BANGOR DAILY NEWS • June 26, 2024
Various entities, including the Penobscot Nation and three eastern Maine towns, are set to receive funds through a legal settlement with the onetime owner of an Orrington chemical plant over mercury it dumped into the Penobscot River between 1967 and 2000. Those funds, which will help the groups to perform watershed restoration and improvement projects, are part of a much larger settlement that Mallinckrodt U.S. LLC, one of the former owners of the former HoltraChem Manufacturing plant, reached in 2021. It will pay at least $187 million as part of the settlement. While much of that funding will go to remediating the mercury contamination, $20 million of it has been reserved for projects in communities affected by the pollution.