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Rogue Rafters Encounter Acid Waters
By Diane Dietz, The Register Guard. Published: Sunday, October 14, 2007 Register-Guard
Many of the 45,500 people who float the wild and scenic Rogue River in Southwest Oregon each year encounter an unpleasant problem just below the Almeda rifle.
There, rafters enter waters tainted by metals-laden acid drainage—a byproduct of gold mining dating back 96 years.
"You can actually see it flowing into the river," Grants Pass activist Barbara Ullian said. "It has a color and consistency that's different. It kind of makes your skin crawl."
The water that flows from the Almeda mine at the rate of 10 to 30 gallons a minute can be as acidic as Coca Cola, and, undiluted, is lethal to adult fish.
The water contains aluminum, cadmium, copper, iron, lead, manganese and zinc, all antithetical to aquatic life. The mine mouth from which the toxic waters flow is just 200 feet from the river.
The U.S. Bureau of Land Management now owns the land where Almeda prospectors went to work centuries ago.
"You wouldn't want to be splashing the water on your skin and you certainly couldn't drink it," said Jim Berge, the BLM's Almeda project manager.
Fish, too, should to keep their distance. "It's high iron, high zinc, high manganese that are toxic to the fish," Berge said.
The Almeda mine, about 25 miles northwest of Grants Pass, has been stubbornly resistant to cleanups.
In 2002, the BLM installed a water treatment system that metered lime pellets into the water emerging from the mine. The lime was supposed to raise the Ph level of the water and cause the metals to fall out of solution before reaching the river. But the system repeatedly caked and jammed and, after a trial, the agency removed it.
In recent years, the BLM dug a channel to corral the drainage water, and lined it with limestone, but that approach works for a only short time until the limestone scales over. "It's not nearly effective enough to get the Ph up," Berge said.
A permanent cure will be elaborate and require perpetual maintenance, Berge said. One method would involve building a shallow pool at the mouth of the mine, collecting the water in a pipe and pumping it 200 vertical feet up out of the river's flood plain. The water would then be poured into an underground concrete vault for treatment.
Such a system would cost at least $1 million to build and an unknown annual budget. "It would be expensive," Berge said. And there's little chance the federal government will fund it, he said.
Waiting isn't good enough for Larry Tuttle, Oregon's leading mine-pollution activist. He repeatedly has asked the state to enforce federal Clean Water Act requirements against the BLM for allowing the polluted water to drain into the Rogue. Or else, Tuttle wants the state to turn enforcement against the BLM over to the federal government.
The mine's old tunnels and shafts contain millions of gallons of metals-laden acid mine drainage, Tuttle said.
"You can have anything from an unusually wet year to a seismic shift and end up with a catastrophic discharge into the Rogue River," Tuttle said.
"You could have a catastrophic event that could really wipe a lot of Southern Oregon's recreational economy."
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