On
Montana’s Clark Fork River, pressure is mounting to demolish a
dam.
The Milltown dam sits seven miles upstream
from Missoula, where the Blackfoot River and the Clark Fork meet.
For years, it has acted as a plug, holding back 6.5 million cubic
yards of sediment contaminated with arsenic and heavy metals washed
away from mines and smelters in Butte and Anaconda, 120 miles to
the southeast (HCN, 1/19/98: Turning the Old West into the New
West).
Experts thought the dam was a safe
repository for the drifting poisons. But in February 1996, a
massive ice floe scoured the reservoir’s bottom and filled the
river with copper and other contaminants. Downstream fish
populations took a nosedive.
The dam also
prevents endangered bull trout from migrating up or down the river,
and this spring the Environmental Protection Agency announced it
may order the dam removed and the sediments cleaned up. The EPA has
asked the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which has studied breaching
four dams on the Snake River, to evaluate the
situation.
Local environmentalists, health
officials and the Missoula County commissioners support the
cleanup. Montana Power Company, the dam’s owner, told the Federal
Energy Regulatory Commission it has no interest in generating
electricity at the 2-megawatt plant, and has done nothing to
dissuade the discussions of tearing it out.
If
the dam is removed, truckers would have to move 150,000 loads of
contaminated soil. The EPA has identified a potential dump in the
hills north of Missoula. But at least one environmental group says
the toxic sediments should be shipped back where they came from –
to a Superfund site outside Anaconda.
“Any place
is bound to be better than the confluence of two rivers,” says
Tracy Stone-Manning, director of the Clark Fork
Coalition.
Copyright © 2000 HCN and Mark Matthews
This article appeared in the print edition of the magazine with the headline The Clark Fork unplugged.
Republish our articles for free, online or in print, under a Creative Commons license.
