Summitville, the Exxon Valdez of the Mining Industry

Comment: I like the last few words of the article: “We got the shaft.” All forms of mining destroys local communities daily! Uranium mining is the worst form of hard rock mining so take the story below and make it 10 times or more worse for our water, lives of all sorts, land and air.

Summitville, the Exxon Valdez of the Mining Industry

It’s been called that… and more. Some say it’s Colorado’s worst environmental disaster, others call it America’s most notorious and costly mine.

It’s an Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) Superfund site on the National Priority List (NPL). Federal and state government are emptying their pockets for more than twice the original estimate to clean up the mess— currently some $210 million and counting.

What is it? The Summitville Mine, a 1,235-acre open-pit cyanide leach gold and silver mine.

Located in a remote area of south-central Colorado at 11,500 feet in the San Juan Mountains and surrounded by the Rio Grande National Forest, Summitville sits at the headwaters of the Alamosa River and about 40 miles west of the city of Alamosa.

Lots of toxic, acidic, and highly-mineralized water earned Summitville these negative superlatives. It poured into the underground aquifer and the downstream watershed.

Taking the Tour

Once a year, the Summitville Mine site is open to the public. In late September, I went up to take a look. My tour group of a dozen or so included residents from nearby communities, a local newspaper reporter, and an employee from the US Senator’s office. Our host for the afternoon was Derek Boer, community involvement and public information specialist for the Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment (CDPHE), co-lead agency on the mine clean-up, along with the EPA.

As we made our way up the four-wheel-drive mountain road, we admired the spectacular vistas and the shimmering golden aspen trees that gave way to heavily-treed deep-green tundra and the bottom fringes of timberline. But looks can be deceiving—even the roads are made from waste rock and overburden from the mine pit. At an open turn out about 2/3rds of the way up the mountain, we caught our first full view of the mine site. The descriptions and the pictures I’d come across in my research hadn’t quite prepared me for the overwhelming extent of the massive open brown gash in the forested hillside.

One member of our group, Charles Spielman, had taken a tour in the ’80s. Spielman had worked for Gulf Oil for 40 years in mine operations all over the world and is currently a city councilman in nearby Monte Vista. He told us that Summitville was “…the worst conceived, worst operated, and worst designed mine in the history of mining.”

Our next stop was a quick look the holding pond, or Summitville Dam Impoundment (SDI), and water treatment plant (WTP) at its southern end. The SDI holds 90 million gallons of pre-treated water, and its banks are stained crimson from the water’s high iron content. The water was at the lowest level of the year, which is usual in fall. It was “…only 6 inches from the top of the dam,” one site worker later told me, when operations started up this year, one month earlier than usual because snowfall had been 165% of the normal amount.

At the main area of site, we met representatives from CDPHE, EPA, and from Golder Associates, a private environmental services and ground engineering company that operates the water treatment plant. Several Golder employees happened on there that day auditing the plant’s operations. A crew of 13 works the site from about February to the end of October.

After a brief round of introductions, we split up into three groups and headed out. I jumped in a Jeep with Austin Buckingham, the CDPHE Project Manager full-time since 1998.

I asked Austin if what I’d heard was true, that Summitville was the biggest mine disaster in the US. “Not really,” Austin replied. “The mine is notable, because it operated in the modern era. It was permitted in the ’80s, when it was assumed there stewardship of the land. But there was no appropriate oversight.”

You Can Lead a Horse to Water

In 1992, rancher Clarence Martin was running his cattle up the Alamosa River Basin. He realized one day that his cows wouldn’t drink the water where the Wightman Fork joined the Alamosa River. Martin also started seeing less life in the river and eventually, none.

Problems along the Alamosa River weren’t unknown. Erosion, straightening, and drought had degraded the river and its riparian areas, and some community members were involved in restoration efforts. But this was a new challenge.

Most official reports say all aquatic life was destroyed along a 17-mile stretch.

