One image of the American West is colorful and iconic, and yet you never see it on scenic calendars or in impressive coffee-table books. Think of a rugged hillside near timberline, then insert the collapsed portal of a tunnel that once extended a couple of hundred feet into the mountain. In the foreground lies a jumble of sharp-edged rocks and rotting timbers. From that emerges a stream of murky orange water flowing down the slope, tainting everything it touches.
That liquid is known as “acid mine drainage.” It comes about because mining is a process of breaking rocks and hauling them out of the ground. In areas with mineral deposits, sulfide rocks are common. Some, like iron pyrite (iron disulfide), often sit near gold and silver ores; others, like galena (lead sulfide), can be ores themselves.
So in days of yore, a prospector looked for sulfide deposits, then started digging. That brought more sulfides into contact with air and water. Water and oxygen react with the sulfides to produce acidic water laden with metallic ions. It kills fish and riparian plants, and it is not all that good for wildlife and people, either.
There were thousands of mines and attempted mines in the Rocky Mountains, and most of them were abandoned long ago. The vein pinched out, cheaper sources emerged, or the government eliminated its price support for silver.
But the acidic water still emerges from many of those holes. The U.S. Bureau of Mines estimates that 12,000 miles of waterway in the West – about 40 percent of all waterways – are contaminated, along with 180,000 acres of lakes.
What to do about it?
It sounds fair to go after the owners of those mines – you know, the ones who made the big money back in the boom times. But many of those silver barons were like Leadville’s Horace Tabor; they wasted their fortunes, so there’s nothing to pursue now. Other pioneer mining companies did survive until modern times – like ASARCO, which filed for bankruptcy last year.
Many other polluting sites were inherited by people of modest means, and others were acquired by counties for back taxes when the miners gave up. In other words, most of the available pockets are pretty shallow.
And besides, it seems unfair to go after people now for something someone else did 125 years ago that was perfectly legal at the time. If you want to argue that “those who derive the benefits of this pollution should pay,” that’s pretty much society in general, since mining profits were invested in everything from telephone companies and department stores to the Guggenheim Foundation and the Myron Stratton Home.
But suppose some people want to clean these pollution sources. A town, for instance, might want to improve the quality of its water supply, or some anglers may support a better trout fishery.
They run into a problem with federal law. Once you touch one of these sites, you’re responsible for bringing it into total compliance with the Clean Water Act and the Superfund Act.
That means an immense potential financial liability for people who were merely trying to fix a problem.
To get around that problem, Congress has considered the Good Samaritan Clean Watershed Act, which would encourage the partial or complete “remediation” of abandoned mines by waiving some of the potential liability.
This sounds like a good idea, but some environmental groups have opposed it. Bill Jennings of the California Sportfishing Protection Alliance put it this way: “Someone could come in, well-meaning, and make things worse and have escaped liability.”
But the original polluter has long escaped liability, so why would this be a bigger problem?
And as for making things worse, it’s hard to imagine how. It’s not like they’re going to be dumping sulfuric acid into the water, along with cadmium and zinc ions. Sure, there might be an occasional accident, but is that a reason not to try cleaning the creeks when Mother Nature, with an occasional flood, can cause the same problems?
And even if they do make the water worse, there’s an upside. I live in a valley where the river used to run orange every now and then on account of old upstream mines. Those colorful surges greatly discouraged the immigration of upscale exurbanites who want acreage in some “pristine location.”
So there’s really nothing to lose with a Good Samaritan law for old mines, and Congress ought to pass it when it reconvenes after campaign season – which also has a toxic flow, but that’s another matter.
Ed Quillen of Salida (ed@cozine.com) is a former newspaper editor whose column appears Tuesday and Sunday.
