Hilton Ranch Community Organization

As I uncover more articles relating to public funds being spent to clean up the mess these mining companies continuously leave us I will publish them here. I'd still like to know how they clean up GROUNDWATER?

Interesting history of the Rosemont land purchase: (FOR RICHER)

More than 2,700 acres in the Santa Rita Mountains that Pima County had been considering for preservation may now become a copper mine.

Augusta Resource Corp., a Vancouver, British Columbia-based mining-exploration firm, announced Thursday that it had agreed to buy the 2,760 acres known as Rosemont Ranch for $20.8 million from local developer Triangle Ventures LLC.

Triangle Ventures bought the property less than a year ago from Tucson-based mining company Asarco Inc. for $4.8 million.

Yoram Levy, one of Triangle's partners and the son-in-law of prominent local developer Don Diamond, had said he would prefer to sell Rosemont to the county so it could preserve the area and had offered the land at $11.5 million. (Seems if he was that concerned he would not have been looking for a 6.7 Million dollar profit)

But a county citizens advisory committee considered that price too high, and Rosemont, an assortment of parcels almost entirely within the Coronado National Forest about 25 miles south of Tucson, slipped down the list of land the county will use bond money to buy and protect, said Linda Mayro, Pima County's cultural-resource manager. Read the full article http://www.theminingnews.org/news.cfm?newsID=580

Whose land is it anyway, and why don't we get anything but the cleanup? (FOR POORER)

The story of the Western Shoshone is a long lesson in the ways that law can fail indigenous people threatened by mineral interests http://www.earthworksaction.org/westernshoshonenation.cfm

Read about the Mining Laws of 1872. You will see that we don't get anything but the bill to clean up the mess http://www.earthworksaction.org/news.cfm?newsID=27. watch the National Geographic video U.S. Mining Law contested http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2008/02/080201-hardrock-video-wc.html

read about "modern mining" and its excellent track record. If we are counting on high copper prices to make the Rosemont mine economically feasible, what happens when the price of copper drops. Will we be another grouse creek mine http://www.earthworksaction.org/pubs/ModernMiningFINAL.pdf

The Grouse Creek mine, located adjacent to the largest wilderness complex in the lower 48 states, was heralded as a "state of the art" mine when it began operations in 1994. Just three years later, the mine shut its doors -- producing no profits and leaving behind severe environmental problems.

Hecla Mining Company (Hecla), owner and operator of the Grouse Creek Mine, began construction in 1993. Before it produced its first ounce of gold, construction activities caused a major landslide, burying 100 yards of Jordan Creek -- a stream federally designated as critical salmon habitat. Read the article http://www.bettermines.org/cvgrousecreek.cfm

Here is a typical scenario for a mine (FOR POORER):

The Anaconda Mining Company, predecessor of the Atlantic Richfield Company, began mining activities at the Yerington Mine Site in Nevada in the early 1950's. From 1953 to 1965, operations at the facility consisted of mining the Yerington Pit for copper oxide. The Anaconda Mining Company sold the property in 1978.

Miscellaneous mining and processing continued around the site from 1978 to 1989 at which time Arimetco began its leaching operations. The method used by Arimetco to extract copper from copper oxide ore involved leaching with acid and other solutions, followed by electro plating the copper oxides sheets.

Arimetco built and ran five lined heap-leach pads, where tailings and low-grade ore were phased for leaching. After filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in January of 1997, Arimetco continued its copper recovery operations through November 1999. Arimetco abandoned the site in January 2000 leaving the five-leach pads with leach solution still in the system.

