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By Root 2038 0

Anaconda’s liabilities. At least, ARCO and BP are not declaring bankruptcy. As one environmentalist friend told me, “They are trying to get away with paying as little as possible, but there are worse companies to deal with than ARCO.” The acidic water seeping into the Berkeley Pit will be pumped out and treated forever. ARCO has already paid several hundred million dollars to the state of Montana for restoration of the Clark Fork, and its total eventual liability is estimated at one billion dollars, but that estimate is uncertain because the cleanup treatment consumes much power: who knows what power will cost 40 years from now?

The second case involves Milltown Dam, built in 1907 across the Clark Fork River downstream of Butte to generate power for a nearby sawmill. Since then, 6,600,000 cubic yards of sediments contaminated with arsenic, cadmium, copper, lead, and zinc have been washed down from Butte’s mines and accumulated in the reservoir behind the dam. A resulting “minor” problem is that the dam prevents fish from migrating along the Clark Fork and Blackfoot Rivers (the latter is the trout stream made famous by Norman Maclean’s novella and Robert Redford’s film A River Runs Through It). The major problem, discovered in 1981 when local people noticed a bad taste in drinking water from their wells, is that a huge plume of groundwater with dangerous arsenic levels 42 times higher than federal water standards is spreading from the reservoir. The dam is decrepit, in need of repair, poorly anchored, located in an earthquake zone, was nearly broken by an ice jam in 1996, and is expected to break sooner or later. No one would think of constructing such a flimsy dam today. If the dam did break and release its toxic sediments, the water supply of Missoula, southwestern Montana’s largest city located just seven miles downstream of the dam, would become undrinkable, and the lower Clark Fork River would be ruined for fishing.

ARCO acquired the liability for the toxic sediments behind the dam when it bought Anaconda Copper Mining Company, whose activities created the sediments. The near-disaster in the ice jam of 1996, and fish deaths downstream resulting from releases of water with toxic copper levels from the dam then and again in 1998, triggered recognition that something had to be done about the dam. Federal and state scientists recommended removing it and its accumulated toxic sediments, at a cost to ARCO of about $100,000,000. For a long time, ARCO denied that the toxic sediments caused the fish deaths, denied its liability for the arsenic in Milltown groundwater or for cancer in the Milltown area, funded a “grass-roots” movement in the nearby town of Bonner to oppose removing the dam, and proposed instead just strengthening it, at the much lower cost of $20,000,000. But Missoula politicians, businesspeople, and the public, who initially considered the proposal to remove the dam crazy, switched to being strongly in favor of it. In 2003 the federal Environmental Protection Agency adopted the proposal, making it almost certain that the dam will be removed.

The remaining case is that of the Zortman-Landusky Mine owned by Pegasus Gold, a small company founded by people from other mining companies. That mine employed a method known as cyanide heap-leaching, developed for extracting very low-grade gold ores requiring 50 tons of ores to yield one ounce of gold. The ore is excavated from an open pit, piled in a big heap (approximating a small mountain) inside a lined leach pad, and sprayed with a solution of cyanide, best known as the poison used to generate the hydrogen cyanide gas used both in Nazi gas chambers and in American prison gas chambers, but with the virtue of binding to gold. Hence as the cyanide-containing solution seeps through the ore heap, it picks up the gold and is drained off to a nearby pond, whence it is pumped to a processing plant for extracting the gold. The leftover cyanide solution containing toxic metals is disposed of by spraying it on nearby forests or rangeland, or else is enriched with more cyanide