Allan Miller, local alfalfa farmer, says otherwise. “There were 55 miles killed.

Usually, the papers just mention the top of the watershed and not the residential areas that were contaminated. It affected our entire watershed including the river, its laterals and the stock ponds where all life was killed. We had a loss of sprinklers, irrigation systems, and the PH of our soil was altered. The rocks and concrete structures were dyed red. No one who lives along the Alamosa has ever been compensated for individual losses.”

The US Forest Service put up signs warning not to drink the water, and neighbors began to band together to discuss what could be done.

Word on the street was that the fishkills of 1991-1992 were caused by a spill or overflow from the dam. Not so, Austin told me. The cause was the cumulative effect of years of acid runoff and heavy metals pouring into the tributaries.

A Sleeping Giant

It was a wake-up call for the public. And, as Austin explained, “Everyone suddenly knew about the sleeping giant in mountain. It caught the community unaware and surprised. There was a loss of trust in officials. The most significant result was creating a state contingency fund if a company walked away. It was small in ’80s, about $100,000.”

The fishkill that woke everyone up wasn’t the first. In 1990, stocked trout in the Terrace Reservoir and three farm holding ponds downstream disappeared. It’s suspected that Summitville was to blame. An anonymous tipster reported the situation to the EPA later that same year.

It Flows Downhill

To understand why citizens were up in arms means understanding the economic importance of the Alamosa River Watershed. The River contributes to half of Rio Grande county’s economy of farming, ranching, and outdoor recreation. It provides drinking water for cattle, horses, hogs, and sheep, and irrigation water for alfalfa (for livestock feed), barley (for beer production), potatoes, and wheat. Its wetlands are habitat for aquatic life and migrating waterfowl, among them the endangered whooping crane.

The headwaters of Alamosa River and two of its tributaries, one of which is Wightman Creek, fall steeply from the San Juan Mountains at Summitville. They flow through forest, irrigated cropland, and the small towns of Capulin and La Jara in the San Luis Valley, filling the underground aquifer, a reservoir, tributaries, and domestic wells along the way. Just 7 miles downstream is the tiny town of Jasper, the nearest populated area, and 17 miles downstream is Terrace Reservoir, which stores and supplies irrigation water for 45,000 acres of cropland.

Traditionally, these mountain waters have had a low PH and a high mineral content, as can be seen in the names of creeks like Alum, Bitter, and Iron. Summitville turned the waters to the PH of vinegar. PH values measure a solution’s acidity or alkalinity on a scale between 0 and 14. Acidic is less than 7, neutral is 7, and basic/alkaline is more than 7. Vinegar has a PH of 2.4–3.4, acid rain 5.2, and drinking water 7.

There’s Gold in Those Hills? (Uranium in Virginia Hills!)

Mining began in the area in 1870, when gold was discovered in South Mountain—and has always been considered marginal. In the early days, gold was placer-mined in the creeks. When load ore bodies—veins—were found, the miners dug small shallow open pits, or ‘glory holes,’ and later, tunneled underground (drift mining) to follow the veins, and drove shafts and adits (horizontal openings) to access the gold.

Summitville was mined off and on through the early 1900s up to the 1940s, and a bit in the 1960s. At one time, there were more than 500 miners and their families, a store, and a schoolhouse on the site. Smaller historical mines still dot the countryside, but it’s estimated that these point sources contribute only 1-3 % of the heavy metal load contamination.

The latest, last, and most destructive operator was Summitville Consolidated Mining Corporation, Inc. (SCMCI), which worked the site from July 1986 through October 1991. SCMCI used the open-pit heap leach pad (HLP) mining method to extract gold out of the low-grade ore. In the HLP process, mined and crushed gold-bearing ore is heaped up on lined, multi-layered pad, then a sodium cyanide solution is poured over it. The cyanide percolates through the pad and leaches out gold that is then further chemically extracted from the solution. It’s reported that SCMCI used 35 million pounds of cyanide solution during the years they operated Summitville.

