Judge Approves Plan For Smelter Settlement

U.S. District Judge William Dwyer has approved the plan to distribute a $65.5 million settlement in a class-action suit over pollution from the old Asarco copper smelter at Ruston.

The lawsuit was filed for residents subjected to years of pollution, with some areas so heavily contaminated with arsenic and other heavy metals that they were placed on the Superfund cleanup list.

Splitting the settlement will be 10,000 to 15,000 homeowners and renters who lived within two miles of the smelter between Sept. 21, 1993, and June 1, 1995.

Because of the complicated distribution scheme, it’s difficult to say how much each resident will get. But Concannon said “the typical homeowner will get hundreds of dollars, not thousands in the first distribution.