Going to Extremes - The Ripple Effect: The Fate of Freshwater in the Twenty-First Century - page 30

THE SILVER LINING TO A DARK PIT
From the late nineteenth through much of the twentieth centuries, the Anaconda Cop-
per Mining Company extracted tons of silver and copper from mines bored around
Butte, known as “Mining City” and “the richest hill on earth.” But the company also
dumped tons of mine tailings (waste rock) and heavy metals directly into Silver Bow
Creek, which flows into the Upper Clark Fork River, creating a poisonous plume 150
miles long. ARCO, the Atlantic Richfield Company—now part of BP—bought An-
aconda in 1977. In 1982, as copper prices dropped, it shut down the company's Berkeley
Pit and removed pumps that had kept it dry. Since then, about 2.6 million gallons of
water have flowed into the thirty-nine-thousand-foot-deep pit every day.
The water in the pit is oxblood red at the surface, a color derived from iron and man-
ganese; deeper down, the water turns a lime green, from heavy copper compounds. The
water is also suffused with heavy metals and toxic chemicals, including arsenic, lead,
cadmium, zinc, and sulfuric acid. It is, in essence, an acid lake.
In 1995 a flock of 342 snow geese landed on the poisonous lake, and every one of
them died. ARCO blamed the death of the geese on a “grain fungus,” but the theory
was widely ridiculed; tests showed that the acidic water had eaten away the epithelium
that lines the esophagus and then attacked the birds' internal organs. Since 1998, BP-
ARCO and regulators from Montana Resources have used a pontoon boat on the lake
and an observation shack overlooking the pit; using shotgun blasts and “wailers” that
emit predator calls and loud electronic sounds, they scare birds away from the lake. The
system has been relatively effective, though dead birds continue to be found in the pit.
One day in November 2007, thirty-six ducks and geese and one swan landed on the
lake, but the bird patrol was blinded by snow and fog; all of the birds died.
As the copper mines began to shut down, the Anaconda smelter closed in 1980. Butte
slipped into decline, and the population drained away. Starting in the 1970s, a group
of enlightened residents—led by Donald Peoples , a former football coach and may-
or—branded Butte the “Can-do City” and worked to replace three thousand lost jobs.
In 1989, Peoples joined Mountain States Energy (MSE), a fifteen-year-old civil engin-
eering company that treated Butte's toxic pit as a laboratory for developing new pollu-
tion cleanup processes and businesses. The company worked with the US Departments
of Energy (DOE) and of Defense to engineer new ways to safely store industrial and
military waste. It developed a plasma furnace that cooks toxins down to a sludge that
hardens into an inactive substance. And it runs the Mine Waste Technology Program
for the DOE : “The need is great,” MSE's website proclaims. “Remediation cost for aban-
doned mines are estimated between $2 billion and $32 billion.” MSE has clients in Japan
and South Korea and is courting business in Europe.