New Law Finally Allows Conservationists To Clean Up Abandoned Mines
In central Idaho, the Triumph Mine produced silver, lead, and zinc from the late 1800s into the 1950s. But since shuttering operations decades ago, the mine has been an environmental hazard, with abandoned tunnels and tailings piles leaching arsenic and other heavy metals into nearby waterways.
In the 1990s, the mining company responsible for the site and the state came to an agreement with the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) to clean it up, subject to federal Clean Water Act standards. They got to work removing toxic soils, managing contaminated discharge water, and plugging the old mine tunnel with concrete. Then, the company went bankrupt, leaving the state on the hook for the rest of the mess. Conservationists wanted to get involved to protect the nearby Big Wood River from further contamination, but federal liability laws stood in their way.
That has been the case at the Triumph Mine but also at the hundreds of thousands of abandoned mines across the West—until now. On Tuesday, President Joe Biden signed a bill that will protect from liability good Samaritans who want to remediate pollution from abandoned mines. The recent reforms are a breath of fresh air, removing illogical barriers to improving the environment that threatened to turn well-meaning conservationists into scapegoats for past pollution.
Federal agencies estimate that there could be half a million abandoned hard rock mines across the Western U.S.—vestiges of a frontier past. Many of them pose hazards to human safety or environmental health. As in the case of the Triumph Mine, the past owners of these operations are often long gone. “The mining companies aren’t there anymore,” Josh Johnson of the Idaho Conservation League told the local news station KTVB7 in November. “Either it is just so long ago that those companies don’t exist, or the companies are more modern—but have gotten bankrupt.”
For decades, few entities other than state remediation agencies have been willing to help, and for good reason. Under the Clean Water Act, anyone who wanted to clean up an abandoned mine assumed all liability for past, present, and future pollution from it, in perpetuity, the moment they undertook a cleanup effort.
Even if a conservation group or another mining
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