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From: "Mineral Policy Center"
mpc@mineralpolicy.org

Mining Exposed as Top Toxic Polluter in U.S.
Yet New Senate Legislation Would Block
Stronger Environmental Mining Rules

Contact:
Alan Septoff, Mineral Policy Center, 202.887.1872, ext. 205
Steve D'Esposito, Mineral Policy Center, 202.422.8991 (cell)

Washington, D.C., - According to the EPA press office, at 2 pm today the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) will release its Toxics Release Inventory (TRI) report. The report will reveal that the hardrock mining industry releases more toxics than any other industry in the U.S. The report details the specific pollutants released which include mercury, arsenic, lead and cyanide.

This marks the first year TRI data will be available for the hardrock mining industry. (Hardrock minerals are nonfuel minerals such as gold, silver and copper.) For years, the hardrock mining industry successfully fought efforts to require its submission of toxic release data along with other industries. But in 1997, the EPA, under pressure from Mineral Policy Center and other environmental organizations, required the mining industry to report. This year's TRI will cover 1998 releases.

The new report reveals:

• In 1998 Nevada mines released approximately 1.3 billion pounds of toxic pollutants. One Nevada mine reported releasing over 80,000 pounds of mercury, with over 9000 pounds of mercury released directly into the air.
• The Cyprus Miami copper mine in Arizona released twice as much toxic waste (123 million pounds) as all of the waste released in New York State (60 million pounds).
• Nevada topped the polluter list, eclipsing Texas, due to toxic releases from the mining industry.
• Mining eclipsed the chemical manufacturing industry as the nation's top polluter.
• In 1997 the chemical manufacturing industry reported 797.5 million pounds of toxic releases nationwide. In 1998, in just one state, Nevada, mining reported approximately 1.3 billion pounds of toxic waste.

Yet even as this new information is released by the EPA, mining industry advocates in the Senate attached an anti-environmental rider to this year's Department of Agriculture spending bill. The rider would block new environmental mining rules. If unimpeded by this rider, these rules would reduce toxic mining pollution, and ensure that mining operators, not the taxpayer, pay the billions of dollars required to clean up toxic mine sites.

The Toxics Release Inventory was created in 1986 by the Emergency Planning and Community Right to Know Act (EPCRA) to provide citizens with vital information about toxic pollution in their communities.

"For over a decade the industry has hid behind a reporting exemption, now we know what we've long suspected, the mining industry is the nation's biggest toxic polluter," said Stephen D'Esposito, President of Mineral Policy Center. "With this information, pressure will build for the industry to clean up its act. This is a wakeup call for an industry that for too long has escaped public scrutiny."

"The facts speak for themselves. The industry is releasing massive amounts of mercury into Nevada's air, it releases cyanide into our nations rivers and streams. And yet rather than respond to these facts, some in the Senate continue to listen to mining industry lobbyists," added Alan Septoff, MPC's reform campaign director. "Industry lobbyists are pushing for an exemption from current limits on toxic mine waste dumping on our public lands. This data shows that Congress should enforce existing waste dumping limits, not grant a toxic waste exemption."

Contact MPC for a full analysis of TRI data. Also MPC can arrange interviews with issue experts and community leaders who live near many of the worst polluting mines. Additionally, photographs of mine waste are available.

Mineral Policy Center (MPC) works to protect communities and the environment from the impacts of irresponsible mining in the U.S. and worldwide.

Mineral Policy Center
Protecting Communities and the Environment
1612 K Street NW, Suite 808, Washington, D.C. 20006
202.887.1872  202.887.1875 (fax)
mpc@mineralpolicy.org  www.mineralpolicy.org

By Paul Koberstein
©2000 Cascadia Times http://www.times.org/archives/2000/cyanide.htm

STANLEY, Idaho - Federal officials say they will issue an emergency order forcing a gold mining company to remove a lake of cyanide that is contaminating salmon habitat in Idaho, Cascadia Times has learned. The lake is perched on a bench almost directly above the Yankee Fork of Idaho's famous Salmon River, at the edge of the Frank Church-River of No Return Wilderness.

The Salmon River and its tributaries are key to the Northwest's billion-dollar salmon restoration effort. Once home to some of the most abundant salmon runs of any tributary in the Columbia Basin, its fish have been decimated since the construction of federal dams on the Columbia and Snake. Proposals to remove four dams on the Lower Snake would restore more fish by far to the Salmon than any other river. But federal officials worry that the cyanide spilling into the Salmon's headwaters is making survival all the more difficult for endangered salmon, steelhead and bull trout.

The government intends to move quickly on removing the 65-acre lake, which contains 500 million gallons of cyanide- laced wastewater, plus 4.3 million tons of tailings - all from the defunct Grouse Creek open-pit gold mine. Cyanide has been detected in ground or surface water near the mine almost continuously since it opened in 1994. But the government's biggest fear now is that eventually the lake could overflow in a major storm, sending torrents of poison down a mountainside into the Yankee Fork, potentially killing all living things for many miles. The dam holding back the lake could also become unstable because of earthquakes, bad weather or leaks.

