Confronting an ugly past

0 Comments | Gazette, The (Colorado Springs), Jul 26, 2008 | by R. Scott Rappold

Creede - From above this historic mining town, Willow Creek is a river of poisons, with cadmium, lead and zinc-contaminated water flowing at 33 cubic feet per second.

Devoid of fish, which can't live in the toxic water, the creek runs through the heart of town before washing out across a deltalike wasteland and into the Rio Grande, source of drinking water for 5 million people downstream.

In a town that loves its history, the creek is a constant reminder of the ugly side of the boomtown days. Silver was struck here in 1889, and the ensuing rush of fortune-seeking miners swelled its population to 10,000. They dumped waste rock on the mountainside and carved tunnels to drain metal-laden underground wa- ter into Willow Creek.

The main culprits of Willow Creek's woes are the Commodore Mine waste rock pile, an unstable mountainside of discarded rocks that threatens to wash down into town in a flood, and the Nelson Tunnel, which directs the contaminated mine drainage into the creek.

For a decade, this tiny community -- Creede's yearround population is 409 -- has worked to clean up the mess, in hopes of stopping the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from declaring the town a Superfund site, a designation reserved for the nation's most polluted places. Community leaders had heard horror stories of what happens when an area is declared a Superfund site: The agency steps in, bullies the locals, mandates unpopular cleanup measures and the Superfund label stays attached for decades.

But this spring, the EPA finally added Creede's old mines to the Superfund list.

The fact that people are happy about that shows how some projects are just too big for any one town to tackle, and how the EPA may have shaken its once-tarnished image.

Learning by example

In many ways, this is a tale of two cities.

Leadville, 111 miles to the north, had its silver rush in the 1870s, and was left with a honeycomb network of mines above town that were never capped, and soil contaminated with lead from smelter operations. Because of high metal levels in the Arkansas River and dangerously unhealthy amounts of lead in the soil, the EPA declared the entire city a Superfund site in 1983.

The fighting hasn't stopped since.

The Superfund designation got Leadville cleaner water for the Arkansas River and treatment plants for mine drainage -- as well as a host of regulations, including blood-lead tests for children, and the stigma of being a Superfund site, something community leaders can't shake. Lawsuits over who is responsible for the pollution have yet to be settled.

"We spend a considerable amount of time, effort and energy with regard to delisting, still after 25 years," said Lake County Commissioner Ken Olsen, a Superfund critic.

The EPA has refused to remove Leadville from the Superfund list. The agency also insists the blood tests continue, though, Olsen said, only one or two children a year out of 400 have high levels, usually traced to a source other than soil.

His suggestion to a community flirting with Superfund: "My first advice is try to do everything you could to not be a listed Superfund site. If you are, I think you better be in for a long, long, long community struggle to de-list your Superfund site."

People in Creede were well aware of Leadville's story when, in 1998, an EPA worker stood up at a public meeting and informed them the agency was considering designating the entire town of Creede as a Superfund site.

Zeke Ward, a ranch manager at the time, was at the meeting and recalls the shock people felt. After all, Willow Creek had been the source of their drinking water for 90 years, until 1991.

"Local government began to ask the question, 'Are there any alternatives?'" said Ward, now a Mineral County commissioner. "We can't do nothing. That's not an option. So doing it ourselves through voluntary and cooperative measures was preferable to a large- scale Superfund project."

Ward found himself elected chairman of the newly created Willow Creek Reclamation Project.

An enormous task

In Creede, most locals seem to either have been miners themselves or had family members who were.

But since the last mine, the Bulldog Mine, was shuttered in 1985 because of low silver prices, Creede has built itself on tourism.

The mission of the reclamation project was to remove the need for Superfund designation. Just how to do that took four years of study. But it took only one summer of sampling to identify the main culprits.

The Commodore Mine is a mile out of Creede on the well-traveled Bachelor Loop road. Well-preserved and mighty-looking, it is the most-photographed spot in Mineral County, Ward said. It is also to blame for the waste rock that covers the mountainside and washes into Willow Creek with each rain, as well as the Nelson Tunnel, which was completed in 1899 to drain the mine.

The entire site is about 5 acres, though the tunnel drains many miles of underground mine passages.

The project volunteers knew they couldn't tackle those mammoth polluters on their own. So they focused on smaller problems, places where rain and snow melt-off regularly washed waste rock into the creek.