When the Dakota Mining Corp. abandoned its Stibnite
gold mine in the rugged mountains of the Payette National Forest
last year, it left a mess behind. Shacks were stuffed with barrels
brimming with unknown chemicals; it took a bomb squad from Mountain
Home Air Force Base to remove one bottle of particularly volatile
acid. Almost a century of mining gold, tungsten and antimony at the
site had left a 76-acre valley floor buried under 3.7 million cubic
yards of spent ore and pools of cyanide-contaminated water – all at
the headwaters of the East Fork of the South Fork of the Salmon
River.
Clearly, says Jim Egnew of the Payette
National Forest, “The company was not a good steward. We asked them
to leave. They were in no position to do anything.”
Dakota Mining Corp. did forfeit $721,000 in
cleanup bonds, but that won’t cover the high-elevation reclamation
project. Cleanup at the 240-acre Stibnite site is expected to cost
an extra $200,000 and take two years. Water monitoring costing
$20,000 a year may last another 10 years. Taxpayers will have to
pay what the company doesn’t cover. Scott Brown of the Idaho
Conservation League in Boise says that could have been avoided if
the state Department of Environmental Quality had asked for a
cleanup bond of more than $1,800 per acre during the last mine
expansion.
“We tried to raise concerns,” he says,
“and we were more or less blown off at the time.”
*Roger Phillips
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline Paying for a gold mine.
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