"We have a problem on our hands," said Helen Hillman of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration in Seattle, in response to a Cascadia Times inquiry. NOAA is involved because it manages Idaho's salmon under the Endangered Species Act.

"If we don't do something about it, it could get worse," Hillman said. "The amazing thing was this mine was permitted in the first place. Eventually it would overflow, and you would have highly toxic water flowing right into the Yankee Fork. It would kill everything in the Yankee Fork for miles."

One federal official likened the situation to a Romanian gold mine spill that devastated 300 miles of the Danube and its tributaries. The top of a dam broke and released an estimated 100,000 cubic meters of cyanide-laced wastewater within 11 hours. Now, in Idaho, with every heavy spring rain, agencies and conservationists watching the cyanide lake at Grouse Creek worry that a similar disaster could happen in Idaho.

"We are facing a tradeoff between the low level of damage from cyanide release, and the potential for a catastrophic spill," said Nick Iadanza, a National Marine Fisheries Service biologist who has reviewed cleanup plans. "In Romania we had the same kind of situation. A tailings impoundment didn't fail - it overflowed. There was a massive fish kill. If this mine at Grouse Creek would fail, that would be pretty catastrophic. I honestly don't know what the potential would be to fail. It is leaking, and it seems unlikely they are going to be able to control that leak."

However, the government's plan for removing the lake is risky, too. They plan to drain all of the contaminated water from the lake, treat it, and then dump it directly into the Yankee Fork. Given the high levels of contamination, the EPA believes that removing all the pollution from the water may not be possible at any price within Hecla's ability to pay. However, federal officials say the river will dilute the pollution enough to make it safe for fish - a point that some conservationists dispute. They are concerned that toxic levels of pollution will be discharged directly in the path of migrating salmon for however long it takes to empty the lake, most likely for three or more years.

The mine's owner, Hecla Mining Co., of Coeur D'Alene, Idaho, has refused to sign a consent agreement providing for a cleanup. Negotiations with the Forest Service, which owns the property where the mine is located, broke down in late April. The Forest Service is now preparing to issue a "unilateral order" forcing Hecla immediately to take action.

But while officials hurry to head off a catastrophic spill, they must also deal with chronic cyanide poisoning of salmon habitat that appears to be getting worse as water levels in the lake rise. The EPA says the lake recently was found to be leaking at a new point. And as the waters rise, the downward pressure forcing contaminated water out from the bottom of the lake also increases. Water levels in the lake have risen about 10 feet in the last three years, with about 20 feet to go before water reaches the top of the dam.

"If you had a huge storm event, that could speed up the need for action," said Nick Ceto, the Environmental Protection Agency's regional mining coordinator in the Northwest. "That's why I want to get the pond emptied quickly. If it raised the elevation 5 to 10 feet, that could increase the contamination."

One positive note is that the dam holding back the lake appears to be stable for now, Ceto said. But the dam was built on top of an old landslide, and another federal official reviewing the problem said the lake is not in a secure place and was never designed to hold as much water as it does now.

"The more water you get in the pond, the more downward pressure you get, the faster you get water moving down into the creeks," NOAA's Hillman said. "We already have a chronic problem right now. There is a potential if we don't do anything about it, this could fail."

The poisons would enter the Yankee Fork just upstream from a million-dollar salmon recovery project operated by the Shoshone- Bannock Tribe, which is working to restore salmon runs to the area, where the tribe has reserved fishing rights.

"The water is acutely toxic for fish," Hillman said. "Our choice wasn't real palatable. If there was some other way around this problem I'd like to see the solution. We'd be happy to avoid having to discharge any of this water into the Yankee Fork."

Federal officials also must deal with Hecla and its troubles. Until last summer, Hecla denied that the lake was leaking, insisting instead that residue from an old spill was the source of contamination. Hecla is opposed to federal proposals calling on it to remove and treat the wastewater to a high standard, insisting instead on a much less rigorous cleanup.

Federal officials worry that if they push Hecla too hard, the company may go out of business. It may anyway: Hecla has lost money in each of the last nine years, including a $38.6 million loss in 1999, and says it may never again become profitable. Hecla carries a $7 million bond, an amount that probably won't come close to covering cleanup costs at Grouse Creek.

Hecla also has environmental cleanup liabilities at seven other sites in Idaho, including Superfund sites at Bunker Hill and the South Fork Coeur D'Alene River. If Hecla walks away from these obligations, the responsibility to pay for them would shift to taxpayers, officials say. That, of course, would be nothing new for the mining industry. The worst cyanide spill in the U.S., at the Summitville Mine in Colorado, left 17 miles of the Alamosa River ecologically dead. Rather than stick around and clean it up, the mine's owner, Summitville Consolidated Mining Company, declared bankruptcy in 1992 and walked away. (Hecla did not return phone calls to Cascadia Times.)

We have to just work with them and the current bond they have in place and hope they are willing and able to perform," said Maggie Manderbach, regional mining coordinator for the Forest Service. "What choice do we have?

