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Crusader Moves a Toxic Mountain
By Larry Bingham, The Oregonian. Published: Sunday, July 01, 2007 The Oregonian
There's an eco-lesson in the ongoing battle for cleanup of Oregon backcountry poisoned by an abandoned mine
Larry Tuttle drove all the way from Portland to a remote mountaintop in southern Oregon in 2000 just to see the mess, and it was worse than he'd expected. A toxic stream, flowing from a leak in the old Formosa Exploration Silver Butte Mine, spilled across a rutted dirt road toward Middle Creek, a stream once teeming with steelhead trout and coho salmon. Some of the PVC pipes and French drains meant to divert the poisoned water had clogged and overflowed. Stones in the water's path turned a rainbow of strange colors: pumpkin orange, squash yellow, eggplant purple.
Tuttle, who runs a two-man environmental nonprofit with his son, was outraged by what he saw—and what he knew. Eighteen miles of Middle Creek and its South Fork had been sterilized by mine pollution. The Japanese owners who operated the mine until 1993 had filed for bankruptcy. The state's Department of Environmental Quality had bungled the cleanup, in his opinion, making a bad situation worse. Taxpayers most likely will get stuck with the estimated $15 million to $50 million bill—if and when the former zinc-and-copper mine site is ever reclaimed.
Seven years later, Tuttle again drove to the site 25 miles south of Roseburg, past towering firs and up steep inclines, stopping in an area so isolated that a glance in any direction reveals only distant, blue-tipped mountains. The mine still pollutes. Enough acid mine drainage water pours from the leak on average in a single day to fill two tanker trucks.
It is the most polluted of 140 abandoned mines in the state, and perhaps the most polluted site in Oregon's backcountry. The worst environmental damage comes not from what Tuttle saw, but what percolates inside 17,000 feet of tunnels filled with metal-laden tailings, a continuously brewing caldron that seeps acidic groundwater.
Thanks, in part, to the Tuttles, the mine should be listed on the EPA's list of the nation's most polluted sites this autumn. The EPA already lists 1,300 sites, and while cleanup could be years away, this is the closest the old mine has come to a permanent fix.
The father and son have spent years pushing to bring the site, a site so far out in the boonies it's easy to forget, to the attention of the feds.
Can one environmental crusader make a difference?
In a word, yes.
The trouble on Silver Butte began long before Formosa started mining in the spring of 1990. Today, the regulatory arm of the primary permitting agency, the Department of Oregon Geology and Mineral Industries, is made up of 10 employees. Back then, there were four: a manager, a secretary and two field agents.
Formosa Exploration Inc., a company owned by Japanese business interests and incorporated in Canada, laid 68 mining claims on Douglas County land under an 1872 provision signed into law by President Ulysses S. Grant.
After Formosa applied to re-open the old Silver Butte mine, which closed in 1937, tests revealed acid water had been leaking for years. Despite decades of pollution, nearby Middle Creek, fished by the Cow Creek Band of the Umpqua Tribe, showed little damage. Oregon's mineral-industries agency saw the application as an opportunity to right an old wrong, says assistant director for regulation Gary Lynch.
The mine was to run for eight years. Reclamation would correct the pollution. Agencies, from the federal Bureau of Land Management to the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality, saw the proposed plans for operation and the environmental studies.
The review process was so thorough that the company complained. In 1990, Oregon issued permits. But the state did not closely monitor the operation.
"They got in over their heads," says Lynch. "Arguably, we got in over our heads, too."
"There is little doubt that routine inspections by knowledgeable staff would have been effective in detecting operational glitches," a DEQ report would say later. "Early detection of sources deviating from approved operating plans and permit limitations should be the goal of the regulatory agencies. It is not their role to be an ever-vigilant presence."
The DEQ did not do a compliance inspection at the site for three years. By then, the damage was done.
What makes an environmental activist successful?
For one thing, the person must possess an almost religious passion for the subject.
Larry Tuttle, 61, grew up in Medford. As the son of a Caterpillar dealership manager, he spent days in the woods, checking on loggers who used his father's products. In later years, as Oregon director of The Wilderness Society and executive director of the Oregon Natural Resources Council, he pursued timber issues and once butted heads with movie producers filming The River Wild on the Rogue, concerned they were causing environmental damage.
Why mining?
"I have something in my personality, something that I can't explain, that always wants to take on big issues," Tuttle says. "When I first became involved in 1989, we were talking about national and international companies. There's something in me that wants to take on the big boys."
The successful activist also must be pragmatic. An understanding of politics puts things in perspective.
Tuttle, who moved to Redmond, twice ran unsuccessfully for Congress in the late 1980s. He has worked as a bank manager and director of a savings and loan. He served one term as a Deschutes County commissioner, where he specialized in environmental issues related to water use and quality.
To endure tedious dealings with regulatory agencies, dealings that can stretch on for years, the successful environmentalist must be patient yet tenacious. A sense of humor helps.
One afternoon, Tuttle trots to the elevator of his office building on Southwest Alder in downtown Portland, a large man wearing a Hawaiian-style shirt and comfortable shoes. He races to the street, where he hopes to beat a meter cop with whom he has exchanged words. While riding the elevator, Tuttle makes jokes: He recently vowed to remove the word "got" from his vocabulary. Four years ago he pledged at New Year's Eve to start carrying business cards and to stop cursing in public.
Family support also helps the activist endure. The first time Tuttle saw the Formosa site pollution, his 41-year-old son, John, and his 10-year-old grandson, Max, were with him. They've backed him ever since.
Tuttle launched the group in 1994, determined to keep it so small he'd never have to spend time raising money or doing administrative work. His son came on board later. To pay the office bills, they rely on donations. "Loyal members" give an average of $25,000 to $40,000 a year, enough for a little compensation.
