The EPA Take a Look Back at the Last 5 Years of Butte-Area Clean-Up

Officials from the Environmental Protection Agency and its consultants from CDM, are in the midst of a mandated Five-Year Review of Superfund sites stretching from the city of Butte down Silver Bow Creek as far as the Warm Springs Ponds. The review is a regular checkup on a Superfund site to ensure that clean-up decisions continue to protect people and the environment. Given the number of environmental issues at play in the Butte area, from capped mine dumps on the Butte Hill to signs of recontamination in Silver Bow Creek to the still-untouched West Side Soils area, the review committee will be busy. The review is expected to be completed by September 2010.

In addition to talking with on-site workers and local officials, the review committee is also interviewing Butte citizens to get their take on how environmental clean-up efforts in the area have succeeded or fallen short. The Citizens Technical Environmental Committee (CTEC), Butte's EPA-funded and citizen-led community Technical Assistance Group, recently held two public meetings on February 24 and March 3 to provide the public with information about the Five-Year Review process, the status of Butte-area Superfund sites, and to collect comments from the public.

At the Feb. 24 meeting at the Butte Public Library, Dr. John Ray, a Montana Tech Liberal Studies Professor, discussed what is known as the Butte Priority Soils Superfund site, which includes the urban areas of Uptown Butte. Contamination a the site includes historic mine waste, mine tailings, and residential soils and dust related to the area's mining history. Contaminants of concern include heavy metals such as lead and mercury and other toxins such as arsenic.

Ray was highly critical of EPA-led clean-up efforts in this area. Ray stated that the EPA decision to leave the "waste in place" by capping rather than removing mine waste has resulted in capped dumps that require ongoing maintenance to prevent the failure of the caps and the exposure of waste. Because of the urban nature of the area, exposed mine waste could potentially impact human health. According to Ray, the majority of mine dump caps have failed. Capping generally involves covering exposed mine waste with 18 inches of topsoil that is then seeded and monitored for erosion issues. Butte-Silver Bow county annually evaluates and repairs these caps, with the expenses paid by ARCO, the EPA mandated responsible party for the site.

Ray also criticized the EPA decision to fence-off or otherwise restrict access to many environmentally damaged sites in the Uptown, preventing local residents from accessing such areas and being exposed to wastes. Ray particularly emphasized environmental justice as an important component of any Butte clean-up, noting that the majority of those living in the Superfund area fall below the poverty line or have below-average income. Ray noted that the EPA has a mandate to consider environmental justice. EPA personnel on hand at the meeting did not agree with Ray's assessment of environmental clean-up on the Butte Hill.

(Photo above shows a capped Butte mine dump in the foreground as evaluators assess the site, and in the background uncapped mine dumps can be seen behind the fence of the Mountain Con mine yard.)

At the same meeting, Ian MacGruder, a consultant from Kirk Environmental working with CTEC, delivered a presentation about the clean-up of Silver Bow Creek, the Warm Springs Ponds, and the Westside Soils, an area to the north and west of Uptown Butte that is listed as a Superfund site due to the presence of numerous mine dumps. No action has been taken at the Westside Soils site to date. EPA considered it a low-priority because no people live in the area, though it is popular for recreation.

MacGruder discussed the success of the Silver Bow Creek restoration, which was led by the State Department of Environmental Quality in conjunction with EPA. That project has been largely successful in removing historic mine wastes from the creek bed and floodplain. The ecosystem seems to be on the road to recovery, and brook, rainbow and native west slope cutthroat trout have been reported during Fish, Wildlife and Parks annual electrofish monitoring of the once-decimated creek. Restoration of the creek is still ongoing in the Anaconda and Durant Canyon areas. (Photo above shows historic tailings deposits on Silver Bow Creek. This site, near Miles Crossing and Durant Canyon, has since been restored; the tailings pictured here now reside in the Opportunity Ponds, aka BP-ARCO Waste Repository.)

Removed Silver Bow Creek wastes are transferred by rail to the Opportunity Ponds, also known as the BP-Arco Waste Repository. The Repository, a former tailings pond for the Anaconda Reduction Works and Washoe Smelter, already holds millions of tons of historic wastes, and wastes removed from Silver Bow Creek and the Milltown site near Missoula have been transferred there, increasing the total volume of waste at the site by a few percent. (Photo above shows an aerial view of the Opportunity Ponds site, which is roughly 5 square miles. In some places, mine wastes are 40+ feet deep. The yellow color comes from the tailings themselves; they are toxic to vegetation, so few plants grow, although revegetation efforts are ongoing at the site.)

