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Mine Cleanup Exposes Toxic Ooze
By Diane Dietz, The Register Guard. Published: Sunday, October 14, 2007 Register-Guard
The first problem an environmental engineer faced this summer at the old Champion gold mine was 2,000 cubic yards of the strangest sludge he'd ever seen.
"I can't explain it," engineer and mine expert Dennis Boles said, while surveying the toxic orange stuff on a mountainside 35 miles southeast of Cottage Grove. "I don't know the rhyme nor reason."
The sludge—the consistency of Jello and pudding together—came out of waters gushing over the decades from the Champion mine, Boles said.
The sludge was 60 percent to 70 percent water, and it would shimmy when heavy equipment rumbled past. When cleanup crews tried to scoop it up with an excavator, it glubbed back out of the bucket.
The muck was just one problem in the $1.7 million taxpayer-funded cleanup at the Champion mine.
The U.S. Forest Service governs the surface land around the main Champion mine entrance. Some of its internal workings are privately owned, and about a dozen people hold mineral rights to parts of the mountain.
The mine was leaching arsenic, lead, cadmium, copper and zinc—most of which are toxic to fish—into Champion Creek, which begins at the mouth of the mine. Champion Creek is a headwater of the Willamette River Coast Fork, which pours into Dorena Lake and on into the Willamette main stem.
This summer, contractors funneled the creek into a black pipe and routed it through the woods, out of the way of the cleanup.
That gave a bulldozer and an excavator room to scrape up and bury up to 8,000 cubic yards of metals-contaminated rock and tailings in repositories above the creek flood plain. Workers turned 4.5 acres of hillside in front of the mine into a muddy, raw mess.
The arrival of squalls in early October led crews to halt their work until next summer. They may need part of 2009 to finish the work, Boles said.
The cleanup is garnering unexpected fans—including impatient environmentalists and skeptical miners.
Larry Tuttle, Oregon's No. 1 mining pollution critic, said the Forest Service went from planning to cleanup at Champion in five years.
"It's pretty fast progress," the Portland activist said. "The Cottage Grove Ranger District has done a terrific job of pushing this ahead—and the Umpqua National Forest, generally."
Even some members of the Cottage Grove-based Bohemia Mine Owners Association—who staunchly opposed the cleanup to begin with—have made their peace with Boles and his crew.
Miner Richard Secord Jr., who works shafts in Champion Mountain, initially called the cleanup an example of government waste. But over the summer, he came to accept the project. He's even allowing cleanup contractors to camp on the flat area near his claim.
"The way to sum it up is, when you don't understand something, you generally oppose it, until you do know what's happening," he said.
Cleanup plans call for a pool at the mouth of the mine and two stepped wetlands down the mountainside. The wetlands would filter metals out of the flowing creek water.
Once a decade, the Forest Service will have to hire a contractor to clean accumulated metal sludge out of the top pool and truck it to the state's hazardous waste disposal dump at Arlington.
Meanwhile, Boles came up with a solution for the gelatinous material: Mix it and stow it above the flood plain.
He explained the idea to an incredulous work crew. "Mix it?" he remembers them asking. "What have you got in mind?"
One scoop of sludge to nine buckets of regular crushed rock mine waste—scooped, dropped and stirred with the excavator bucket, Boles figured. "Like making cake batter."
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