A Disaster Waiting to Happen

Summitville’s $222 million start-up costs were bankrolled mainly by European investors, with the Bank of America chipping in $30 million after Bechtel, the world’s biggest civil engineering company, signed on to design and engineer the mine. Despite reports by previous mine engineers that there was no new gold in these hills, Robert Friedland, President and CEO of Galactic Resources, the parent company of SCMCI, charmed investors and came up with the millions to fund his folly.

Summitville was destined for disaster from day one.

The vinyl liner under the HLP, which was laid down in freezing winter weather, cracked and started leaking almost immediately. SCMCI wouldn’t allow the contractor to repair the liner. They hadn’t banked on a host of other problems, either, including high snowfall (30 feet per winter) and the resulting heavy spring meltoff, as well as avalanches and landslides. SCMCI was going after very small quantities of gold in a clay-type ore, and they didn’t have any place to store or treat dirty water to manage the contamination. In addition, the price of gold plummeted.

In 1987, there were at least 8 spills, and in 1989, SCMCI attempted to bring online a water treatment plant, but it didn’t work properly. In September 1990, the EPA checked out the site after several anonymous phone calls, and three months later, Friedland sold all his shares and resigned from the company.

SCMCI was penalized and paid $100,000 in civil fines, on top of $30,000 that had already been paid. Still, in 1991, the state of Colorado gave them the go-ahead to discharge excess water that met certain contamination limits. Those limits weren’t met, and SCMCI was served with a Cease and Desist Order. It’s estimated that 85,000 gallons of contaminated water had leaked through the HLP’s damaged liner. SCMCI had also agreed to draft a clean up plan, which was done by November 1992, and had started cleaning up.

On December 15, 1992, Galactic Resources, parent company of SCMCI, declared bankruptcy, announced that site clean-up would immediately cease, and abandoned Summitville, despite a Colorado court injunction not to do so. They walked away from a 9-ton, nearly 200-feet high heap leach pad that covered at least 40 acres, and contained an estimated 150-200 million gallons of cyanide leachate.

On December 16, 1992, an EPA Emergency Response team stepped in. Snowfall was at triple levels that winter, and the cyanide solution in the 127-foot-deep containment around the HLP was within 5 feet of the top of the surrounding earthen berm. In addition, EPA officials found 6 sites at the mine leaking 3,000 gallons a minute of potentially toxic fluids. It’s said that 1,000-2,000 pounds of dissolved heavy metals left the site daily.

The two biggest, most pressing problems were containing contaminated water on the site until it could be treated and stopping the leaks.

In 1994, the first Technical Assistance Grant (TAG) was awarded (as required by Superfund laws) by the EPA, and a citizens’ group formed and became part of the clean-up process. But water quality continued to decline.

On May 31, 1994, the EPA placed Summitville on its National Priorities List (NPL).

In 1995, an EPA scientist found copper levels in soil and plants 25 times higher than
expected, and a year later, measured high copper levels in sheep livers. The EPA tried to shut down his research and initiated a criminal investigation, but eventually settled with the scientist. While the CDPHE admits that copper may be accumulating in the livers and the wool of sheep, they declare that no adverse health effects have yet been discovered.

Moving Mountains

If heavy metals are present in an area for millions and millions of years, why are they a problem when the area is mined?

When metal-bearing rock is broken up and sees the ‘light of day,’ as it were, not only is its surface area greatly increased, but its increased surface area is exposed to weathering, which oxidizes the metals and leaches them out.

The Summitville mine’s volcanic rocks are also high in sulfides that, when oxidized, form acidity. But the rocks don’t have to be exposed to the weather for oxidation and leaching to happen. The oxygen-rich water running through tunnels oxidizes the rocks and discharges acidic, highly-mineralized water into the ground and surface water. Also, the cyanide used in the HLP process plays a part in leaching out heavy metals. The United States Geological Survey (USGS) states,

“The Summitville mine drainage waters are among the most acidic and metal-rich in Colorado.”