Complicating the sensitive negotiations between the federal government and Hecla is the position taken by the state of Idaho. Federal officials say Idaho has joined Hecla in advocating for a less stringent cleanup. The state is willing to let Hecla contaminate three-fourths of the Yankee Fork's width, three times greater than what the EPA would allow. All along the state has been one of the mine's biggest boosters, and recently reduced a fine, levied against Hecla last year for illegal cyanide discharges, from $230,000 to $51,500.

by Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
January 15, 2001; Page A01

ZORTMAN, Mont. -- There was gold in them thar hills, but it's gone now. So are a lot of the hills. And so is the bankrupt company that tore them down and drenched them in cyanide. All that's left today is a scarred landscape and an equally ugly cleanup bill.

The Zortman-Landusky mine ushered in the modern era of mineral exploration when it opened here in the Little Rocky Mountains in 1979, using a newfangled cyanide-based process to extract about a pickup truck full of gold from about 200 million tons of rock. The hardrock mining industry has expanded tenfold since then, leaching billions of dollars worth of precious metals out of previously useless low-grade ore, transforming wide swaths of the western landscape in the process. According to federal statistics, it has also become America's most prolific polluter, responsible for nearly half the nation's toxic emissions.

Now, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt is using his final days in office to strike back, taking some aggressive parting shots at an industry he battled throughout his eight-year tenure. He is pushing through sweeping new metal-mining regulations designed to prevent future Zortman-Landuskys, rules that will take effect on the last day of the Clinton administration. And this week he plans to reject an application for a gold mine on sacred Indian land in California, something no federal official has done.

The mining industry is suing to stop the new rules. But it is also counting on President-elect Bush's administration to be far less antagonistic to land uses such as logging, drilling and mining. In the last election, mining interests donated a record $5 million to mostly Republican candidates; Bush was by far the top recipient. His pick for Babbitt's job, former Colorado attorney general Gale A. Norton, has been an outspoken supporter of the western "property rights" movement that has crusaded against many environmental regulations. In recent weeks, the Clinton administration has made a series of moves to expand the president's environmental legacy: announcing strict rules to reduce truck emissions, declaring a third of America's national forests off-limits to road-building, protecting several huge chunks of the West as "national monuments," plus the latest assault on mining. Bush has vowed to review all these moves to make sure "the Western mentality" is represented in his administration. "It's part of that big swath of red on the map," he told The New York Times, referring to his electoral victories out West.

For Babbitt, though, the last-minute mining rules have personal as well as environmental significance. He isn't supposed to say so, but he can't stand the mining industry.

"That industry thinks it has an absolute right to grind up mountains and poison streams and wreck the landscape," he fumes. "Then these companies just disappear and leave the public holding the bag for the cleanup. Are you getting the sense that I have strong opinions about this?"

Industry officials have strong opinions, too. They warn that overregulation could destroy domestic mineral exploration, increasing America's reliance on imports of key metals and devastating a slice of the western economy. They note that Babbitt's own Bureau of Land Management (BLM) admitted the new rules could gut as many as 6,000 jobs. They also accuse Babbitt of defying Congress and western governors, and ignoring a National Academy of Sciences study that found no need for reforms of mining regulations.

The officials say they can live with Babbitt's efforts to require hardrock mining companies to post more substantial bonds before starting work on public land. But they are furious about a new rule creating a virtual "mine veto," allowing the BLM to reject any plan it believes could create "substantial and irreparable harm."

"This could really threaten the survival of our industry," said Karen Batra, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association. "We're going to fight this all the way."

The Zortman-Landusky gold mine here in north-central Montana has become a symbol of western mining, in part because it pioneered the use of cyanide -- a chemical best known as a murder weapon in Agatha Christie mysteries -- in large-scale "heap-leach" mining operations. That basically means ripping up mountainsides into giant heaps, then pouring cyanide solutions over them to leach out the gold. Some of the 19th-century pick-and-shovelers who helped settle the West knew that cyanide could lure gold out of rock, but Pegasus Gold Inc. was the first company to use the old-time technology to remove gold from mountains.

Zortman-Landusky is also a symbol of failure. Pegasus removed less than 50 tons of gold from the mine -- about one ounce for every 100 tons of ore it moved -- then declared bankruptcy in 1998, citing bad investments and plunging gold prices. The firm also paid a huge settlement for 22 Clean Water Act violations, including a cyanide leak that tainted the local water supply and unforeseen acid-drainage problems that have contaminated a host of nearby streams. The water here will have to be treated in perpetuity, and although Pegasus did contribute more than $60 million to the cleanup through its settlement and its bond, taxpayers could get stuck for more than $100 million in additional costs. Pegasus also handed out $5 million to its executives before going under, giving new meaning to the phrase "golden parachute."

Montana's top environmental official recently called the situation a "financial nightmare." But to the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes on the adjacent Fort Belknap Reservation, it is even worse than that. The land for the Zortman-Landusky mine was lopped off from the reservation in a dubious 19th-century treaty after government agents threatened to withhold food rations. It was sacred land, known as Spirit Mountain; they visited it for sun dances and vision quests, to fast and pray for gifts from the Great Spirit. Now the mountain that stood here for 65 million years has been reduced to rubble. Those rocks, when exposed to air, turn olive green and leak acid into the water.