Recent data has shown that some contaminants from the Butte Hill in the form of sediments are reaching the restored Silver Bow Creek. It is likely that additional action on the Butte Hill and continued monitoring and management of contaminated Butte groundwater will alleviate this recontamination in the future. For the time being, contaminants mainly flush down the restored reach of the creek to the Warm Springs Ponds.

The Warm Springs Ponds, another former Anaconda Company waste management site, were created to capture contaminants from Silver Bow Creek, preventing them from reaching the Clark Fork River. The site has been extremely successful in that regard, and has also become an excellent habitat for waterfowl and abnormally large trout. Future plans for the management of the Warm Springs Ponds, however, are somewhat murky. There is also a lingering arsenic issue at the ponds; lime is added to Silver Bow Creek water to cause metals present in the water to settle out in the ponds by reducing the acidity of the water. This reduction in acidity has the unfortunate side effect of mobilizing arsenic, and data indicates that arsenic levels flowing out of the ponds into the Clark Fork River are higher than expected. As long as no one drinks from the Clark Fork, this should have little effect on human health, although the arsenic issue will have to be addressed in the future.

EPA Remedial Project Manager Roger Hoogerheide responded to the presentations by noting that, while in the past the Five-Year Review process has been something of a rubber-stamp formality, the current EPA administration has instructed agency personnel to treat the Five-Year Review seriously and thoroughly as a means to improve ongoing clean-up efforts.

When asked about the relative scarcity of discussions of the Five-Year Review in local media, Hoogerheide agreed that there was more the EPA could do to inform and involve the community. The ongoing citizen interviews are a large part of the EPA's increased public relations efforts on this Five-Year Review.

The Mar. 3 meeting at the Butte Chamber Visitors Center featured the same presentations, although for this meeting the Silver Bow Creek/Warm Springs Ponds presentation was delivered by Montana Tech Society and Technology Professor Pat Munday. The community discussion was somewhat more lively at this meeting. Most citizens present expressing frustration with the pace of Butte-area clean-up and the difficulty in finding answers to Superfund-related questions and in participating in area Superfund-related programs like the Multi-Pathway Residential Metals Abatement Program Plan. That program is designed to mitigate potentially harmful exposure of residents to sources of lead, arsenic, and mercury contamination. EPA personnel at the meeting again expressed a renewed commitment to public outreach to ensure that local residents are connected to and informed about ongoing clean-up efforts.

Local citizens are encouraged to comment on the clean-up of the Butte environment. Written comments can be mailed to:
Roger Hoogerheide
Remedial Project Manager EPA Montana Office
10 W. 15th St.
Helena, MT 59626

For more information on the Five-Year Review, call Wendy Thomi, EPA Community Involvement Coordinator, toll free at 1-866-457-2690

(Photo above shows historic mining and smelting in the city of Butte, which accounts for the contamination we see and manage today.)

Science Cafe: The Science of the Berkeley Pit

To someone driving through Butte, Montana for the first time, one image dominates the landscape: the expanse of the Berkeley Pit to the north. The Pit extends 1700 feet from the top of the rim near the old Bell-Diamond Mine to the bottom of the over 40 billion gallons of acidic water that make up the slowly rising Pit Lake.

The sheer magnitude of the site, a functioning mine from 1955 until 1982, is enough to draw attention. But the environmental science underlying the Berkeley is the real cause for interest.

From the early days of underground mining in Butte, the hill has been dewatered by underground pumps. Those pumps ran continuously from the late 1800s until 1982. When economic conditions forced the Berkeley Pit to close, ARCO, the parent company of the Berkeley, decided to shut off those underground pumps.

The result is the Berkeley Pit Lake we see today. Without the pumps to keep the thousands of miles of tunnels beneath the Butte Hill dry, surface runoff and seeping groundwater began to accumulate, eventually reaching the bottom of the Pit. Throughout the 80s and 90s, the water level in the Pit continued to rise, and today the Pit Lake is over 1000 feet deep.

The water in the Pit is highly acidic, with a pH of about 2.5. A process called Acid Rock or Acid Mine Drainage is the culprit. Not all of the rock extracted from the Butte Hill and the Berkeley is valuable. A high percentage is waste rock, and a considerable amount of waste rock still sits behind the Berkeley to the north and east.

