Acid mine drainage from old mines seeps into waterways, pulluting streams and killing aquatic life. Photo courtesy U.S. Environmental Protection Agency
Kevin Mayer wants to put a cheerful face on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s cleanup operations at the Leviathan Mine, located twenty-four miles southeast of Lake Tahoe in the Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest in California. But Mayer, the site manager for the project, admits it’s tough. The method being used to treat acid runoff at the 250-acre, former open-pit sulfur mine works well from June through September, he says. Operator-monitored generators pump the runoff from four discharge points to a point where it is neutralized by a lime mixture. But the mine—listed as a Superfund site in 2000—is located at 7,000 feet in the Sierras. Once the nip of fall is in the air, the reclamation effort has to shut down. “As soon as the blizzards start, we don’t have a safe road,” he says.
For decades the acid runoff—along with the arsenic, nickel and zinc it dissolved from the mine’s waste rock—killed all aquatic life in Leviathan Creek for a stretch of nine miles. Now that the reclamation effort is underway, the creek comes back to life each year in late spring. Bugs return, and the fish follow them. “After September you turn the pumps off, and it breaks your heart,” he says.
There’s no doubt that hardrock mining helped build the West. It lured the curious and the inventive, the brave and the greedy, the visionary and the hopeful across the plains and into the mountains of the arid West. The 1872 Mining Law made land and mining cheap and laid out a welcome mat for mining into the twenty-first century. Mining generated communities, agriculture, railroads and commerce and built an industry that provided a livelihood for thousands.
Now we know the earth exacts a huge price for the taking of its minerals. Thousands of acres of public lands across the West are affected by acid mine drainage from abandoned mines, an insidious mining residue that can appear years after a mine has been shuttered and can last for decades. In addition, tunnel openings, vertical shafts and mineral-laced pools pose safety hazards for humans and wildlife.
Today, thousands of abandoned hardrock mining sites are located in the western United States—19,000 inventoried sites on Bureau of Land Management land and about 40,000 on national forest land. Thousands more sites have not yet been inventoried. Because mining companies aren’t required to post bonds for cleanup, taxpayers are footing the bill for billions of dollars in reclamation costs that will, in some cases, be required for decades.
The Leviathan Mine is a complicated cleanup operation, but it illustrates what is required to remediate just one of those sites. The agency is studying approaches that can be sustained year-around, Mayer says, “but it’s going to be expensive to build and expensive to operate.” In a settlement reached this January, Atlantic Richfield Company, which bought the site from Anaconda Copper in 1978, agreed to pay $8 million in cleanup costs at the mine.
In this section, we look at several aspects of the hardrock headache plaguing public lands in the West. We discuss efforts being made by some in Congress to reform the 1872 Mining Law. We look at how stimulus funds will be used to clean up a small copper mine on the OregonCalifornia border and the predicament of a small community whose drinking water is threatened by a proposed mining operation. We talk about the potential of using former mine sites for alternative energy production. This issue also includes a review of Gordon Bakken’s The Mining Law of 1872: Past, Politics and Prospects.
Acid mine drainage is moving to the forefront of national concern as clean water becomes an increasingly precious resource. According to Maggie Baker, the U.S. Forest Service’s mine cleanup coordinator for Region 4, about 14 percent of total runoff in the United States comes from national forests, and that runoff is the largest single source of water for 3,400 communities in thirty-three states. After years of looking the other way, the government is taking steps to stem the flow of acid mine drainage into these water sources. This year, the National Park Service, the BLM and the Forest Service received $105 million in funding for mine cleanup and reclamation under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act.
Those who have worked for years to draw attention to the negative impacts of mining say the funds are a good beginning, but not nearly enough. “The problem will cost about $50 billion to fix,” says Lauren Pagel, policy director at Earthworks in Washington, D.C. “But $20 million here, $14 million there is not enough to deal with it.”
Funding is a critical factor when it comes to mine cleanup—Earthworks is pushing to have reclamation fees included in any mining reform bill that Congress passes. But perhaps the biggest step that needs to be taken is for land managers and Congress to challenge the Old West “anything goes” mentality that sees public lands as cheap and natural resources as unlimited. Global warming is already stressing arid landscapes, and it’s imperative to minimize environmental harm over which we have some control. If mining corporations are given a mandate to operate mines with minimal impact on the environment, or pay a steep price, they will find a solution. Our public lands deserve no less.