"That land is us. It is who we are," said Ben Speakthunder, the tribal vice chairman. "We believe we are all just caretakers for the earth, so it's a sickening feeling to look at what's happened there."

Montana's origins are rooted in mining; its state flag still bears the motto "oro y plata," for gold and silver. And in a state that ranks last in the nation in average income, the $50,000-a-year salaries that mines can produce still hold some sway. Nevertheless, the impact of the Zortman-Landusky debacle helped persuade the state's usually conservative voters to ban future cyanide heap-leach mines in 1998, although a Montana company is suing to overturn the law. And Republican Gov. Marc Racicot -- normally a strong supporter of mining interests, and one of Bush's strongest allies in the West -- filed a bill before leaving office this month that would tighten the state's bonding requirements to make sure polluters pay.

"Under ideal conditions, the statutes ensure reclamation at no cost to the state," a recent report by the Montana state legislature concluded. "Seldom, though, are conditions ideal."

In many ways, the situation at Zortman-Landusky is closer to ideal than at other abandoned mines. Pegasus received its initial mine permit with a puny bond, but regulators did increase the amount several times as they discovered environmental problems at the site. There are still disputes over the cleanup, particularly over how much of Spirit Mountain taxpayers can afford to rebuild, but the reclamation has begun, with bulldozers refilling some open pits and workers regrading and reseeding hillsides. And while no one is happy that the water may need to be treated forever, there are two treatment plants to do it. "I'm not saying it's been a perfect process, but the fact is, the system is working," said Scott Haight, the BLM official who oversaw the mine and is overseeing the cleanup.

Some experts believe hardrock mines have contaminated as many as 12,000 miles of streams and 180,000 acres of lakes, so Zortman-Landusky is not the only controversial one. In Montana, a copper mine in Butte is the nation's largest Superfund site, a vermiculite mine in Libby has been blamed for nearly 200 asbestosis deaths, and a gold mine in Lewistown is leaking cyanide. These kinds of problems are being felt throughout the West.

o In Colorado, a massive cyanide spill at the Summitville gold mine destroyed 17 miles of the Alamosa River. The company went bankrupt, and taxpayers are on the hook for more than $100 million in cleanup costs through the Superfund program. As attorney general, Norton filed a lawsuit against company officials, and although environmental groups have complained about her emphasis on voluntary compliance by polluters, they have expressed hope that her Summitville experience may affect her approach to mining issues. o In Nevada, there are 36 mining sites in bankruptcy, many secured by bonds that are nowhere near the amount needed for cleanups.

The state has set up a Mine Bankruptcy Working Group, and it has prohibited mining companies from backing their bonds with their own corporate assets. But one report found that the total taxpayer liability in the state could reach $840 million, and the contaminated Yerington copper mine may be added to the Superfund list.

o In Idaho, a 500 million-gallon pond laced with cyanide from the defunct Grouse Creek mine is leaking into the ecologically precious Salmon River. Federal officials were initially concerned that a dam containing the pond could fail, creating a repeat of a Romanian disaster that devastated 300 miles of the Danube. Mines have left behind several gigantic Superfund sites in the state, but Sen. Michael D. Crapo (R-Idaho) cut a deal last year with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to delay Superfund reforms until they could figure out a way to exempt financially shaky mining companies from onerous liabilities.

o In Washington state, after Babbitt used an obscure legal loophole to reject a proposal to mine Buckhorn Mountain, another site considered sacred by local tribes, Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) overturned the decision by inserting a rider into a bill funding the military effort in Kosovo. But state officials have rejected the mine as well, and the publicity about Gorton's machinations may have contributed to his narrow defeat in November.

o In California, the Glamis-Imperial Corp. is seeking an application to mine 180 million tons of ore in the desert northwest of Yuma, Ariz. But the site contains 55 historic sites sacred to the Quechan tribe, and Babbitt plans to reject the application at a ceremony Wednesday.

"This industry has been untouchable for years," said Aimee Boulanger, a western activist with the Mineral Policy Center. "It's about time somebody said: Enough is enough."

That somebody has been Babbitt. At the start of the administration, he sought to reform the 1872 law that exempts hardrock mining companies from paying royalties on public land. He almost helped engineer a legislative compromise, but the industry backed out in 1994, and the Republican leaders who won control of Congress that year had no interest in resurrecting the issue. Meanwhile, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) has blocked proposals to restrict "mountaintop-removal" coal mining in the East, which is governed by somewhat different rules.

But now Babbitt says his new rules will achieve everything he had hoped from legislation in the West -- except requiring hardrock mining firms to pay royalties, as coal mining and oil drilling firms already must. "It's been a torturous process, but miracle of miracles, we're crossing the finish line," he says. "You know, I've had the melancholy privilege of visiting Zortman- Landusky. We need to stop that kind of thing before it happens."