Rock from the Butte ore body is high in sulfur, mainly in the form of iron pyrite or fool’s gold. When exposed to air and water, the iron pyrite is oxidized. Mixed with surface and ground water, the sulfur increases the acidity of the water. This increased acidity, in turn, causes the other metals present in the rock, such as copper, lead, cadmium, and zinc, to dissolve into the water.

In the case of the eastern slope of the Butte Hill, all of this Acid Rock Drainage water flows, either over the surface or through a natural cone of depression in the ground water table, into the Berkeley Pit Lake. In this way, the Berkeley is not all bad: the collection of acid water there prevents it from spreading elsewhere where it could potentially impact the Butte valley or, just downstream, the Clark Fork River.

While the Berkeley water is certainly toxic, it is not as deadly as some suppose. The acidity of the Pit, with a pH of 2.5, is about the same as the acidity of your favorite soft drink. In other words, the Pit water is not going to instantly dissolve anything that touches it. There have been incidents of bird deaths in the Pit resulting from birds drinking and swimming in the Pit water continuously for more than a day. Today, hazing activities prevent birds from spending too much time in the Berkeley.

The main human health risk from the Berkeley involves the possibility that the water level may some day rise high enough to infiltrate into surrounding ground water aquifers. Such an occurrence could potentially contaminate drinking water wells, or contaminate ground and surface water downstream.

The critical water level at which Berkeley water could spread out from the Pit is 5410 feet above sea level. The surface of the Pit Lake currently sits at 5282 feet above sea level. As the water level rises only a few feet each year, that leaves a lot of time before the critical level is approached. Current projections estimate that the Pit Lake will near the critical level some time after 2023.

A strategy is already in place to manage the Pit water when that time comes. In 2003, construction was completed on the Horseshoe Bend Water Treatment Plant on the northeast rim of the Pit (as pictured below). Already tested and used in Montana Resources nearby mining operations, the Treatment Plant will pump and treat the Berkeley Pit water before it reaches the critical level.

The water is treated by adding materials, primarily lime rock, that reduce the acidity. As the acidity decreases, the metals and other toxins dissolved in the water settle out in a solid “sludge.” This leftover sludge will be dumped into the Pit, in effect, backfilling it very slowly. Treated, clean Pit water will be used in Montana Resources mining operations or discharged into nearby Silver Bow Creek (pictured below just downstream and to the west of Butte and the Berkeley).

While the visual and scientific spectacle of the Pit is essential to our current understanding of it, the most important legacy of the Berkeley cannot be seen at the Pit itself. Over 300 million tons of ore came out of the Berkeley, and the copper from that ore gave electricity and light and development to the U.S. and beyond. The next time you flip on an electric light in the middle of the night, take a second to remember the Berkeley Pit, and the true cost of the development we enjoy and often take for granted today.

Want to learn more about the Berkeley Pit, past, present, and future, as well as other environmental reclamation projects around the Butte area? Join Justin Ringsak for a Clark Fork Watershed Education Program Science Café discussion on the Berkeley Pit on Friday, Oct. 30 from 5:00 to 6:00 P.M. at the Venus Rising Espresso House, corner of Park and Main in uptown Butte.

Westslope trout found in Restored Silver Bow Creek

In the restoration of Silver Bow Creek,
the word “progress” can be essentially defined with the recent capture of two native Westslope cutthroat trout in its flows this October. While barely enough to fill one fisherman’s stomach (if keeping westslopes were legal, of course), the presence of these two fish speaks volumes to the likelihood that a stream long-revered as one of the West’s most contaminated waterways has hope in establishing a future fishery, if things continue down the same, right path.

It’s noteworthy to mention that while the trout found in the creek this fall are certainly remarkable, the ongoing and previous restoration across the floodplain has been very successful to date, most notably judged by the exceptional increase in vegetation diversity and the presence of various waterfowl, shore and song birds, deer, moose, and even elk frequenting the area. What is particularly significant about the discovery of the two Westslopes during the annual electrofishing count on Silver Bow Creek is that they were collected in a location several miles away from the closest “clean” tributary supporting a healthy Westslope population.

