Clearwater Paper Corporation leaked chlorine gas — the same chemical weapon deployed in World War I — into the air above Lewiston, Idaho, and then sat on that information for the better part of a year before telling a single emergency responder.

Four Releases. One Company. Zero Immediate Warnings.

Chlorine gas is classified as both a “hazardous substance” and an “extremely hazardous substance” under federal law. The legal threshold that triggers mandatory emergency reporting is just 10 pounds released within any 24-hour period. That is a number deliberately set low because chlorine gas is genuinely dangerous at small concentrations.

Between September 2019 and January 2021, Clearwater Paper’s pulp and paperboard manufacturing facility at 803 Mill Road, Lewiston, Idaho blew past that threshold four distinct times. The releases ranged from an estimated 12 pounds to as high as 171 pounds in a single day. The community around that mill had no idea any of this was happening.

Federal law under CERCLA and EPCRA is blunt: when you know a reportable release has occurred, you call the National Response Center, the State Emergency Response Commission, and the Local Emergency Planning Committee — immediately. Clearwater Paper did the opposite of that.

The Company Knew. The Clock Was Running. They Did Nothing.

Nearly a Year of Silence for Releases 1, 2, and 3

The first chlorine leak occurred on September 16, 2019. The second followed four days later, on September 20, 2019. A third event struck on January 5 and 6, 2020. The EPA’s legal findings state that Clearwater Paper knew or should have known about all three of these releases no later than July 17, 2020. That is a gap of at least nine months — and as long as ten months — before the company had any internal reckoning with what it had released into the air above its neighbors.

But knowing is just step one. The company then waited another two full weeks after that internal knowledge date before calling anyone. Clearwater Paper finally reported Releases 1, 2, and 3 to the National Response Center, the Idaho State Emergency Response Commission, and the Nez Perce County Local Emergency Planning Committee on July 31, 2020. The written follow-up emergency notices did not arrive until August 3, 2020.

The law requires immediate notification. The word in the statute is not “soon” or “within a reasonable time.” It is “immediately.” Clearwater Paper’s reporting gap for those first three releases clocks in at somewhere between nine months and ten months and eighteen days.

Release 4: Still Not Fast Enough, Even After Three Prior Violations

You might expect a corporation that had already violated emergency notification law three times to have built an airtight response protocol for the fourth incident. Clearwater Paper had not. On January 20 and 21, 2021, the facility released approximately 12 pounds of chlorine into the air. The EPA’s records show Clearwater Paper had confirmed knowledge of the release at 00:15 on January 21, 2021.

Clearwater Paper called the National Response Center at 09:17 that morning. That is a gap of nine hours and two minutes between confirmed internal knowledge and the required “immediate” call. The SERC and LEPC got the call six minutes after that, at 09:23. Nine hours is not immediate. For a chemical that attacks the respiratory system, nine hours is an eternity.

The Non-Financial Ledger: What a Dollar Amount Cannot Cover

There is a community sitting next to this paper mill in Lewiston, Idaho. Lewiston sits at the confluence of the Snake and Clearwater rivers, and its residents live and breathe in proximity to an industrial facility that, by its own company’s admission in signing this consent agreement, released a toxic gas four separate times over a span of 16 months. Those residents were not informed. Emergency responders were not put on alert. The Idaho State Emergency Response Commission — the body that exists precisely to coordinate protective action during hazardous chemical events — was kept in the dark.

Chlorine gas does not require a massive spill to cause harm. The EPA set the reporting threshold at just 10 pounds because concentrations that cause eye irritation, coughing, and respiratory distress can build quickly in residential areas near industrial sites. Clearwater Paper’s first release potentially reached 171 pounds in a 24-hour period — seventeen times the legal threshold. At that exposure level, the failure to alert emergency services means first responders had no idea what people in the surrounding area might be breathing. People with asthma, the elderly, children, workers in nearby businesses: none of them had any official warning.

The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act exists because of a specific lesson humanity learned from industrial disaster. The law was passed in the wake of the 1984 Bhopal catastrophe, where a chemical release from a Union Carbide plant in India killed thousands of people in their sleep because no emergency notification systems were in place. EPCRA’s entire purpose is to make sure communities have the right to know what is in the air around them — and to make sure emergency planners can act. Clearwater Paper hollowed out that right for nearly a year for the people of Lewiston.

The consent agreement documents that Clearwater Paper “neither admits nor denies” the specific factual violations. That legal shield is standard corporate procedure. But the timestamps in this document tell a story that is not ambiguous. The company had confirmed internal knowledge of three separate toxic gas releases by July 17, 2020. The company waited until July 31, 2020, to make a single call. Every day of that two-week silence was a day the Nez Perce County Local Emergency Planning Committee could not do the job the law assigned to them. Every day of the preceding nine-to-ten-month gap between the releases and that internal knowledge date raises its own questions about how this company manages its chemical safety processes.