Larry Tuttle, who is married to Judy Tuttle, once chief of staff to Portland Mayor Vera Katz, works part time to help support his family. For one recent consulting job, he drafted a transportation plan for the elderly in Lake County. Son John Tuttle works a similar situation, serving part time as a legal assistant.
The Center for Environmental Equity was born the year after Formosa shut down, when the doomed cleanup effort began.
The center's big campaign then was to stop a proposed mine in eastern Oregon that would have used cyanide to leach the mineral from its rock. Larry Tuttle was sitting at a mineral-industries agency meeting, waiting for an update on the proposal, the first time he heard about Formosa.
Pollution in the wilderness. Government missteps. Potential corruption involving an international company.
Tuttle's ears perked up. It was his kind of case.
The permit application said 200 tons of ore would be mined a day. The ore would be crushed, the remaining tailings, as fine as powder, would be temporarily held in a water storage pond until they could be stuffed back inside the mine.
But that isn't how it went.
Miners dug more ore than planned, nearly double the amount cited in the permit. Because production rose, the stockpile of mineral-laden tailings swelled. The pond reached capacity. If the pond rose above its permitted level or seeped between two protective liners, Formosa agents were to immediately contact the Department of Environmental Quality.
Except they didn't.
A former employee called DEQ inspector Greg Farrell, according to records, and said the company was pumping excess water from the pond at night. The whistle-blower's call led Farrell to do a compliance inspection, the first since the permits were issued. The result: a scathing report citing 16 permit violations.
Given the work needed to amend the violations, and the declining price of ore, the mine closed. The company, which had posted a $500,000 bond—the maximum amount allowed at the time—posted another $500,000. After the cleanup began, the company declared bankruptcy.
In the meantime, 20 tons of tailings flushed down the mountainside and killed 18 miles of Middle Creek. It would take a hunter coming upon the creek and smelling sulfur to discover the problem.
In the following years, environmental regulations would tighten, the agency's policies would change and the bonding requirements would spike to make Oregon one of the costliest states in which to mine. The number of Oregon base-metal mines dwindled to none.
But on Silver Butte, where toxic water still flows down a mountainside today, those changes came too late.
Formosa filled the emptied mine tunnels with waste rock, tailings and lime to reduce the acidity. Portals were capped with concrete. But the plan didn't work. Instead, it created a system where groundwater passing through tailings becomes acidic.
The first system to divert the toxic water away from the creek failed. The DEQ later hired a consulting firm, Hart Crowser, to study the situation. The Tuttles cried foul when a DEQ employee, the former Formosa site manager, quit and went to work for the consulting firm.
The DEQ and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management poured $1.5 million into the cleanup and investigation, using some money from the state's "Orphan Site Account."
A second system to divert the water, in a series of pipes that would end in treatment ponds, failed when adjacent land owners said no. The ponds were never constructed.
To the Tuttles, it became clear that state agencies couldn't solve the problem. State workers, meanwhile, realized they didn't have the necessary money, said project manager Greg Aitken, and were looking for alternatives.
Larry Tuttle saw only one.
After years of filing complaints, raising questions and dogging state agencies, he wanted the mine added to the nation's Superfund list.
The EPA, he thought, was the mountain's only chance.
What's the most frustrating thing an environmental activist encounters?
"Getting them to say they're not going to take the next step is as important as getting them to say they are," Tuttle says. "It's when you can't get them to do anything, that's really hard. When they stretch it out or sit on it—that's when it's hard."
His biggest frustration came after the mine closed, when cleanup efforts failed. His biggest joy arrived in the form of documents that revealed the agencies coming to grips with the fewer and fewer options.
Ken Marcy, task monitor of the EPA's regional office in Seattle, said many of the Superfund sites come to his agency from petitions filed by nonprofits. Only a few come from individuals.
"In a number of these situations, you need people on the ground who have a lot of passion and a lot of energy and won't take no for an answer," he said. "They understand the state and the federal government. Although we have good intent, we are bureaucracies and we behave that way. We need people to zap us every now and then to get us going."
Tuttle saw his job as to get the state to let go of its responsibility for cleaning up the mine. If the state didn't have the money, it could pass the job to the feds.
Tuttle filed a petition, on behalf of the Center for Environmental Equity, for the EPA to consider the site. The EPA said it couldn't—until the state let go. Tuttle, who never takes no for answer, looked through law books and came across a provision that said a single citizen could petition the EPA.
In 2005, just as he was about to send the petition, he learned that the federal Bureau of Land Management and the Oregon Department of Environmental Quality had decided to release Formosa.
Tuttle tucked the information into his missive. The front page of the petition, which would nudge the EPA to investigate and later to recommend adoption, carried the words that are so humbling in a democracy:
Petitioner
Laurence A. Tuttle, an Individual
The wind howls across the southern Oregon mountains. The old Formosa mine buildings are gone, and the two-acre tailings pond has been filled in. The only signs of life are the charred remains of a campfire, scattered beer bottles, and a rusted Volkswagen someone pushed over the side of the mountain.
What happens here next will depend on the EPA.
For the Tuttles, as well as some DEQ officials, it is a bittersweet victory.
It could be years before Formosa is cleaned up. Formosa's pollution does not directly affect people, as far as anyone knows. The water in the nearest town, Riddle, is clean. The most immediate danger could come from eating fish caught in Middle Creek.
Meanwhile, the DEQ could go to the site and remove the pipes that cost an estimated $25,000 a year to maintain, because they're little more than window dressing, said Aitken at the DEQ.
Whether the agency removes the pipes or not, toxic water still streams down the hillside, enough to fill two tanker trucks every day.
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