Too little water can be as bad as too much. Evaporation over winter and in dry spells increases the acid and metal concentrations in the water, which are then released during snowmelt and summer storms.

Ironically, several USGS studies have indicated that the severe acid drainage may have actually helped lessen cyanide’s effects. When heap leach solutions were mixed with acid-drainage waters from the site, results showed that metal-cyanide compounds in the solutions reacted readily with the acid to form hydrogen cyanide that volatilized into the atmosphere. On warm sunny summer days, cyanide volatizes and breaks down fairly quickly. Winter is a different story, and cyanide may persist downstream.

Here’s to Your Health

Cyanide is highly toxic chemical—one teaspoon of a 2% solution can kill a human. Solutions in the microgram-per-liter range wipe out fish and other aquatic life, and in the milligram-per-liter range cause death in mammals. It reacts with many other elements and breaks down into several hundred different related compounds. Annually, more than 200 million pounds of cyanide are used in American mining.

The mining and extraction process at Summitville liberated tons of heavy metals like aluminum, cadmium, copper, iron, lead, manganese, nickel, and zinc from the host rock. Humans require trace amounts of some heavy metals, such as copper and manganese, for instance, but there are no known beneficial effects of most of the others. They tend to accumulate in the body, and the medical term, “heavy metal poisoning,” refers to an excess of these elements.

A Heap of Trouble

Our first stop was the HLP in the Cropsey Valley, which drains into Cropsey Creek. The EPA’s efforts here came early in the clean-up, and the goal was to reduce the levels of cyanide. Water was injected into the HLP to “rinse” it and then removed. The removed contaminated water was treated to break down the cyanide, then re-injected, removed, and re-treated. When the process ended, the excess water was treated to eliminate metals and was discharged off-site. Tons of crushed rock from the HLP were hauled over to the other side of the site to fill in the North and South Pits. The 90 million gallons of water currently remaining in the HLP is now considered “circum-neutral,” with a PH of about 6.5, according to Austin.

In 1998, the HLP was contoured and capped with a mixture of clay and geosynthetic material, and the cap sweetened and fortified with tons of lime and organic matter, then re-planted with grasses and trees. We could barely see the small baby evergreens across the Valley—trees grow very slowly in this climate.

What we also couldn’t see was all the work that went on under our feet. There’s an extensive system of storm drains, bulkheads, tunnels, and pipes to help remove the water that constantly pours off the mountain and carry it to the SDI for treatment.

When the EPA arrived on the scene in 1992, the two major adits, Reynolds and Chandler, “were flowing like rivers,” said Austin. And they were among the first major objects of the EPA’s attention. Both were plugged up with reinforced concrete for surge control.

But it was like the Dutch boy putting his finger in the dyke. Plug up one leak, and others start somewhere else. Pressure builds up around the plugged adits, as well as from the massive mountain, creating acid seeps and springs where there where none before. Site workers, as one reported to me, are regularly discovering new ones.

Water above ground is handled with a surface water management system made up of retention ponds and of drainage ditches that direct it to the SDI for treatment. 200,000 tons of limestone was trucked to the site and dumped into miles of these ditches to line them and help buffer the acidic runoff.

Up Against the Wall and Pits

Our next stop was the High Wall on the South Mountain. A third of the mountain’s tundra forest was blasted and stripped away by SCMCI, leaving behind a dusty sheer, barren vertical rock face that won’t be coming back to life anytime soon, at least not until a new technology for restoring it is discovered.

Standing at the bottom of the High Wall, we looked down a cliff into the closed rubble-filled North and South Pits. which had been filled with rinsed rock from the HLP. The Pits’ runoff drains into a ditch that leads to the SDI for treatment.

Next to the Pits is the Sludge Disposal Area. The sludge (dewatered residue from the WTP) is not considered hazardous waste, according to test results. Its disposal will be necessary as long as water is being treated.

