Help wanted: BLM seeks responsible parties

The last week of May was no ordinary week in Yukon, Canada's most westerly territory.

It was Mining and Geology week, and the historic wooden buildings in downtown Dawson City were plastered with brand new white and gold banners.

"This Business Supports Placer Mining.

Placer Mining Supports This Business," they proclaimed.

But the geologists, engineers and biologists spending their days listening to talks at the Palace Grand Theatre and their evenings living it up at Diamond Tooth Gertie's music hall and casino were not in town to discuss digging for gold.

Well, not much.

Their primary purpose was to compare notes on the complex but essential science of mine reclamation, something that previous generations of miners too often preferred to ignore.

Alternates between Canada and Alaska

The Northern Latitudes Reclamation Workshop is held in a different city every two years, alternating between Canada and Alaska. The opportunity to see Dawson and nearby mines, as well as the famous Dredge No.4 - the largest wooden-hulled dredge in North America, assembled in 1913 - was a treat for the participants, who trekked up from as far afield as Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, Sacramento, California, and Cheyenne, Wyoming. Even arriving here by plane or car is a logistical challenge today, so it was easy to imagine how strong the pull of gold must have been for miners to brave the arduous journey a century ago.

"The mining industry has always been the backbone of Yukon's economy," Kevin Brewer, director of mineral development at Yukon's Department of Energy, Mines and Resources, said in his introductory speech at the workshop. "Mining developments in Yukon must be managed in a sound and sustainable manner and provide benefits to all Yukoners. In this regard, we are currently designing a reclamation and closure policy to guide new hard rock mine developments in the territory. We have also recently created a major mine permitting team." There are no operating hard rock mines in Yukon currently, but five projects are moving forward towards development.

Gold rush country appropriate setting

Gold Rush country was a very appropriate setting to look at how agencies can deal with abandoned mines. George Stone is the Bureau of Land Management's Washington, D.C. office program leader for abandoned mine lands. Most metal mines are in the west of the country and most coal mines are in the east, he said. There are an estimated 100,000-500,000 abandoned hard rock mines in the United States. "We in America do not have a national inventory of all abandoned mines," Stone said. "We think that we know where the significant abandoned mines are, the ones that are posing problems to human health, to the environment, particularly water pollution."

Nature will reclaim most of the sites, but around a quarter of them pose potential physical safety hazards to visitors, who climb around buildings and go into open adits, according to Stone. Roughly 5 percent of the sites pose environmental problems and account for the bulk of the cost because water treatment is extremely expensive. On the coal side, the Office of Surface Mining and state government agencies have compiled an inventory of some 13,000 sites. Most are in the east, but the bigger sites are in western states like Wyoming. The main problem with these sites is physical safety hazards.

Use and occupancy another issue

Use and occupancy of abandoned mine sites is another issue, particularly on public lands. "Our mining laws are such that it doesn't take much for someone to stake a claim and ostensibly say they're doing some mining," Stone said. "In the southwest part of the United States this seems to happen an awful lot, and these folks are simply not doing mining, they're just looking for a place to park their camper, and while they're doing that, they're enjoying their stay on the public lands, making quite a mess."

Sites that used to be fairly remote are no longer remote because of western population sprawl and increased use of ATVs for recreation. ATVs have been involved in several accidents on tailings piles, or driving up a hill and then falling down a mine shaft on the other side. There are even websites encouraging ATV users to visit abandoned mines, Stone said.

A "Stay out, stay alive" program organized by the Department of Labor's Mine Safety and Health Administration is aimed at educating school-age children about the dangers of visiting abandoned mines, with the idea that they might pass on the message to their parents and friends. If people want to make a historical site acceptable for visitors, there are ways they can do that.

Remediation runs into billions

There is no real estimate of remediation costs, but they probably run into the billions of dollars, according to Stone. "Suffice it to say, it's a lot more in the way of work to be done and money needed, than the money that we have." The coal mining industry pays a fee that goes into a trust fund for remediation managed by the Treasury Department, which has a balance of over $1 billion currently. If the fee system is to continue, it must be extended by Congress, as it is set to expire soon.

