Note to readers • The following story is Part 1 of two stories reported by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project in partnership with The Salt Lake Tribune and support from the McGraw Center for Business Journalism at CUNY’s Craig Newmark Graduate School of Journalism. Read Part 2 here.

The plumes of mist that drifted toward the Utah Test and Training Range in November 2021 were thick enough that they had begun to interfere with military exercises.

A concerned environmental engineer from Hill Air Force Base emailed state air quality officials to report that military personnel were complaining — rightly so, in his opinion — about the potential health impacts of the mist, which they said smelled like chlorine and appeared to emanate from U.S. Magnesium.

“You probably don’t know, and they have a reputation not to report, but I wonder if the[y] are experiencing a breakdown?” the Hill AFB engineer wrote on Nov. 8, 2021.

His inquiry followed months of complaints from area residents. Between February 2021 and December 2022, state air quality officials received multiple complaints about a chlorine-like smell and a visible plume of mist or fog coming from US Magnesium, which for decades has extracted magnesium from the brines of the Great Salt Lake.

A new analysis of state and federal documents, obtained by The Utah Investigative Journalism Project through public records requests, indicate that the company may have taken emissions control equipment offline during the spate of complaints. The documents also reveal the restricted scope and slow pace of how regulators responded to reports of what appeared to be increased emissions at US Magnesium, including:

• Utah’s Division of Air Quality (DAQ) gave the reports scant attention, with a spokesperson explaining they were considered simply “odor” complaints for local health officials to consider — despite evidence that the plant’s emissions impacted residents and others working for government agencies and businesses in the area.

• The Environmental Protection Agency investigated broader concerns about US Magnesium’s chlorine emissions over a period that included the many reports of fog. But by the time it issued a sweeping notice of violation in March 2023, US Magnesium’s plant had been closed for months.

The EPA’s notice, which has not previously been reported, focused on the company’s chlorine reduction burner, “a critical control device” responsible for limiting chlorine emissions. The notice alleged the plant operated between January 2016 and July 2022 with the burner offline some 1,100 times — resulting in chlorine emissions in excess of the company’s permit during those years.

• Because the company has idled the plant, the EPA has not asked it to make any changes or comply with any penalties as a result of the violations, an agency spokesperson explained.

Air quality experts and environmental groups said the response to the various concerns about chlorine emissions shows the limits of how US Magnesium — which hopes to resume operations — is regulated, with enforcement split among government agencies and monitoring significantly based on self-reports from the company.

The definitive cause of the chemical-smelling mist reported in 2021 and 2022 remains undetermined.

Wasatch Front air quality has long been affected by the chemicals US Magnesium has historically emitted, whether allowed under its permits or released in alleged violations, as it mines the critical mineral.

According to the company, its regular operations produce large quantities of water vapor and steam, which can become trapped near the ground during atmospheric temperature inversions — the same phenomena that cause northern Utah’s air quality to plummet in the winter.

“During these unusual atmospheric events, plant emissions remain within permitted values,” the company said in an April 1 statement signed by CEO Ron Thayer and Rob Hartman, its environmental manager. “It is possible that trace levels of permitted chlorides could be detected in the water vapor/fog.”

That is entirely plausible, according to Jessica Haskins, an assistant professor of atmospheric chemistry at the University of Utah — though she, like the company leaders, noted this mist would likely contain some chemicals beyond water vapor, including chlorine.

But she said it’s also possible that the mist came from equipment that failed at roughly the same time, or that went offline — as EPA records indicate — during breakdowns and maintenance operations at the plant.

Without nearby air quality monitors, Haskins said, it’s impossible to tell what happened beyond the self-reports provided by US Magnesium in this and in other circumstances.

Experts like Haskins and environmental groups say the situation points to a problem bigger than US Magnesium itself: a dearth of oversight and air monitoring to verify emissions in remote locations.

“Self reporting … reduces the regulatory burden of going out and inspecting places, but it, for very obvious reasons, is not a great way to regulate an industry,” said Lexi Tuddenham, executive director of HEAL Utah. “It’s like, would I ask my toddler to tell me how many cookies he had? No.”

US Magnesium holds that it has “reported all emissions in a factual manner and has done so throughout the life of the facility.” Its reports to the state are based on stack tests completed by third-party contractors, Hartman and Thayer said, and they noted that the EPA also oversaw two years of 24-hour air monitoring by third parties that captured emissions during both normal operations and during mechanical breakdowns at the plant.

“None of this perimeter area monitoring produced results that were deemed unsafe or unhealthy,” Hartman and Thayer said.

