State takes over Superfund site
One of the West’s worst environmental disasters is nearly cleaned up, and Colorado will pay $2M a year to keep Summitville Mine that way
SUMMITVILLE» After 27 years of EPA control, Colorado is preparing to take over the full financial burden — a forever bill for $2 million a year — of a high-mountain cyanide gold mine that became one of the West’s worst environmental disasters.
The reshaping of ravaged alpine tundra at the Summitville Mine through a $250 million federal Superfund cleanup stands out because scores of other toxic mines in Colorado still are contaminating headwaters of Western rivers each day.
But this fix requires constant work. Colorado must pay the $2 million, a cost that the EPA has been handling, starting in 2021 for cleaning a fluctuating flow of up to 2,100 gallons a minute of toxic water that drains down a oncepristine mountainside.
The Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment will use the money to run a silver-domed $18 million industrial water treatment plant built at 11,500 feet elevation in a wild and spectacular valley, surrounded by snow-splotched jagged peaks.
The plant houses huge stainless-steel
vats of burbling brown sludge. Toxic metals are chemically coaxed and filtered out. Plant operators haul 4.1 million pounds a year of concentrated waste back up South Mountain (elevation 12,550 feet) in trucks for burial. This muck contains more than 690,000 pounds of cadmium, lead, copper, aluminum, iron, manganese and zinc. It is toxic metal that otherwise would flow down and degrade the Wightman Fork of the Alamosa River.
Colorado also must oversee the artificial covering and drainage ditches across 1,100 acres of tundra scarred by openpit mining. Mountainsides ripped and slashed to remove gold and silver have been recontoured by contractors using bulldozers, and replanted with native vegetation — the engineering equivalent of plastic surgery to make the place look as good as possible.
How good is it? Satisfaction depends on expectations, said Mark Rudolph, CDPHE’s project manager.
“Everybody has different expectations. You cannot make everybody happy all the time. We’re trying to, primarily, protect human health and the environment,” Rudolph said during a recent visit. “We’re trying to turn a liability into an asset.”
A local watershed group more or less approves, confident fish can survive and even reproduce along headwaters previously impaired by mine waste.
“It is a new mountain, a new reality. And today we’d never be able to get the Superfund money that we did,” said San Luis Valley resident Cindy Medina, who launched the Alamosa Riverkeepers after her phone rang in 1992 with a neighbor saying fish were floating belly up.
“Is it perfect? No. It will never be the mountain area that I remember as a little girl. That is gone,” Medina said.
Gold and silver motivated the mining, which began in the 1870s.
Summitville Consolidated Mining Inc., a subsidiary of Canadabased Galactic Resources, consolidated claims in the 1980s over 1,400 acres and intensified extraction using thennew techniques. Colorado government officials in October 1984 issued Galactic a permit allowing a fullscale open pit and heap leach operation, federal records show, a mining process that uses cyanide to remove silver and gold from surrounding rock.
The rocks blasted out of pits on South Mountain moved on a conveyor belt to crushers, then to an industrial pad. Mine workers sprayed cyanide to chemically attach to and capture the gold and silver. The workers took out the gold and silver. The idea was to reuse cyanide and discharge treated wastewater into headwaters.
Galactic president and chief executive Robert Friedland in 1988 became a resident of Canada, where he had begun business activities in Canadian mining finance circles in 1980. Friedland in 1990 resigned his positions with Galactic. Problems had arisen at the mine. Colorado officials asked the EPA for emergency help. As the EPA took over the site in 1992, a legal battle began between Friedland, the EPA and the state over responsibility for an emerging disaster. The company declared bankruptcy in 1992.
Years later, a legal settlement was reached. Friedland in 2001 paid $20 million for restoration work in the Alamosa River watershed, according to his lawyer. The U.S. government paid Friedland $1.25 million to cover legal expenses following a Canadian court’s censure of U.S. authorities for misconduct when targeting Friedland.