The problem, according to the industry's defenders, is that a hazy standard like "substantial and irreparable harm" can be used to reject even the most responsible mine plan. This is especially true when Native American claims are involved, because it is obviously difficult to undesecrate a holy site. But to Jimmy Main, a 70-year-old Indian activist at Fort Belknap, that's exactly why Zortman-Landuskys should be stopped before they start. "Spirit Mountain is ruined forever," he says. "They can plant trees and cover up some of their poison, but they can't reclaim what's lost. Ain't no amount of money can buy feeling."

© 2001 The Washington Post Company

By Michael Grunwald
Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, January 15, 2001 ; Page A01

ZORTMAN, Mont. -- There was gold in them thar hills, but it's gone now. So are a lot of the hills. And so is the bankrupt company that tore them down and drenched them in cyanide. All that's left today is a scarred landscape and an equally ugly cleanup bill.

The Zortman-Landusky mine ushered in the modern era of mineral exploration when it opened here in the Little Rocky Mountains in 1979, using a newfangled cyanide-based process to extract about a pickup truck full of gold from about 200 million tons of rock. The hardrock mining industry has expanded tenfold since then, leaching billions of dollars worth of precious metals out of previously useless low-grade ore, transforming wide swaths of the western landscape in the process. According to federal statistics, it has also become America's most prolific polluter, responsible for nearly half the nation's toxic emissions.

Now, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt is using his final days in office to strike back, taking some aggressive parting shots at an industry he battled throughout his eight-year tenure. He is pushing through sweeping new rules that will take effect on the last day of the Clinton administration. And this week he plans to reject an application for a gold mine on sacred Indian land in California, something no federal official has done.

The mining industry is suing to stop the new rules. But it is also counting on President-elect Bush's administration to be far less antagonistic to land uses such as logging, drilling and mining. In the last election, mining interests donated a record $5 million to mostly Republican candidates; Bush was by far the top recipient. His pick for Babbitt's job, former Colorado attorney general Gale A. Norton, has been an outspoken supporter of the western "property rights" movement that has crusaded against many environmental regulations.

In recent weeks, the Clinton administration has made a series of moves to expand the president's environmental legacy: announcing strict rules to reduce truck emissions, declaring a third of America's national forests off-limits to road-building, protecting several huge chunks of the West as "national monuments," plus the latest assault on mining. Bush has vowed to review all these moves to make sure "the Western mentality" is represented in his administration. "It's part of that big swath of red on the map," he told The New York Times, referring to his electoral victories out West.

For Babbitt, though, the last-minute mining rules have personal as well as environmental significance. He isn't supposed to say so, but he can't stand the mining industry.

"That industry thinks it has an absolute right to grind up mountains and poison streams and wreck the landscape," he fumes. "Then these companies just disappear and leave the public holding the bag for the cleanup. Are you getting the sense that I have strong opinions about this?"

Industry officials have strong opinions, too. They warn that overregulation could destroy domestic mineral exploration, increasing America's reliance on imports of key metals and devastating a slice of the western economy. They note that Babbitt's own Bureau of Land Management (BLM) admitted the new rules could gut as many as 6,000 jobs. They a National Academy of Sciences study that found no need for reforms of mining regulations.

The officials say they can live with Babbitt's efforts to require hardrock mining companies to post more substantial bonds before starting work on public land. But they are furious about a new rule creating a virtual "mine veto," allowing the BLM to reject any plan it believes could create "substantial and irreparable harm."

"This could really threaten the survival of our industry," said Karen Batra, a spokeswoman for the National Mining Association. "We're going to fight this all the way."

The Zortman-Landusky gold mine here in north-central Montana has become a symbol of western mining, in part because it pioneered the use of cyanide -- a chemical best known as a murder weapon in Agatha Christie mysteries -- in large-scale "heap-leach" mining operations. That basically means ripping up mountainsides into giant heaps, then pouring cyanide solutions over them to leach out the gold. Some of the 19th-century pick-and-shovelers who helped settle the West knew that cyanide could lure gold out of rock, but Pegasus Gold Inc. was the first company to use the old-time technology to remove gold from mountains.

Zortman-Landusky is also a symbol of failure. Pegasus removed less than 50 tons of gold from the mine -- about one ounce for every 100 tons of ore it moved -- then declared bankruptcy in 1998, citing bad investments and plunging gold prices. The firm also paid a huge settlement for 22 Clean Water Act violations, including a cyanide leak that tainted the local water supply and unforeseen acid-drainage problems that have contaminated a host of nearby streams. The water here will have to be treated in perpetuity, and although Pegasus did contribute more than $60 million to the cleanup through its settlement and its bond, taxpayers could get stuck for more than $100 million in additional costs. Pegasus also handed out $5 million to its executives before going under, giving new meaning to the phrase "golden parachute."

Montana's top environmental official recently called the situation a "financial nightmare." But to the Assiniboine and Gros Ventre tribes on the adjacent Fort Belknap Reservation, it is even worse than that. The land for the Zortman-Landusky mine was lopped off from the reservation in a dubious 19th-century treaty after government agents threatened to withhold food rations. It was sacred land, known as Spirit Mountain; they visited it for sun dances and vision quests, to fast and pray for gifts from the Great Spirit. Now the mountain that stood here for 65 million years has been reduced to rubble. Those rocks, when exposed to air, turn olive green and leak acid into the water.

