Manufacturing companies have been operating since 1941 at the foot of Black Mountain, in the southeast quadrant of the Las Vegas Valley. Part of the land east of Boulder Highway was used for the disposal of a variety of industrial and municipal effluents into unlined evaporation ponds. This practice was industry standard and legal at the time. In 1976, the use of the unlined evaporation ponds was permanently discontinued.

At that time, Titanium Metals (TIMET) built a series of lined evaporation ponds under a permit issued by the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP). The ponds were used for effluent until 2005 when Basic Management Company (BMI) and TIMET constructed a water treatment facility on the manufacturing plant site to process TIMET's effluent. This allowed TIMET to permanently discontinue its permitted use of the evaporation ponds.

In 1991, under the supervision of the NDEP, a voluntary private effort to investigate the land began. Investigations and studies have been ongoing and continuous since 1991, during which more than two million analyses have been completed from over 2,700 samples for up to 500 compounds per sample. This testing went far beyond the originally manufactured compounds to ensure that nothing was overlooked. To view a map of the areas tested, please visit our Cool Science! page.

Through investigation and study of the entire 2,200 acres, it was determined that only approximately 400 acres of the site contain contaminants in concentrations that may pose an unacceptable risk to human health if left in place. The primary contaminants on the site are certain metals, radionuclides, pesticides, salts and asbestos. Please refer to Cool Science! for a complete list of substances and compounds for which tests were conducted.

It is worth noting that the site was considered and rejected by the US Environmental Protection Agency as a Superfund site. This essentially means the extent and type of substances and compounds did not pose an immediate risk to human health.