Safety equipment offline

As area residents filed complaints with state air quality officials about the chlorine-like smell and a visible plume of mist or fog coming from US Magnesium, Nando Meli, a former employee of the Utah DAQ and now mayor of the town of Stockton, called a former colleague at the division to check in about their concerns.

On February 1, 2021, the day before the spate of complaints began, the company had taken the chlorine reduction burner offline for three hours, according to records collected by the EPA.

Federal regulations require US Magnesium to use the device to burn off chlorine gas and remove hydrochloric acid from its emissions, preventing chlorine gas from being released directly into the atmosphere.

US Magnesium had also taken the chlorine reduction burner offline for two hours that day, the EPA records show.

There were other equipment failures in 2021 that could have also resulted in excess emissions from the magnesium plant. For example, the company reported to the EPA — in September 2022 — that emissions control equipment for its spray dryers went offline for maintenance for over a month in 2021.

It’s also possible that the fog came from multiple sources.

BLM firefighters sickened

The EPA also raised the issue of elevated levels of emissions from US Magnesium during 2021, but not because of events that year.

In August, EPA officials said the Bureau of Land Management had inquired about the possibility that US Magnesium had taken emissions control equipment offline for maintenance. The BLM also expressed concern that this could expose its workers on nearby public lands to chlorine gas.

The communication between the federal agencies was likely triggered by the experiences of BLM firefighters during a 2018 wildfire, according to a spokesperson for the BLM’s Utah office. They had to abort efforts to control the Lakeside wildfire when the wind shifted and blew smoke from US Magnesium in the direction of the flames.

A BLM pilot who worked the fire sought medical attention following the incident, while other BLM personnel reported experiencing several days of nausea, body aches, itching and burning skin and eyes, and nasal congestion, according to an after-action report by the BLM.

US Magnesium disputes the notion that the health effects reported by the BLM were tied to its emissions. “USM firmly asserts that the stack releases from the plant do not produce hazardous area conditions,” Hartman and Thayer said in their recent statement.

But the BLM and the EPA came to believe the 2018 illnesses were related to an unusually large release of pollution from US Magnesium, caused when the company took the chlorine reduction burner offline during maintenance activities.

Exposure to chlorine gas can cause eye, skin and respiratory tract irritation, according to an EPA spokesperson, and high levels of the gas can trigger pulmonary edema, a serious and potentially fatal condition where the lungs fill with fluid.

Given the health risks, the EPA and BLM asked to be informed of US Magnesium’s future maintenance schedule to avoid exposing staff in the future. The inquiry — and its apparent tardiness — triggered a heated message from US Magnesium staff to regulators.

“Your carefully crafted email refers to ‘US Magnesium’s upcoming plans to take off-line the chlorine reduction burner (CRB) for maintenance’ (emphasis added),” Hartman wrote in an August 12, 2021, email, sent jointly to state and EPA officials. “US Magnesium has no such ‘upcoming plans.’”

US Magnesium had already provided the EPA with ample information about past events when the chlorine reduction burner was down, such as the 2019 earthquake in Magna, Hartman added, and the company would “no longer engage in verbal responses to hearsay, innuendo or rumor regarding its operations.”

He attached a series of federal orders regarding the importance of the company’s magnesium production to domestic security, and signed off in Russian, “Поздравляю вас товарищи, вы снова победили промышленность США.”

Or in translation, “Congratulations, comrades, you have once again defeated U.S. industry.”

Hartman, who said he was speaking for himself and not on the company’s behalf in a separate email, told The Utah Investigative Journalism Project that his personal relationship with EPA regulators had “soured” by 2021-2022. They had failed to follow through on an earlier promise to allow US Magnesium to review draft regulation before it published in the Federal Register, he said.

He said he liked to write some of his emails to regulators in Russian to “бросить вызов ленивым бюрократам,” or “challenge lazy bureaucrats.”

Hartman and Thayer said in their joint April 1 statement that the company “has always maintained a factual and open communication with federal and state regulators.”

A different fog

Complaints about episodes of mist continued throughout 2021 and resumed in late 2022, when a contractor from a neighboring company sent the EPA photos and videos of one day’s fog.

Usually, the contractor said, the company’s security officers described emissions plumes from US Magnesium as yellowish, smelling like chlorine and causing their eyes to burn. However, this time seemed different, the contractor indicated — the cloud of mist coming from US Magnesium was oily and smelled slightly sweet, like battery acid.

In a subsequent email exchange between US Magnesium and state and federal regulators, company officials indicated that the different-smelling mist likely came from the company’s lithium operation.

Although the exact date of the contractor’s complaint was unclear, a US Magnesium manager said the company had applied an acid to its digester pit a few days prior, on Dec. 21, 2022, and that this could have produced a fog or mist.

