A technician stands in a backyard in Carteret, New Jersey, tablet in hand, and drops a pin. It marks the exact spot where a crew just pulled contaminated soil out of the ground. Seconds later the coordinates sync into a dashboard that a lawyer in Phoenix, a regulator in Trenton and an engineer on-site can all open at once, according to Esri, which built the underlying software with Freeport-McMoRan.
That dashboard is the point of this story. Freeport-McMoRan spent years rebuilding an internal mapping system called Townsite Information & Assessment, and Esri has now recognized the project with a 2026 Special Achievement in GIS Award at its annual user conference. The timing matters because the work the system tracks is not finishing. Decades after a smelter shut its stacks, Carteret is still producing settlements, still producing lawsuits, and Freeport's environmental teams are still walking its streets with tablets. The software had to be built to outlast the litigation it documents.
Freeport calls this work "townsite remediation," Esri notes — the assessment and cleanup of residential neighborhoods near legacy sites the company picked up through past mergers, where airborne metals from old smelter stacks settled into the soil over years of operation. The company's teams knock on doors, request access, sample soil, and remove material where the chemistry demands it, according to Esri. It is slow, door-by-door work, and the data it generates has to survive far longer than any one employee's career.
That is the problem Joshua Dunsmoor inherited almost as soon as he arrived at Freeport. A software consultant by training, Dunsmoor had spent years building GIS applications before joining the company, and he was confident the work could be brought in-house rather than run through outside contractors, Esri reports. The old TIA system was parcel-based but map-blind — you needed a unique identifier before you could find anything, according to Esri. The rebuild fixed that, linking mobile field data collection, centralized records and real-time dashboards into one system. "All of it ends up back in this dashboard," Dunsmoor said. "It's end to end."
Bryce Romig, who manages Freeport's remedial project programs across multiple states, put a number on why that durability matters: the data has to live on a 50-year timeline, he told Esri, calling that fact "priceless." Chris Franks, Freeport's director of land resources, described the broader philosophy behind the buildout: "We're using GIS and geospatial technology as the center point of doing the work, displaying the work, and collaboratively sharing, which creates better and more informed decision making." The program did not grow through a corporate mandate, Franks said — it spread from 25 scattered desktop licenses in 2010 to 1,500 users today by "flying under the radar," expanding project by project rather than by directive.
The SAG Award is, per Esri, "one of 197 chosen from more than 100,000 Esri clients worldwide." — a mid-tier honor rather than the company's top prize — but it recognizes something concrete: a system that turns information retrieval that once took days into a process that takes seconds, and that Esri says is helping Freeport return remediated legacy townsites to communities as parks and usable land.
Carteret is the case that shows why the dashboard needs to last. U.S. Metals Refining, a Freeport subsidiary since 2007, ran a smelter and refining operation in the borough from 1903 to 1986, and first agreed with New Jersey regulators to clean up the site in 1988. A 2012 agreement between the borough and USMR opened investigations into hundreds of public and private properties near the plant. By 2017, Mayor Daniel J. Reiman announced a settlement in which U.S. Metals would make an immediate payment of $4.25 million, plus $3.15 million more to the borough over the following decade. "For over twenty years, the New Jersey Department of Environmental Protection (NJDEP) largely forgot about the Borough and its long-gone smelter," Reiman said. He credited the company for staying at the table once the borough pushed: "When the Borough took action in 2011, U.S. Metals worked with us on a comprehensive approach to investigate and, where appropriate, clean up historic pollution from the plant." Joseph A. Brunner, who oversees discontinued operations for U.S. Metals, framed the deal in narrower terms: "This settlement is consistent with USMR's commitment to remediate soils impacted by historic smelter operations in the Borough of Carteret."
That was not the last word. A separate case, Juan Duarte, et al. v. United States Metals Refining Co., filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of New Jersey, produced a $42 million settlement over allegations that lead, arsenic and other contaminants from the site had damaged surrounding properties, according to Topclassactions. More than 1,000 residents in the area were eligible to file claims, with each qualified property owner projected to receive roughly $17,500.
Freeport's exposure to this kind of long-tail liability tracks its own growth. The Corporate Research Project describes it as the largest U.S. corporation focused on mining, with annual revenue above $20 billion, a scale built largely on its 2007 acquisition of Phelps Dodge for roughly $25 billion, which made it the world's largest publicly traded copper producer. That expansion also brought other legacy liabilities into the portfolio, according to the Corporate Research Project: a $6.8 million settlement in 2012 with the Justice Department over toxic discharges into waterways near the company's Morenci mine, and Arizona regulatory fines totaling $105,000 and $150,000 for air and pipeline violations. The company employed roughly 25,200 people as of December 31, 2017, 11,000 of them in North America, according to its 10-K filing, and the market valued its shares at $22.3 billion as of January 31, 2018.
None of that history closes on its own. Carteret's smelter has been silent for decades; its case file has not. The system Esri just honored was built for exactly that gap — a system meant to keep answering questions from regulators and lawyers long after the people who built it have moved on.
