It Didn’t Come From Space: Frisco’s Purple Blobs and the Clean-up of Exide

Via Frisco Unleaded member Eileen Canavan, comes this blast from the past that has implications for the scheduled clean-up of the Exide lead smelter. 

On August 11th, 1979 the annual Perseid meteor shower was taking place over DFW. The very same night, Sybil Christian found three desk-phone-sized, two-pound purple blobs with the constancy of whipped cream in her front year, located in the "farming town" of Frisco. All three were warm to the touch and contained small chunks of metal. She was convinced they were space rocks.

Ms. Christian sprayed the blobs with a garden hose. One melted into the lawn. The other two were taken by Frisco police to the Heard National Space Museum and eventually to NASA. The further up the scientific food chain the samples went, the more it seemed as if there might be something to Ms. Christian's theory. 

But an Assistant Director at the Ft. Worth Museum of Science and History wasn't buying it. He visited Frisco in the daytime and looked around to see what was near Ms. Christian's home. NASA had reported the the metal chunks found in Ms Christian's blobs were lead. So the scientific sleuth looked for possible sources of the metal. He found a large one – the GNB (now Exide) lead smelter about a mile and half away. "In the back" were tons of the same purple blob substance. It was a caustic soda used to clean the impurities out of lead from the millions of used batteries the plant was breaking open and mining for the metal. It was also learned that trucks carrying scrap iron went past the caustic soda dump and the Christian's house EVERY DAY.  Case solved, according to the Museum Mythbuster.

But that was 1979, when lead waste falling off the back of a truck, instead of falling from space, in the small farming community of Frisco didn't strike people as being totally whacked.

At the bottom is Stewart Creek, on its way to Lake Lewisville, a source of drinking water for Dallas and other North Texas cities. The white stuff is contamination from the Exide lead smelter which is right behind the wall. This is an EPA inspection photo.

Everything agreed to by the City of Frisco and Exide as part of their historic settlement announced in late May concerns contamination in and around the smelter itself – either the physical structures or the acres of buffer zone the company tried to build around the smelter. Nothing is mentioned in the settlement about off-site contamination that decades of sloppy practices and misguided policy produced – the paving of Frisco city streets with lead. The use of lead as fill or soil additives in Frisco and Collin County. The dumping of lead waste in vacant lots. The routine spillage of lead waste along neighborhood streets.

Although it's a humorous incident, this 1979 story is also deeply disturbing. We'll never be able to fully know the extent of the toxic legacy left by the Frisco smelter because so little in the first two to three decades of operation was reported or noted. A spill here, a dumping ground there. Who will remember, or even be alive, some 30 years later to tell us what happened?

But that shouldn't be a license by the authorities or Exide to ignore tracking down the leads we do have and trying to minimize the surprises down the road. At this point there's no effort being made by EPA, the state of Texas, or the City of Frisco to chronicle the memories of old-timers and do archival searches to provide a better map of total contamination risks.

Moreover, with the Exide settlement, the City of Frisco has waived its right to have any say in how the worst part of the smelter is cleaned-up. It has agreed to not challenge any plans the Texas Commission on Environmental Quality will come up with for final disposition of the plant site, including just leaving everything in place and pouring some cement over it. Remember please that we got to this point in large part due to TCEQ not doing its job. Now the same people who created the problem are in charge of fixing it. Somehow, we don't think they have the local population's best interest at heart.

Who will be making sure the Exide clean-up is done well and right on behalf of the residents of Frisco?