EPA may fund Riddle mine cleanup

Former site of Formosa mine is currently a toxic stew.

Funding may be restored for cleanup efforts this summer at the abandoned Formosa mine, which has been leaking acidic drainage into local creeks.

Denise Baker-Kercher, remediation project manager with the Environmental Protection Agency, said Thursday she learned this week that she may get between $500,000 and $750,000 from the EPA headquarters in Washington, D.C.

The Formosa mine site is on Silver Butte, several miles south of Riddle.

Formosa was abandoned by its foreign owners in the early '90s and has since been under the management of a parade of state and federal agencies. The EPA is the latest lead agency involved in the cleanup effort and the attempt to track down the responsible parties after the site was added to the list of Superfund hazardous waste sites in 2007.

EPA works with the Bureau of Land Management on oversight and cleanup of the 80-acre site, a checkerboard of public and private lands. EPA is in charge of the private lands, BLM operates the public lands.

Baker-Kercher won't have a full green light on the funding or know the exact amount until March. However, the tentative nod is big news, she said.

“I thought the site was still going to be shelved,” she said.

Funding for Formosa at the Region 10 level – serving Alaska, Idaho, Washington and Oregon — had been stalled, she reported earlier, as sites with more immediate threat to human health took precedence over sites such as Formosa, which poses a significant threat to the environment but has not contaminated local drinking water.

Baker-Kercher said contamination from acid mine drainage has been found in nearby Middle Creek and the south fork of Middle Creek.

Eric Quinn, Riddle's public works director, was happy to hear about the funding Friday morning. Quinn and other Riddle officials had been primed for a delay in funding and EPA movement at the site since October.

“Oh good,” he said. “We have this level of concern … I hate to see it go into a limbo state, so it's good to hear they got funding.”

In prior interviews with The News-Review, Baker-Kercher said she's concerned that the longer testing and cleanup is delayed, the greater the chance that drainage could reach the city's water source and become a threat to people's health.

The unexpected funding will go a long way in speeding up the process and mitigating that future, but it will likely still be several years before testing is complete.

“It has everything to do with how much money I get,” she said of the timeline.

With the windfall, Baker-Kercher is already outlining what she hopes to accomplish at the site this summer, including installing groundwater monitoring wells, more sampling of the ground and surface water and taking a hard look at the volume of mine tailings laying on the surface.

Mine tailings are the finely ground leftovers from the extraction process, which separates the valuable ore but leaves debris that can be laden with heavy metals and contribute to contaminated drainage.

During testing in October, Baker-Kercher said her crew's samples of the tailings would change how they address the site.

“We realized we had a ph of 2 – we're talking about something that's more acidic than Coca-Cola,” she said. “It would eat away at your shoes if you were standing in it now.”

A rough estimate of the volume puts the tailings on the surface outside the mine at 70,000 cubic yards, but Baker-Kercher said that doesn't account for width or depth of the piles, which is still unknown.

She guessed there could be at least twice the estimated amount.

With that in mind, she's hoping to devote half of the funding this year to investigate the tailings, in the hopes that if that issue is addressed more aggressively and simultaneous to dealing with contaminated ground water, it will reduce the amount of continued pollution.

“We may see a huge decrease in acid mine generation with just the tailings (removed),” she said. “I want to put (the tailings) on the fast track, address that as fast as I can so I can get a fuller picture.”

Dealing with the tailings issues will take similar funding for the next three years before all the investigation, studies, planning and decisions are complete and a detailed clean up proposal can be drafted.

After that, Baker-Kercher said there's still the issue of the tailings inside the mine and addressing ground water contamination.