In the past, brook trout have been found during the annual fisheries monitoring, but never Westslopes, and what’s more, never so far away from one of the uncontaminated tributaries, like Browns Gulch and German Gulch creeks. Westslope cutthroat can serve as an “umbrella species” in an ecosystem – if there are Westslope cutthroat trout thriving, then everything else in the ecosystem must be relatively well too – another piece of evidence that all is going as planned in the ultimate restoration of Silver Bow Creek.
This is exciting news as the project moves closer to completion (the remediation and restoration of Silver Bow Creek is now expected to be finished by the end of 2011). It’s also important news in light of some recent monitoring data that shows metals recontamination occurring in some of the upper reaches of the restored stream. Greg Mullen, the restoration project manager for the Natural Resource Damage Program, stated the following in light of the recent trout findings: “Once the wastewater treatment plant (Butte’s Metro Sewer municipal sewage treatment plant, which discharges high volumes of nutrient-laden water to the creek) is cleaned up, then we should see more trout in Silver Bow Creek.”


Perhaps the biggest thing for the public and others to remember when judging restoration projects of this magnitude is that it takes a significant amount of time for a stream to return to an uncontaminated condition after more than a century of intense abuse and misuse. The remediation and restoration of Silver Bow Creek started in 1999; it wasn’t until 2008 that the first native trout were found swimming in its restored reaches. One of the remedial goals of the project from the mid-1990s was to reestablish a self-sustaining native Westslope fishery in Silver Bow Creek. Well, it’s nine years later and we’re getting there.

In restoration, it’s the destination, not so much the journey, that needs our greatest attention. There are lots of ups and downs along the way, but keep in mind that the end of the road will take us to a better, cleaner place.

Another good example and case for this reminder is the Milltown Dam and Sediments Removal remediation and restoration project, 120 miles downstream at the Clark Fork’s confluence with the Blackfoot River. With the breaching of the dam last March, there has been a significant amount of sediment, some containing arsenic, that washed downstream of the project, allegedly impacting the middle Clark Fork fishery and macroinvertebrate populations, not to mention the reservoir at Thompson Falls another 100 miles downstream. Regardless of these short-term impacts, the important thing to remember again is that restoration takes time.
The Clark Fork-Blackfoot confluence has been hidden and contaminated behind and beneath the Milltown Dam and Reservoir for 100 years. This integral link between big river ecosystems was just reconnected in March of 2008 and while there are some short-term impacts that might not be as positive as we’d like to see, there are thousands and thousands of fish and their future generations already much, much happier, even in the murk of some extra sediments.

Of course it would be foolish not to look closer at short-term data that shows problems, especially if the problems are ones that can and need to be addressed. The data showing recontamination of restored Silver Bow Creek tells that there is still significant work left to be done on the Butte Hill; the Milltown sediments loading since the breaching signifies that additional erosion and sediment control measures may need to be in place before the Spring 2009 runoff. But it’s just as foolish for one to expect that fragile and complex ecological systems like those being restored are going to improve overnight or, likewise, to sound the alarm of failure at the earliest signs of negative data. Again, not to belabor the point, it took our predecessors more than a century to put this watershed in the condition that required the current cleanup; it is certainly possible that it could take decades before things are fully restored, depending on the definition of restoration.

But the rewards of a revitalized watershed are as great as any mother lode.
Who knows? Maybe in some of our lifetimes, the trout swimming in Silver Bow Creek might be the same trout that swam past the confluence of the Blackfoot and Clark Fork to spawn.

The Salish-Kootenai and Pend d'Oreille peoples’ historic name for the confluence area was “the place of the big bull trout.” While at this point in time, we should relish in the simple discovery of the Westslopes returning to the most contaminated reaches of the Clark Fork system, it certainly might be feasible that in future generations the words of the native people could again come true. After all, “if it can be recalled, it can be restored.”

We have a vision, a plan and a mission underway to clean up the Clark Fork watershed from its damaged condition. But what we also need to have, as much as or maybe even more than anything else, is patience.

As the end of the 2008 construction season closes on Silver Bow Creek, let’s have a look at the progress to date and the work to be performed in the near future: Volume of contaminated materials removed: 3,700,000 cubic yards
Miles of stream remediated and restored: 10 miles
Acres of floodplain remediated and restored: 950 acres
Percentage of Total Project Completed: 70%
The Next Six Months:
A new stream and floodplain will reach from Butte all the way downstream to the railroad trestles at the upstream end of Durant Canyon;
Almost one mile of new stream will be completed in the beginning reach of Subarea 4 (near Opportunity/MT Hwy 1);
The bid package for the first 2.5 miles of the Durant Canyon cleanup section will be released.