Superfund sites that rank among the nation's most toxic. Facing thousands of environmental lawsuits -- including 95,000 asbestos-related claims -- Asarco filed for bankruptcy in 2005 in an attempt to evade cleanup costs that may exceed $20 billion.