Straight from the Document: The Words They Signed

These are direct, unedited passages from the EPA Consent Agreement signed on May 31, 2024. Clearwater Paper’s own Senior Vice President signed this document.

What This Does to Real People and Real Places

Environmental Degradation

Clearwater Paper’s facility sits on the banks of the Snake and Clearwater river system in Lewiston, Idaho, one of the most ecologically significant waterway systems in the Pacific Northwest — a critical corridor for salmon migration and tribal fishing rights held by the Nez Perce people. The four documented chlorine releases went into the air above this landscape without any emergency monitoring protocols being activated. When an extremely hazardous substance is released without triggering the emergency notification chain, the environmental monitoring infrastructure that could track air quality impacts, measure deposition on soil and water, and assess ecological harm never gets deployed. The EPA’s own designation of chlorine as an “extremely hazardous substance” reflects the fact that it does not stay neatly contained to the point of release.

The legal framework behind EPCRA and CERCLA exists specifically because hazardous chemical releases have documented cascading environmental effects beyond the immediate release point. Chlorine gas can react with moisture in the atmosphere and with organic material in surrounding ecosystems. When the notification chain fails — as it did here for four separate incidents spanning September 2019 through January 2021 — environmental regulators and local land managers never receive the signal to begin impact assessment. The environmental consequences of these four releases, and whether they caused measurable harm to the air, land, or water of the Lewiston area, are not documented in the source material because no immediate monitoring was triggered. That absence of documentation is itself a consequence of the company’s silence.

Public Health

Chlorine gas is a respiratory hazard. Exposure causes irritation to the eyes, nose, and throat at low concentrations; higher concentrations cause pulmonary edema, meaning fluid buildup in the lungs. The EPA’s “extremely hazardous substance” classification exists because chlorine’s effects escalate rapidly with concentration and exposure duration. The legal reporting threshold of 10 pounds per 24-hour period is deliberately conservative for exactly this reason. Clearwater Paper’s Release 1 potentially discharged up to 171 pounds into the air in a single day — seventeen times that threshold. Release 2 discharged 122 pounds. Neither community residents nor healthcare providers in the Lewiston area received any official notification that would allow them to connect reported symptoms to a known chemical exposure source.

Lewiston, Idaho, is a small city of roughly 33,000 people. A significant industrial corridor lines its riverfront. Workers, residents, and schoolchildren in the surrounding area breathe air that is, by the EPA’s own findings, subject to periodic chlorine releases from this facility. The Emergency Planning and Community Right-to-Know Act was designed so that local emergency managers — specifically the Nez Perce County Local Emergency Planning Committee named in this document — can coordinate with hospitals, first responders, and public health agencies when a chemical release occurs. That coordination was denied to them for four separate incidents because Clearwater Paper did not make the required calls. For an unknown number of people in Lewiston who may have experienced respiratory symptoms, headaches, or other health effects during the periods of these releases, no public health investigation was ever triggered. There is no way to know what health impacts occurred in the community, because the systems designed to detect them were never activated.

Economic Inequality

The $322,088 penalty (roughly equivalent to what a minimum-wage worker in Idaho would earn over 22 years of full-time work, or enough to pay rent for a working-class family in Lewiston for approximately 15 years at median area rental rates) is the entirety of what Clearwater Paper Corporation paid to resolve 14 separate violations of federal emergency notification law across four toxic gas releases spanning sixteen months. Clearwater Paper is a publicly traded corporation. The fine amounts to a rounding error on a corporate balance sheet. It is, explicitly, a cost of doing business — not a deterrent.

The communities that absorb the risk of living next to industrial facilities like Clearwater Paper’s Lewiston mill are overwhelmingly working-class and lower-income communities. Industrial zoning patterns in American cities have, for decades, placed the highest-polluting facilities nearest to communities with the least political and financial power to resist them. The Nez Perce people maintain treaty rights and deep cultural connections to the land and waterways surrounding Lewiston. The failure to notify the Nez Perce County Local Emergency Planning Committee of four separate chlorine gas releases is a failure that falls hardest on those with the least capacity to monitor corporate behavior on their own — and the fewest resources to protect themselves when that monitoring fails.

What Clearwater Paper Paid Per Violation

Please fact check me by visiting the EPA’s website on this specific act of corporate misconduct: https://yosemite.epa.gov/OA/RHC/EPAAdmin.nsf/Filings/346E7314FC66EEEA85258B35007E950E/$File/CAFO%20Clearwater%20EPCRA%2010%202024%200110.pdf

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