Since January 2000, the Nevada Division of Environmental Protection (NDEP) has been managing the mine site to ensure that leach solution are appropriately dealt with (FOR A POORER PUBLIC). NDEP, with cooperation from other parties, has also made improvement to limit site access and to reduce fugitive emissions. Read the full article http://ndep.nv.gov/yerington/history.htm

PHELPS DODGE impact on Green Valleys water supply (FOR POORER)

This article is from March 22, 1993 gives Phelps Dodge a "D" in mining. They contaminated the water supply for Bisbee from the copper queen mine tailings that they failed to reclaim when the mine was closed. The tailings pile now leaches contaminants into the ground water.

the state of Arizona had forced the company to undertake a reclamation project at one mine and the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency had had to threaten to list two others as Superfund sites before Phelps Dodge would deign to clean them up.

Phelps Dodge Company vice president Scott Crozier said the MPC report "contains numerous inaccuracies. We had attempted to provide information to the MPC that was accurate and factual, and they have chosen to include only what they saw fit to include."

Crozier said it was true that ground water contamination had occurred around the Copper Queen mine, but it was "certainly not as extensive as they would like people to believe." (Good call Scott, why in 2008 has the situation worsened?) Read the full article. http://www.hcn.org/servlets/hcn.Article?article_id=2136 .

Phelps Dodge Sierrita Mine is contaminating Green Valleys water supply and they promised to fix it in this June 2006 article http://www.uswaternews.com/archives/arcquality/6pheldodg6.html .

More on Phelps Dodge, According to the Groundwater Awareness League Complaint issued 2/7/2007, now that the environment is trashed Phelps Dodge Corporation is planning to sell to Freeport MacMORON http://www.g-a-l.info/ComplaintOne.htm .

Now Green Valley has higher Uranium, Cadmium, and Thallium levels in their water supply, and the culprit is Phelps Dodge's Sierrita and Twin Buttes mines. But rest assured, Phelps Dodge spokesman Ken Vaughn said the company is working with the EPA and ADEQ to assess the uranium plume. He said uranium occurs naturally in the area, and the contamination may not be from mining. "We're going to work with them to understand where this is coming from and why," he said. The federal and state limit for drinking water is 0.03 milligrams per liter. The most recent data from 2004 show one of three monitoring wells on the Sierrita site at just over the limit while a second is more than double the maximum. As reported by the Arizona Daily Star on 2/20/2007 http://www.azstarnet.com/sn/printDS/170040 .

Sounds like Phelps Dodge is right on top of the testing if the most recent data was from 2004, and why wasn't the public warned then, not 3 years later?

On June 29, 2007 an article from the Arizona Department of Environmental quality informs us that they are making it more difficult for Phelps Dodge to get a water permit http://lists.azdeq.gov/pipermail/media/2007-June/000056.html .

Back to the Copper Queen a more recent article from the Arizona Department of Environmental quality dated 1/25/2008 once again addresses the Bisbee and Naco water supplies, guess 15 years was not long enough for Phelps Dodge to learn how to prevent contamination of groundwater. Wonder what Phelps Dodge Company vice president Scott Crozier would have to say now? http://www.azdeq.gov/function/news/2008/download/0125.pdf .

Department of Justice had to get involved here, wonder how much that cost the taxpayers

Looks like it took the Courts to make Kennecott do anything! In an article dated July 9, 2007 the US Department of Justice issued this release about the second largest mining company in the US., the Kennecott Utah Copper Corporation (Kennecott), and its groundwater pollution from past mining operations. The Bingham Canyon Mine is located 30 miles southwest of Salt Lake City. The proposed consent decree requires Kennecott to meet three major objectives for the cleanup of the OU 2 Zone, a groundwater plume. The Zone A plume is the portion of the groundwater aquifer contaminated by acidic waste water that has leached from waste rock dumps and that has been contaminated by other wastewaters generated from operations in the mining district. The plume of contamination is about 20 square miles in size with a highly acidic core area of two-square-miles with high concentrations of sulfates and heavy metals. It will take 4 DECADES to cleanup. How do you clean up groundwater? Has it ever been done successfully? read the full article http://www.usdoj.gov/opa/pr/2007/July/07_enrd_488.html