For Colorado officials tasked with protecting the state’s environment, this debacle forced a rethinking of how to handle industrial projects that could cause harm.
Today, Colorado Department of Natural Resources officials point to Summitville as the spur for regulatory toughening.
“We needed stronger regulations and more oversight at mines with toxic or acidforming materials such as cyanide,” said Ginny Brannon, director of the DNR’s division of mining reclamation and safety.
State officials say they apply tougher standards now in issuing permits, collecting bond money to ensure adequate funding for cleanups and scrutinizing engineering design and environmental protection plans for leach facilities, disposal of waste rock and use of hazardous chemicals.
Instead of inspecting “designated mining operations” once every four years, state regulators after Summitville inspected them annually, and sometimes inspectors check facilities every month, Brannon said.
The handoff of responsibility for Summitville from the EPA to CDPHE in 2021 will mark a turning point in dealing with a severely damaged landscape using the nation’s Superfund system for handling disasters.
This project was set in motion before Congress in 1995 killed automatic funding for Superfund cleanups.
Complete restoration to a preexistent state is considered impossible and the government aimed at bestpossible repairs.
“That was what the EPA and the state worked to do: bring it back to a sustainable protected state. Once there is mining in an area, it has longterm impact,” said Fran Costanzi, an EPA official who managed the Summitville cleanup for four years. “We worked to bring water quality back and also the vegetation into a longterm stable state.”
An EPA spokesman issued a statement placing Summitville “among the more illustrious, or perhaps infamous, examples of the environmental damage a large mining operation can cause when resources for safely managing contamination sources disappear. The EPA’s initial response was an emergency situation in which the site was literally abandoned by the operator — in wintertime conditions — with a cyanide heap leach pad eroding into a headwaters stream.
“After years of work and investment, we’ve essentially reclaimed a watershed in one of the most beautiful parts of the state. Protecting those gains will continue to require our attention.”
The cleanup improved water quality to where fish can live in Terrace Reservoir, about five miles below the mine, and in the Alamosa River.
CDPHE officials now are required to monitor conditions.
The financial burden falls to Colorado because the Superfund process shifts responsibility to states after initial federal remediation. Colorado lawmakers have arranged to pay about $2 million a year by tapping revenue derived from fees paid at municipal and other landfills around the state.
Inside the water treatment plant, operators at computer screens run a multistage system using vats, filters and presses to remove heavy metals. Superconcentrated sludge then is buried in a pit on the mountain that was converted into a claylined landfill with a drain that routes water back to ponds by the treatment plant. Rain water and melting snow is caught in drainage ditches that carry it to the ponds, where monitoring shows relatively high acidity — before the wastewatercleaning begins.
Around the western United States, cleanup of toxic mines long has loomed as a difficult environmental challenge. Congressional researchers have estimated there are more than 20,000 leaking old mines contaminating headwaters of rivers. The total costs of cleanup are estimated at more than $73 billion.
In Colorado, state water quality officials say they know of nearly 230 inactive mines draining into waterways. They say they plan to add newly identified mines into an inventory they’ve been developing since the Gold King Mine disaster in 2015. They’ve classified more than 1,800 miles of streams in Colorado as “impaired” due to heavy metals from acid mine drainage.
Western governors increasingly raise concerns about this problem — thousands of gallons a day contaminating waterways — because clean water is coveted amid rapid population growth. This month, the governors called on Congress to protect “Good Samaritans” who voluntarily clean up inactive mines by reducing their potential liability under the Clean Water Act and other laws. They urged members of Congress, if they cannot pass legislation, to at least support cleanup pilot projects.
At Summitville, Rio Grande County eventually will own the 1,100acre site. State and county officials have been setting up placards conveying the history of mining in the area with an emphasis on environmental damage and evolving efforts to repair harm.
“It’s pretty upsetting that it had to come to this,” Riverkeepers director Medina said downriver at her home. “Clean air and water is worth more than gold.”