However, the manager also said the wind was blowing from the southeast the day of the acid application, while the videos supplied to the EPA showed the wind blowing the opposite direction — creating confusion about exactly when this episode occurred.

The reality, Haskins said, is that even with photographic evidence, it’s impossible to tell what caused the reported plumes and what they may have contained in the absence of nearby, specialized air sensors.

The air quality monitors nearest to US Magnesium, according to DAQ spokesperson Ashley Sumner, are located in the town of Erda, on a site state regulators selected because they believed it to be representative of the average air quality conditions experienced by the majority of Tooele Valley residents.

Air monitoring is focused, per federal regulation, on the state’s most populous areas, Sumner said.

Asked about the Utah DAQ response to the complaints about the chemical-smelling fog, Sumner characterized them as “related to chlorine odors.” Local health departments, she said, regulate odors.

On the day that the lead environmental engineer at Hill Air Force Base had complained that “plumes originating from US Mag” had impacted operations at the Utah Test and Training Range — and that personnel had expressed concern about “exposure impacts while performing their duties” — DAQ did contact US Magnesium, Sumner said.

She specifically identified that August complaint as concerning chlorine odors, and said the call was made “to determine if facility issues may have been causing the increase in odor.” Sumner did not respond to multiple requests to clarify these statements.

Tuddenham, with HEAL Utah, said she found the state’s assertion that regulation of “odors” from US Magnesium should fall to the Tooele County Health Department laughable.

“Expecting local health departments dealing with a myriad of public health issues with very small staffs and very little political power to regulate an industry … is completely unfair,” she said.

Sumner noted Utah DAQ’s has “initiated a compliance action” in “any instance where DAQ has reason to believe that US Magnesium is not conducting required air quality reporting.”

The state did sue US Magnesium in 2017 for some 30 violations of its air quality permit, including five that allegedly impacted the environment and multiple complaints that the company failed to keep and report records of its emissions in a timely manner.

The eventual $430,000 settlement, announced years later in September 2023, was criticized as too low by two members of the Utah Air Quality Board.

Limited oversight, questioned maintenance

It is difficult, Haskins said, to find another company to which US Magnesium could be compared, or that could provide examples for how regulators might better get a handle on the company’s emissions.

Its processes and the emissions they produce are unique; it is the only US producer of magnesium that doesn’t come from recycled materials. And essentially the only experts who have intimate familiarity with its operations are the people who work there.

The closest analogy Haskins sees are the small individually owned oil and gas wells that dot the U.S. These wells produce the majority of the industry’s nationwide emissions of methane, which according to the EPA represents the second most common planet-warming gas after carbon dioxide.

“Those wells are operated by mom and pop shops, and they are the ones emitting because” because they struggle to afford the latest emissions technologies, Haskins said.

Larger oil companies like Exxon or bp may be willing to preemptively reduce their emissions in order to avoid government mandates, but “the biggest emissions come from small one-off companies that don’t get that much oversight,” she said.

Limited government oversight may not be the only similarity between these small oil and gas companies and US Magnesium; under-investment could have increased emissions from the company’s plant as well.

The company had longstanding maintenance and equipment issues dating back to at least 2018, when US Magnesium vice president of sales Cameron Tissington testified before the United States International Trade Commission in Washington. D.C.

He told the commissioner that the company had been “forced to continue to postpone the rebuilding of electrolytic cells and defer all but very essential maintenance” in order to keep its operating costs low enough for its products to remain competitive.

The company argues that it could not have anticipated the essentially simultaneous failure of key pieces of equipment that forced the plant to stop processing magnesium in 2022.

But one of its largest customers — Kaiser Aluminum — sued over the shutdown anyway, arguing “the equipment at issue was poorly maintained, its breakdown foreseeable, and not reasonably beyond US Mag’s control.”

US Magnesium’s director of sales told Kaiser that the machinery that broke was a “known bottleneck in the facility, and that it was a piece of equipment from the 1970s for which parts were not easily replaceable,” Kaiser alleged in its complaint.

Kaiser Aluminum also identified online reviews by current and former employees of US Magnesium that referenced issues with maintenance.

“Lastly, upper management is more concerned about fixing 40 year old equipment with parts from other 40 year old equipment rather than buying new equipment so there is some lengthy downtime at times,” reads a review from Indeed.com that Kaiser Aluminum cited.

The language from the suit, which is still pending in New York, echoes allegations from the EPA’s notice of violation. The “regular and reoccurring nature” of the chlorine reduction burner being offline, the EPA said, meant the episodes would not meet the legal definition of a “malfunction.”

And that meant they represented hundreds of violations of the federal Clean Air Act, the agency contended. But as the plant remains closed, the EPA has idled its enforcement as well.