"That land is us. It is who we are," said Ben Speakthunder, the tribal vice chairman. "We believe we are all just caretakers for the earth, so it's a sickening feeling to look at what's happened there."

Montana's origins are rooted in mining; its state flag still bears the motto "oro y plata," for gold and silver. And in a state that ranks last in the nation in average income, the $50,000-a-year salaries that mines can produce still hold some sway. Nevertheless, the impact of the Zortman-Landusky debacle helped persuade the state's usually conservative voters to ban future cyanide heap-leach mines in 1998, although a Montana company is suing to overturn the law. And Republican Gov. Marc Racicot -- normally a strong supporter of mining interests, and one of Bush's strongest allies in the West -- filed a bill before leaving office this month that would tighten the state's bonding requirements to make sure polluters pay.

"Under ideal conditions, the statutes ensure reclamation at no cost to the state," a recent report by the Montana state legislature concluded. "Seldom, though, are conditions ideal."

In many ways, the situation at Zortman-Landusky is closer to ideal than at other abandoned mines. Pegasus received its initial mine permit with a puny bond, but regulators did increase the amount several times as they discovered environmental problems at the site. There are still disputes over the cleanup, particularly over how much of Spirit Mountain taxpayers can afford to rebuild, but the reclamation has begun, with bulldozers refilling some open pits and workers regrading and reseeding hillsides. And while no one is happy that the water may need to be treated forever, there are two treatment plants to do it.

"I'm not saying it's been a perfect process, but the fact is, the system is working," said Scott Haight, the BLM official who oversaw the mine and is overseeing the cleanup.

Some experts believe hardrock mines have contaminated as many as 12,000 miles of streams and 180,000 acres of lakes, so Zortman-Landusky is not the only controversial one. In Montana, a copper mine in Butte is the nation's largest Superfund site, a vermiculite mine in Libby has been blamed for nearly 200 asbestosis deaths, and a gold mine in Lewistown is leaking cyanide. These kinds of problems are being felt throughout the West.

• In Colorado, a massive cyanide spill at the Summitville gold mine destroyed 17 miles of the Alamosa River. The company went bankrupt, and taxpayers are on the hook for more than $100 million in cleanup costs through the Superfund program. As attorney general, Norton filed a lawsuit against company officials, and although environmental groups have complained about her emphasis on voluntary compliance by polluters, they have expressed hope that her Summitville experience may affect her approach to mining issues.

In Nevada, there are 36 mining sites in bankruptcy, many secured by bonds that are nowhere near the amount needed for cleanups. The state has set up a Mine Bankruptcy Working Group, and it has prohibited mining companies from backing their bonds with their own corporate assets. But one report found that the total taxpayer liability in the state could reach $840 million, and the contaminated Yerington copper mine may be added to the Superfund list.

In Idaho, a 500 million-gallon pond laced with cyanide from the defunct Grouse Creek mine is leaking into the ecologically precious Salmon River. Federal officials were initially concerned that a dam containing the pond could fail, creating a repeat of a Romanian disaster that devastated 300 miles of the Danube. Mines have left behind several gigantic Superfund sites in the state, but Sen. Michael D. Crapo (R-Idaho) cut a deal last year with Senate Majority Leader Trent Lott (R-Miss.) to delay Superfund reforms until they could figure out a way to exempt financially shaky mining companies from onerous liabilities.

In Washington state, after Babbitt used an obscure legal loophole to reject a proposal to mine Buckhorn Mountain, another site considered sacred by local tribes, Sen. Slade Gorton (R-Wash.) overturned the decision by inserting a rider into a bill funding the military effort in Kosovo. But state officials have rejected the mine as well, and the publicity about Gorton's machinations may have contributed to his narrow defeat in November.

In California, the Glamis-Imperial Corp. is seeking an application to mine 180 million tons of ore in the desert northwest of Yuma, Ariz. But the site contains 55 historic sites sacred to the Quechan tribe, and Babbitt plans to reject the application at a ceremony Wednesday.

That somebody has been Babbitt. At the start of the administration, he sought to reform the 1872 law that exempts hardrock mining companies from paying royalties on public land. He almost helped engineer a legislative compromise, but the industry backed out in 1994, and the Republican leaders who won control of Congress that year had no interest in resurrecting the issue. Meanwhile, Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-W.Va.) has blocked proposals to restrict "mountaintop-removal" coal mining in the East, which is governed by somewhat different rules.

But now Babbitt says his new rules will achieve everything he had hoped from legislation in the West -- except requiring hardrock mining firms to pay royalties, as coal mining and oil drilling firms already must. "It's been a torturous process, but miracle of miracles, we're crossing the finish line," he says. "You know, I've had the melancholy privilege of visiting Zortman-Landusky. We need to stop that kind of thing before it happens."