For abandoned hard rock mines, BLM has a meager budget of around $10 million.

"Under our Superfund law and Clean Water Act, where we possibly can, we adhere to the polluter pays principle, which means we need to go out and see if we can identify a financially liable, responsible party to help clean up their site, or to at least contribute in part to the clean-up," Stone said.

"More often than not, these sites are 100-plus years old and the chances of finding anybody who had anything to do directly with the mining are slim to none.

But what we can do sometimes is find relatives who may have inherited the land over the years, or in some cases companies that have bought the land ...

and more often than not we are able to at least get some in-kind contribution to the clean-up."

Re-mining another option

Some states that have finished their work on abandoned coal mines can then use the money on hard rock mines. Another option for enticing companies to become involved with abandoned sites is the possibility of re-mining. "I think industry is willing to do this, but right now, because of Clean Water Act liabilities, in the United States if you go onto one of these sites and touch it in any way, you could be held responsible for all of the past, prior damage," Stone said. Legislation is pending, called the Good Samaritan provision, that would amend the Clean Water Act to allow new companies to come in.

Linda Billingsley, a natural resource specialist with BLM in Fairbanks, spoke at the workshop about her experiences remediating abandoned placer gold mines in Interior Alaska. "We had to clean some sites up that were in some pretty remote areas and we had to get creative, but we still wanted to maintain some fiscal responsibility," Billingsley said. Before BLM instituted its reclamation requirements in 1981, miners typically abandoned their claims, often leaving behind safety and pollution problems, she added.

"If there is a responsible party then we try to track them down and gently encourage them to help clean the site up, or to do the site clean-up completely on their own, but that's not always the case," Billingsley said. "Because mining's happened for so long, it's often difficult to pinpoint one person that is responsible for material that was left on-site, and so BLM generally has to kick in and do the entire clean-up or push them along." BLM contracts environmental engineers if there are hazardous or potentially hazardous materials on the site.

Three recent sites in Alaska

Three of the projects Billingsley has worked on recently are within the Steese National Conservation Area, which was set aside in 1980 to protect wildlife habitat such as caribou calving grounds. The sites are located along creeks that drain into Birch Creek Wild and Scenic River. One important task was to find and remove abandoned fuel tanks and drums. "The Steese Conservation Area gets a lot of recreation and hunting, and so we don't want to have the public near sites where they could potentially get injured," Billingsley said.

At one of the placer mining sites, along Great Unknown Creek, there were three buildings, one of which had already fallen into the creek because it was built on an eroding stream bank. Such buildings are a liability and an attractive nuisance to the public, Billingsley said. "The resource specialists in the office expressed great concern over impacts to the vegetation when we were going in, so ideally we would go in with a piece of heavy equipment and pull the buildings out, there was a bunch of fuel tanks that were downstream and we'd pull those out, but because we didn't want to cause any more damage in this conservation area, we had to look at other means."

Instead, the buildings were dismantled on-site and the materials were burned in the winter time, so there was no chance of a wildfire starting. Anything that didn't burn was pulled out by snow machine. The fuel tanks were flown out by helicopter, after the fuel in them had been pumped out. All that remained was a large sluice box, and a local resident offered to retrieve it.

BLM found buildings, vehicles, trailers, washing machines, beds, stoves and over 100 55-gallon drums at the two other sites, at Ptarmigan Gulch and Squaw Creek. Some of the drums had contents, others were empty. Some had been shot at by people using them for target practice.

The Alaska Fire Service's smoke-jumper parachute unit at Fort Wainwright in Fairbanks offered to deliver equipment to help with the clean-up. The drums were removed from the site in winter, in special sleds with high sides on the back of snow machines. They were left by the road for four months until the snow melted and a truck could come to pick them up.

The total cost for use of the helicopter at the three sites was $21,000, and contracting the environmental engineers was another major expense.