Water, Water Everywhere

“It’s all about separating clean water from dirty water,” said a site worker, as we moved on to the office/lab. Sounds simple enough, in theory. In reality, though, it’s sometimes been more about figuring out exactly which water is clean and which is dirty. There have been incidents of clean water being treated and dirty water escaping downstream, Derek told me. Water running off the re-vegetated areas is considered ‘clean’ and is channeled into Wightman Creek, as is effluent from the WTP.

We went into office/lab and sat down to listen to a pitch by Jim Hanley, EPA Remedial Project Manager, for a new 2-stage water treatment plant. The current one-stage WTP, operating 24/7 and set to process about 275 million gallons in 2005, can’t keep up with the stream burden. A new plant has been designed and was planned to be built in 2005, but there’s no funding. The proposed $16 million plant would save about $500,000 annually in operating costs, and be more effective in removing ammonia and copper.

But the EPA doesn’t consider the site to be causing a human health hazard, so a new WTP for Summitville is not a high-priority budget item.

For the final part of our tour, we went back outside the office/lab to see a quick, mini demonstration-in-a-beaker of what actually goes on inside the plant. A lime and polymer treatment solution raises the PH of ‘dirty’ water to 3-5, at which point aluminum settles out and is removed. Then, the PH is raised to 9 and other heavy metals precipitate out and are removed. In the process, the WTP goes through 3-4 tons of lime per week.

Our tour time was running out, and we didn’t have a chance to visit the cyanide destruction facility, a big metal building behind the office/lab. Maybe next tour.

Justice is Served?

In July of 1996, the EPA reached a $950,000 settlement with Cleveland-Cliffs Iron Company for its hazardous practices at the Summitville in the late 1960s.

Former President and CEO of Galactic Resources, Robert Friedland, was the subject of a criminal investigation and brought up on charges by the state. In 2000, after 5 years in court, “Toxic Bob,” as he’s been nicknamed, agreed to pay $27,750,000 over 10 years, with $5,000,000 earmarked as a Natural Resources Damage Settlement for restoring the Alamosa River. But Friedland hasn’t let Summitville or these fines stop him. He’s been after gold ever since and was recently named one of the world’s richest men by Forbes magazine.

Two former SCMCI managers were fined $10,000 each and sentenced to 6 months in a halfway house. Friedland, because he is a Canadian citizen, was hard to pin down, and fought and won a case that doesn’t allow the US to go after him. However, he still has the right to go after the US government and former Summitville contractors. The contractors, Friedland claims, didn’t submit a competitive bid to the EPA, and his attorneys argued that some $75 million in cleanup costs were due to “outright fraud, bid-rigging, billing irregularities.”

In this regard, Friedman and the EPA may be in agreement. The EPA’s inspector general believed too much money was spent in 1992 in an “emergency” winter mode. Auditors also criticized a contractor for procuring EPA funding “without adequate supporting documentation to ensure costs were allowable and reasonable.”

State of Mining in the State of Colorado

Colorado promotes and encourages mining (coal, gold, gypsum, limestone, silver, molybdenum, soda ash and sodium bicarbonate), and the industry contributes $7.4 billion to state’s economy every year. In 2000, hard rock mining was estimated to be responsible for 38 percent of all TRI (Toxic Release Industry) chemicals in the state. Nationwide, abandoned hardrock mines will cost an estimated $71.5 billion (1993 dollars) to clean up.

The Summitville disaster brought mining methods to the public eye in Colorado, and in 1993, a mining reform bill was passed to prevent another Summitville and strengthen the state’s authority. But it did not address water quality problems and continued to allow open pit cyanide mines. One open cyanide pit mine has been licensed by the state and is in operation today. Recent attempts to ban the deadly compound failed.

Are there non-toxic alternatives to open-pit cyanide leach mining? There is a environmentally-friendly method for extracting gold that’s 6 times faster than cyanide mining, passes California’s strict standards, and has been used to process 100 tons of ore so far. It’s the Haber Gold Process, developed by Norman Haber of Haber, Inc.