The problem, according to the industry's defenders, is that a hazy standard like "substantial and irreparable harm" can be used to reject even the most responsible mine plan. This is especially true when Native American claims are involved, because it is obviously difficult to undesecrate a holy site. But to Jimmy Main, a 70-year-old Indian activist at Fort Belknap, that's e xactly why Zortman-Landuskys should be stopped before they start.

"Spirit Mountain is ruined forever," he says. "They can plant trees and cover up some of their poison, but they can't reclaim what's lost. Ain't no amount of money can buy feeling."

© 2001 The Washington Post

By Timothy Egan
New York Times,
Sunday January 7, 2001
http://www.nytimes.com/2001/01/07/politics/07NORT.html?printpage=yes

Eight years ago, Ignacio Rodriguez took his grandson out for an afternoon of fishing near his house on the Alamosa River in the foothills of the San Juan Mountains in southwest Colorado. The river that runs through the valley was his longtime neighbor, but on this day, he said, it was a stranger.

"The rocks were red and the river had some greenish tinge to it," Mr. Rodriguez said in a telephone interview last week. "The fish were all belly up. Rainbow trout and German browns - all dead. It was sickening."

Mr. Rodriguez was one of many witnesses to what state officials have called the worst environmental disaster in Colorado, a spill of cyanide and acidic water from a gold-mining operation that killed virtually every living thing in a 17-mile stretch of the Alamosa River, though causing no human injuries.

The company responsible for the leakage, the Summitville Consolidated Mining Corporation, declared bankruptcy, and its major officers fled the country, leaving taxpayers with a cleanup bill that is approaching $150 million.

It may take decades before clean water runs year-round through the Alamosa. But the account of what happened in the little valley in a remote corner of Colorado nearly a decade ago is emerging, both sides say, as a central exhibit in the testing of the political philosophy of Gale A. Norton, President-elect George W. Bush's choice for secretary of the interior.

Ms. Norton, 46, was the attorney general in Colorado when the Alamosa was sterilized with waste from the Summitville mine, and it was under her that many of the legal proceedings against the mine were initiated. Even Ms. Norton's political opponents in Colorado say that her office did a commendable job in trying to get compensation for the damage, though they criticize her for not pressing criminal charges.

But it is not Ms. Norton's conduct as the state's chief legal officer that is being debated in connection with the Summitville mine. Rather, it is her philosophy. Ms. Norton, like Mr. Bush, has long advocated allowing the mining, timber and oil industries more leeway to police themselves. Their argument is that if businesses are given incentives, like immunity from fines and prosecution, for reporting and cleaning up their own pollution, most will do the right thing - a so-called self-audit.

Ms. Norton has also been a consistent advocate of states' rights and minimal federal interference. But in the Summitville case, it was the federal government that stepped in, acting on an emergency basis after the poisoning of the river to avert an even larger disaster, and later winning felony criminal convictions against many of the corporate owners of the mine. The state welcomed the federal intervention.

"The whole problem with Summitville goes back to the essential trust that the state put in that mining company," said Larry MacDonnell, former director of the Natural Resources Law Center at the University of Colorado. "Summitville is a poster child for the inadequacy of that kind of philosophy."

Regulation was so lax, and state laws so weak - both were strengthened after the mine disaster - that Summitville is seen by members of both parties in Colorado as a lesson for the vigilance that government needs to keep over potential polluters.

Ms. Norton, like other cabinet choices, could not comment on past official actions pending her confirmation hearing.

But five years ago, when she was asked about how her philosophy of giving polluters incentives to come forth squared with the Summitville case, she said, "This was an unusual case, a situation where the individual in question knew about continued environmental problems and continued with operations in spite of that."

In her writings and speeches, Ms. Norton has preached a new kind of environmentalism, less dependent on federal policing, for example, "We need to give good businesses the incentive and the tools to be good environmental citizens."

The death of the Alamosa River affected Ms. Norton deeply, said people who worked with her when she was attorney general from 1990 to 1998.

"Summitville to her was a disaster of huge magnitude," said Tim Tymkovich, who served as solicitor general for Ms. Norton. "Gale's philosophy would be not to let polluters off the hook," he said, but to give industries a chance to comply with regulations before acting to enforce them.

Supporters of Ms. Norton expect her to bring big changes to managing the more than 500 million acres of public land, from national parks to wildlife refuges, and to regulating the thousands of mines operating on federal property. As a protégée of James G. Watt, who angered environmental groups as Ronald Reagan's interior secretary, and as a onetime delegate to the Libertarian Party presidential convention, Ms. Norton has advocated free-market approaches to solving environmental problems.

But even Ms. Norton's staunchest allies say the Summitville disaster points to the limitations of the free- market, hands-off approach.

"Self-auditing without the potential to bring down the hammer will not work," said Terry L. Anderson, who is a member of the Bush transition team on the interior, and is director of the Political Economy Research Center, a free-market environmental research group in Bozeman, Mont. Mr. Anderson suggested Ms. Norton to Mr. Bush for the interior post.

"What Gale Norton will bring is reform, but not revolution," Mr. Anderson said. "To think that she will come in and let the polluters off the hook if they only agree to 'fess up is dead wrong."

