It's not hypothetical. The disaster at a gold mine that was abandoned nearly a century ago near Silverton, CO, is exactly what opponents of sulfide mining in Minnesota have been warning about. Water mixes with crushed rock and leaches out sulfides that make for a nice acid bath --- formerly known as Cement Creek and the Animas River.
On a scorcher of an August afternoon, a crowd gathered on a bridge over the deep-green waters of the Animas River on the north end of Durango, Colorado. A passerby might have thought they were watching a sporting event, perhaps a kayak race or a flotilla of inebriated, scantily clad inner tubers. Yet the river that afternoon was eerily empty of rowers, paddlers or floaters — unheard of on a day like this — and the mood among the onlookers was sombre. One mingling in the crowd heard certain words repeated: sad, tragic, angry, toxic.
They were here not to cheer anyone on, but to mourn, gathered to watch a catastrophe unfold in slow motion. Soon, the waters below would become milky green, then a Gatorade yellow, before finally settling into a thick and cloudy orangish hue — some compared it to mustard, others Tang. Whatever you called it, it was clearly not right.
They're dealing with pollution from mines mostly abandoned in the 1920s and 30's. By "they", I don't mean the mining companies. I mean the taxpayers, in this case in the form of the EPA.
Then there's acid mine drainage. The portals and shafts blasted into the mountainsides hijack the natural hydrology, pulling water flowing through fractures toward natural springs into the mine tunnels. There, the water reacts with iron disulfide (pyrite) and oxygen to form sulfuric acid. The acidic water dissolves naturally occurring heavy metals such as zinc, lead, cadmium, copper and aluminum. The resulting contaminated water flows out of the mine adit as if from a spring. By 1991, when the last major mine in the watershed shut down, there were some 400 mines in the watershed, many discharging unmitigated discharges into streams. Not a fish could be found for miles downstream from Silverton, and the impacts to aquatic life were felt in Durango, where, when the mines were still running, sensitive fish were unable to reproduce.
The owner of the last mine tried to do something, namely the minimum the state would let it do.
Then it got even more complex: Sunnyside cut a deal with the state and Gold King mining, a small operation owned by a Silvertonian. Sunnyside would leave, and turn over its water treatment operations to Gold King, along with enough cash to keep it running for a while. Gold King hoped to eventually resume mining the Gold King (not far from the American Tunnel). For decades, the Gold King, like the nearby Red and Bonita mine, had not discharged any water. But not long after Sunnyside sealed its bulkheads, water started pouring out of all of them. "It was not a coincidence," says Peter Butler, ARSG co-coordinator. The backed up water had found natural fractures to follow into the other mines. Together, the Gold King and Red and Bonita would become some of the biggest polluters in the basin. Initially, their waters were run through the treatment plant that Sunnyside had left behind. But before long, Gold King ran into technical, financial and legal troubles and the treatment plant stopped operating. Water quality for miles downstream once again deteriorated. The fish that had returned to the Animas below Silverton were wiped out. Part of the renewed impetus for a Superfund designation was to bring in funds to resume water treatment as well as figure out ways to clean up the basin’s remaining major polluting mines.Though there's been some focus on the cock-up by an EPA crew that was intending to avoid this problem, the issue is that the taxpayers were stuck with the problem. Whether it was the EPA or a different federal agency or the state, it's all the same to the mining companies. They got to take the gold and leave the problem. The companies formed for the sulfide mining in the Iron Range are owned by multiple companies, none of whom will have any liability when the temporary companies go bankrupt following the mines closing. Minnesota could easily have Colorado's problem of trying to figure out what to do about acidic water a century after the mines close --- with no end in sight. Before reminding me that a century has passed and the technology is surely better, let me point out that Mount Polley happened just a year ago. Could modern mining engineers find a solution to avoid destroying the water supplies in northern Minnesota? I'm willing to believe there is an engineering solution, making it possible to mine and still prevent pollution, if the mining companies are willing to spend what it takes to implement such a solution.
If you're saying that's a huge "if", oh yes. The mining companies have so far shown no interest in proving their willingness and ability to pay for cleanup of their pollution. Why should they, when dumping cleanup costs on the public while taking the profits and running is built in to the business model? But it's easy to prove me wrong. Pay a damage deposit. Essentially, the mining companies want to rent our land for a while. So pay a damage deposit to cover the public's costs when the mines are closed or, since presumably the companies would want to get their deposit back, provide an incentive to avoid pollution problems in the first place. So Polymet and other companies wanting to engage in polluting enterprises: no damage deposit, no renting our land.
cross-posted at MN Progressive Project