Testing the Waters

According to Austin, tests taken of the water in the Terrace Reservoir, show that 80 to 99% of the levels of aluminum, copper, iron, and zinc were reduced from 1994-2000. Water quality is tested regularly at various locations throughout site, and the results can be accessed at the state’s Summitville webpage. It’s also tested downstream, as well as in private wells and the wetlands.

The Alamosa River Watershed Master Restoration Plan, completed in March 2005, states “Water quality below Wightman Fork continues to exceed PH, copper, zinc, and aluminum water quality standards. Iron concentrations are also high…” The Plan also acknowledges the limited data on water quality for groundwater basins, and points to the ongoing risk of untreated releases from site because of lack of storage.

What Will the Future Bring?

The good news, if there could be any in this saga of contamination and controversy, is that the disaster at Summitville opened up communications and brought together private citizens and groups with the state and the feds. As the state says, “The local stakeholders are the final stewards…” Collaboration isn’t necessarily voluntary, though—Superfund law requires a Community Involvement Plan, but the disaster may be helping to pave the way for restoring the people’s trust in government.

Last year, the lead agencies met with community members who voiced their concerns. Among the issues raised were funding, water quality, heavy runoff, a new water treatment plant, and old and overburdened water storage and treatment systems. Other issues were the WTP’s inability to meet water quality standards and the state’s possible lowering of those standards, which it tried to do several years ago, but backed off on because of public pressure. The state recognizes that the biggest current threat may be the release of contaminated water from the SDI.

In October 2004, studies were completed on soil amendments, reclamation practices, and exposure on wildlife, livestock, and irrigated cropland—but no one’s resting easy yet.

Farmers and ranchers have concerns about the accumulation of heavy metals in the soil, then potentially in the crops, the livestock, and the people. They’ve experienced first-hand the effects of acidic, highly mineralized water on their irrigation equipment and have routinely replaced corroded headgates over the years.

Farmer Allan Miller has seen bottom-feeding fish and salamanders returning around his farm, and he’s encouraged by their return, because it indicates that heavy metals aren’t accumulating at the bottom of his streams, ditches, and ponds. It may be a while before the trout that fishermen prize can survive again, though—they’re especially sensitive to copper.

Miller started and is currently a board member the Alamosa River Restoration Project , a grassroots group that drafted the Restoration Plan and will direct the disbursement of the Natural Resources Damages Settlement of $5 million from Robert Friedland. Another citizens’ group, the Alliance for Responsible Mining, is working to ban cyanide mining.

Everyone’s in it for the long-term. The EPA estimates that it will take 100 years of treatment for the river to be restored to its natural state. Austin had told me that Summitville won’t be removed from the NPL in the “foreseeable future,” and they’ll be treating the water on the site “…indefinitely.”

The USGS concludes that “Leakage of groundwaters from a highly-fractured, mined mountain like Summitville is difficult, if not impossible to prevent, and long-term leakage of acid groundwaters from natural discharge points is unavoidable.”

Derek told me, water at the site will be treated “…in perpetuity,” as we made our way back down the mountain. I mused to myself about the afternoon’s sights—the dusty barren brownfields are slowly supporting green grasses, and we’d even happened across several cows wandering around the site during our tour, although we didn’t see any drinking the water. I wondered out loud to Derek—

Does mining ever pay off in the long run? Or does it always mean short-term gains for private enterprise and long-term losses for taxpayers and the environment?

Depending on who you talk to, the value of the gold and silver taken from Summitville varies—from $113-200 million. Balance that against the $222 million Friedland spent on start-up plus the $210 million spent so far by the EPA.

It doesnot take a CPA to see the mining business was drowning in red ink.

Yes, they got the gold—and as someone so aptly summed it up, “We got the shaft.”

Go to the link and look at all the pictures:
http://www.sprol.com/2005/10/summitville/