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Mine Fix to Wait
Published: Sunday, October 14, 2007 Register-Guard
The only way to get the $5 million—or more—needed to clean up mercury pollution at Lane County's Black Butte mine and to make fish downstream in Cottage Grove Lake safe for children to eat is to put the site on the Superfund list of the nation's worst environmental disasters, federal officials said.
After a two-week remedial effort this summer at the long-shuttered mine 14 miles south of Cottage Grove, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency officials have assigned a four-member assessment team in Seattle to rate Black Butte using the National Hazards Ranking System.
If the mine scores high enough, it eventually could qualify for the millions of dollars needed for cleanup, officials said.
This summer, the EPA spent a couple of weeks and a half-million dollars working to cover the worst of the mercury contamination at the mine site. They buried 10,730 cubic yards of mine tailings, waste rock and contaminated dirt.
But agency officials found that they only scratched the surface of the job needed to prevent mercury from washing downriver and spoiling the fish in Cottage Grove Lake.
"This is going to be a longer cleanup than we had thought," the EPA's on-scene coordinator, Kathy Parker, said recently. And more costly, too, Parker said, by at least a factor of 10.
Parker was frustrated by an unexpectedly deep pile of toxic tailings with a stream washing right through the middle of the mess.
Cleanup on the privately owned mine site was necessary because fish downriver exhibit unhealthy concentrations of mercury in their tissue, according to the state Department of Environmental Quality.
So much mercury has accumulated in the fish that small children and women of childbearing age shouldn't eat them at all, state health officials say.
Fish—whether stocked or native—that have remained in the lake over the years are suspect. The state Department of Fish and Wildlife requires anglers on Cottage Grove Lake to throw back any widemouthed bass over 15 inches.
The EPA this summer tried to stop erosion of mercury into the water by burying contaminated mining wastes and spreading clean soil on top. Crews also contoured the steep bank of Dennis Creek, which runs alongside the site, so mercury would no longer slough into the water.
But the cleanup stalled when it got to Furnace Creek, which runs through the old mine tailings pile.
Parker had hoped she could scoop the tailings out of the creek. But when crews tried test holes to see how much of the streambed they would have to excavate, they realized the job was beyond them.
As they dug, mercury levels in the material increased. They found mercury at 800 parts per million and then 2,500 parts per million. They dug down four feet in some places and nine feet in others and never found the native soil under the tailings, Parker said.
The 1,100-foot-long creek is probably the major source of mercury contamination emanating from the mine site, Parker said.
The solution is lining the streambed with impervious fabric to keep the water from contacting the mercury-laden tailings underneath. The job is likely to cost more than $5 million, Parker said.
Parker has referred the Black Butte case to the EPA's site assessment team, to see if it qualifies for a Superfund listing with the aim of getting money to deal with the creek. That's going to take a while, said Sylvia Kawabata, assessment team manager. "It's not going to happen next year, I can tell you that. It's a long-term project," she said.
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