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

Referring to her experience with ASARCO, Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash, says "We need to address the lax enforcement and loopholes that allow polluting corporations to manipulate bankruptcy laws and evade cleanup responsibilities." Daniel Tellechea, the former CEO of Asarco, all but admitted to the legal gambit when he acknowledged in a press release that one of the reasons for the bankruptcy was the numerous environmental-related lawsuits brought by government agencies and private parties.

In El Paso, the Asarco plant has been closed since 1999, and local officials and residents are fighting to force the company to keep the smelter closed permanently. "The city has spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to get their air-quality permit blocked," says Cook of the smleter. "Asarco is still fighting us tooth and nail -- but now that we're experiencing clean air, it's going to be hard to go back to yellow dust."

Residents say they're willing to sacrifice the hundreds of jobs that the company provided, in exchange for clean air. "Asarco has defined the town for a hundred years," says Shapleigh, who has made keeping the plant permanently closed one of his main legislative objectives. "We won't let it define the town for another hundred."

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.