An Excerpt from Summitville Superfund Site: The Role of Mediation in Community Empowerment by Lucy Moore The Summitville Superfund Site sits high in the San Juan Mountains in south-central Colorado. Since 1870, Summitville has been a magnet for gold seekers, but at an altitude of almost 12,000 feet mining has always been a risky business, both in physical and economic terms. An equally precarious livelihood for other early immigrants to the region lay downstream of Summitville in the Alamosa River Watershed. Here, for generations, farmers and ranchers have struggled to make a living and protect their rural lifestyle in the beautiful San Luis Valley, surrounded by spectacular peaks that are the source of the Rio Grande River and its tributaries, including the Alamosa. It’s a hard life, they say, but the beauty of the valley, the fish in the river, the cranes migrating in the spring and fall, and the sense of community all make it worthwhile. In 1984, the Summitville Consolidated Mining Company opened a large open-pit gold mine, which operated until 1992 when the company abandoned the site and declared bankruptcy. Uncontrolled acid mine drainage from the site carried contamination down the river to the valley below. The exposed earthen materials from the mining operations generated acid, which in turn mobilized a variety of metals including copper, zinc, and aluminum that contaminated the river system. The damage was devastating to the local community: fish died in the river, irrigating sprinkler systems turned into metal lacework, and property values dropped, making survival for independent farmers and ranchers even more difficult. Although the responsible party, the mining company, fled to Canada, cleanup at the site began immediately. The mine was declared a superfund site in 1994, and the US Environmental
2 Protection Agency and the State of Colorado jointly oversaw ongoing cleanup activities. With the mining company bankrupt and extradition denied by the Canadian courts, 90 percent of the bill was paid by the Superfund trust fund, and the remaining 10 percent from the Colorado Hazardous Substances Response Fund. As part of the Superfund requirements, a technical advisory group was formed to serve as liaison between the community and the two government agencies. The technical advisory group has been an important voice for the community anxious about Summitville, and community representatives serving in the group continue to actively pursue the community’s priorities for cleanup. How Clean Is Clean? No one disputes that damage has been caused by the drainage from the Summitville mine. But it is also well known that acid drainage from rocks occurs naturally in these mineral-rich mountains. The same effect can be caused by water flowing from a mine over large amounts of disturbed earth and rock, and by water flowing over earth and rock that is not disturbed. In this case, the greatly increased surface of rock exposed during mining has raised the level of acid drainage to Superfund status. But the question remains: How much of the total contamination is the result of Summitville mining activities, and how much is naturally occurring? To what degree must the State of Colorado and the EPA clean up the Alamosa River? How clean is clean? Understandably, the technical advisory group strongly advocates a thorough cleanup. Livelihoods and quality of life of those who live in the region, and in some cases family histories and culture, are bound up in the future of the Alamosa River. Community members believe that the river must be restored at least to 1984 quality before the opening of Summitville. The State
3 and EPA also agree that the restoration must meet predisaster standards. But, what are those standards? How clean was the Alamosa River before the mine existed? Without baseline data, the answer became a moving target. Those who lived in the region could only describe what life was like then and how it should be now. The State and the EPA felt the best approach to determine an appropriate level of cleanup was sophisticated computer modeling and analysis of comparable sites, factoring in key conditions such as temperature, turbidity, flow rate, and presence of other minerals. In the eyes of the community, however, the government approach was at best hocus-pocus, at worst outright deceit—an exercise designed to keep costs to a minimum but do little else. The Triennial Review As this debate was heating up, the State of Colorado announced that the Triennial Review of Surface Water Standards was on the horizon. Every three years, they explained, the federal Clean Water Act requires states to review standards for all their streams and make changes to stream classifications as necessary. With the Alamosa River degraded by Summitville mine drainage, the State Department of Public Health and Environment was preparing an analysis of water quality in the Alamosa River at a pre-1984 target, with recommendations to downgrade certain segments of the river unable to meet the existing standards. If a segment of the river could not support fish, for instance, but was designated as “cold water fishery class I,� the State would recommend reclassification of that segment for a less-stringent use. The issue of water quality standards in the Alamosa River immediately ignited the community. They saw yet another nail in the coffin, another sign that the State of Colorado was not serious about cleaning up the river to an acceptable standard but only interested in cutting
4 costs. From the State’s perspective, the Triennial Review was a process that bound them to follow certain steps of analysis and to make certain recommendations to ensure that the designated uses matched the quality of a river. The EPA, with oversight responsibility for the Superfund site, was concerned with the technical advisory group’s adversarial role with respect to the water quality standard review process. With the technical advisory group and the State of Colorado at war with each other, the restoration and remediation process at Summitville bogged down. In an effort to help the two parties come to agreement on water quality standards to be proposed at the Triennial Review, EPA convened a process and hired a mediator.
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