Abandoned mines are polluting rivers throughout the West. This law could help | Opinion
Across America, largely hidden from view, tens of thousands of abandoned mines release a poisonous brew into our waterways, turning rivers orange with sulfuric acid and toxic, heavy metals such as lead, mercury, and arsenic.
The Environmental Protection Agency estimates that 40 percent of western headwater streams are impaired by acid drainage from abandoned hard rock mines. With an estimated cleanup cost as high as $54 billion, the abandoned mine crisis is too large for the federal government alone to solve. The good news is that conservation organizations, watershed groups, state mine remediation agencies and other “Good Samaritans” stand ready to help end what is perhaps the nation’s most pervasive form of water pollution.
The problem is that under federal law, these Good Samaritans who want to clean up drainage from abandoned mines are treated the same as polluters. This nonsensical legal conundrum creates enormous liability risks for those who had nothing to do with the creation of the problem and simply want to make our waters cleaner.
Good Samaritan mine cleanup legislation would open a path to healthier water, and should be a part of the ongoing negotiations over federal permitting between Congress and the White House. This is common-sense, bipartisan permitting reform that can clean up our communities and create high-paying, family wage jobs in the process.
Organizations like mine are not equipped to tackle expensive and complicated Superfund clean-ups. Instead, Good Sam legislation would help us address the low-risk projects, tackling overlooked water pollution and making our waters more fishable, swimmable, and drinkable.
Consider the work done to clean up American Fork Creek in Utah. On the property of Snowbird ski and summer resort, a series of abandoned mine waste piles were leaching toxins into a river that harbors the threatened Bonneville cutthroat trout. The mines had closed 100 years earlier, and no corporate entity remained to clean them up.
Snowbird wanted to clean up the pollution, but knew that federal law would make them part of the “chain of custody” for the pollution, potentially exposing them to litigation and other liabilities. So the mine waste sat. Local kids had taken to riding dirt-bikes over mounds with lead levels over 1,000 times the EPA health safety standard.
Trout Unlimited agreed to clean up the tailings for Snowbird. It took us two years to negotiate an agreement with the EPA. We finished the actual restoration in eight days.
Thousands of these types of small projects could be cleaned up by would-be Good Samaritans.
Paradoxically, mine cleanup is hampered by provisions in the Clean Water Act, the bedrock legislation that has done so much to make our rivers and streams healthier over the past half-century. Cost-effective cleanup techniques could restore a stream to 95 percent of federal water quality standards, but under the Clean Water Act, even a group doing a cleanup project could be subject to lawsuits and held liable for the millions of dollars it might take to reach 100 percent.
In other words, under federal law, you are on the hook to achieve the federal water quality standard — even if you are a Good Samaritan cleaning up historic pollution.
Without legislation, the perfect will continue to be the enemy of the good. Instead of being cleaned up, these sites will continue to leach toxic pollutants into our waterways while groups with the ability to help remain sidelined.
Last year, a bipartisan group of lawmakers led by U.S. Sens. Martin Heinrich, D-New Mexico, and Jim Risch, R-Idaho, introduced the Good Samaritan Act, authorizing a new pilot program administered by the EPA that would permit up to 15 low-risk cleanups such as the one on American Fork Creek. While it received a hearing and earned the support of 18 cosponsors evenly split between Republicans and Democrats, it advanced no farther. Meanwhile, abandoned mines continue polluting the environment.
Congress must pass the Good Samaritan Act and finally accelerate the clean-up these abandoned mines for people, fish and wildlife.
Chris Wood is president and CEO of Trout Unlimited, a national coldwater conservation group.