But people who live in the valley that lost all aquatic life to a mine that was, according to court documents, poorly regulated, say they fear that Ms. Norton will bring a philosophy to the office that only invites more Summitvilles.

"You should not let the coyotes guard the sheep pens," Mr. Rodriguez said.

Dr. Colin Henderson, a physician who lives near the Alamosa River, said: "The philosophy at the time this river was killed was to let industry police itself. You had a river where people used to catch fish, that people used to camp next to, where people used to rely on it for good irrigation water for their crops. And now it's been killed."

As interior secretary, Ms. Norton would have broad discretion over thousands of mines on public land. Under a 1872 mining law, companies or individuals are able to buy the public land on which they make their mining claim for only $2.50 an acre, a condition that the departing interior secretary, Bruce Babbitt, has ridiculed as a giveaway of epic proportions. Mr. Babbitt has enlarged the regulatory power of the interior secretary, using his office to deny permits to mines that are considered a threat to environmental or cultural treasures owned by all Americans.

"Babbitt could not get the Congress to reform the mining laws, but he has essentially reformed them himself through administrative actions," said David Getches, an environmental law professor at the University of Colorado. "Gale Norton will inherit that legacy of discretion. And she can use it either way."

Most months, the Alamosa River is a slight stream that falls steeply from headwaters at 12,000 feet in the high cradle of the San Juan Mountains. It drains into a valley of hay farmers, ranchers, urban exiles and others who live in one of the driest of the high valleys of Colorado, before it slows to a trickle and breaks into small creeks. The valley is sparsely populated, and so far the biggest complaint of farmers has been that the acidic water has corroded their irrigation equipment. Many residents have stopped using the water on their vegetable gardens.

People have been mining gold in the mountains above the valley for more than century, but it was not until the late 1980's that a new method was used. At Summitville, the method involved crushing millions of tons of rocks and heaping them into giant piles, then soaking them with a cyanide solution that leached the gold from the rocks. The mine was operated for about five years, until 1992, by Summitville, whose major shareholders were in Canada. At the time, the mine was leaching gold with cyanide, Colorado was in a deep recession and its Legislature cut back on enforcement and regulation of mining operations.

The mine was supposed to be supervised by the state, but from the very beginning, according to court documents, the plastic linings of containment ponds that held the stew of toxic waste were not properly installed - and the state never caught the problem. The linings were breached, sending poisons into the river. At the same time the mine became a money pit of financial losses.

In late 1992, just as the toxic waste water was filled to the brim and threatening a heavy spill into the valley, Summitville declared bankruptcy and shut down operations, and its officers fled. It was left to the Environmental Protection Agency, using company workers familiar with the operation, to keep the toxins at bay. It is a continuing operation that federal officials say could go on for two more decades.

"The river was killed for 17 miles, but it would have been a heck of a lot worse if the feds had not stepped in," said Roger Flynn, who served on the governor's Summitville task force and is the director of Western Mining Action Project, an environmental group in Denver. "At the time, our regulatory agencies had been gutted," Mr. Flynn said. "So we gave this mine the benefit of the doubt - laissez-faire, hands-off, the company says everything is fine - and look what happened." Several corporate leaders of the mine were indicted by a federal grand jury and pleaded guilty to numerous felonies, including failure to disclose discharge of toxic waste. The state civil suits against the mine operators were begun in 1996, with Ms. Norton's office joining the federal government in seeking repayment for the millions of dollars spent by the public to control the waste and clean up the mine. But the state was criticized for its role. "Kudos to federal prosecutors for pressing criminal charges in the Summitville Mine disaster," The Denver Post said in an editorial in 1995. "Nonetheless, it's a shame that Colorado must rely on the feds to pursue the case." Ms. Norton's wanted to pursue state criminal charges, Mr. Tymkovich said, but was unable to do so because of technical problems with other state agencies, and because the statute of limitations had expired by the time state criminal investigators were on the case.

Just two weeks ago, the new attorney general of Colorado, a Democrat, Ken Salazar, announced that his office had reached a settlement with one of the principal shareholders in the mine, Robert Friedland, a Canadian businessman based in Singapore, who agreed to pay more than $27 million over the next 10 years to help pay for the cleanup. The state is still trying to get money from five corporations that were involved in the mine, dating to the middle of the last century.

Ms. Norton vigorously pursued the owners of the mine, the state lawyers involved in the case said. "The legal work that Gale did laid the groundwork for the settlement that Ken Salazar was able to obtain," said Mr. Tymkovich, the solicitor general under Ms. Norton.

In years where there is little snow runoff from the mountains, the Alamosa River bears a faint resemblance to its old self, a river that held numerous trout, say residents of the valley in the shadow of the San Juan Mountains. But in years of heavy rain or snow, the toxins still tumble down into the drainage and the river, reigniting the anger of people who live there.

"I grew up in this valley," said Cindy Medina, a resident. "I used to camp near that mine and went tubing in the river with other kids. Now we have to live with one of the largest mining disasters in the United States. To say the least, we don't believe in self-auditing."