Ready, fire, aim: Daines and Pruitt to fix Berkeley Pit disaster

As a longtime adversary of the Environmental Protection Agency, Donald Trump’s selection of Scott Pruitt to head the EPA should give Montanans pause. More to the point and close to home, our own U.S. Sen. Steve Daines is willing to diminish the billion-dollar Superfund cleanup of the upper Clark Fork watershed for a soundbite.

Just before voting to confirm Pruitt to head the EPA, Daines made a startling promise - he and Pruitt will clean up the Berkeley Pit: “It has been on the list for over 20 years. It is time to fix it.”

Evidently Daines, in his eagerness to condemn the EPA for complacency, missed the fact that EPA, with the support of Montana Department of Environmental Quality, selected a remedy for the Berkeley Pit way back in 1994. Here are the underlying facts that lie hidden in plain view.

Fact: In the Record of Decision for the pit, the agencies acknowledged that contaminated groundwater filling the pit could never be “cleaned up” because it is technically impracticable to do so.

That reality bears repeating - the Berkeley Pit can’t be cleaned up.

Instead, the remedy entails pumping and treating extremely contaminated pit water to constantly keep up with inflow to the pit and discharging the cleaned water into Silver Bow Creek, headwaters of the Clark Fork of the Columbia. And it will continue in perpetuity - a legal term for eternity.

Fact: The parties that are responsible for that remedy and for paying the bill - oil giant British Petroleum and the current mining company, Montana Resources - willingly signed up for that remedy under a consent decree, which was approved by a federal court in 2002.

Why willingly? Because technical impracticability evaluation is a regulatory tool that EPA established to protect industry from ineffective remedies or clean ups that are “inordinately costly.”

The evaluation looked at four scenarios and rejected three. It was simple to discard the truly absurd notion of removing the source of acid and toxins - the ore body itself. That would require a pit 60 times bigger than the Berkeley and would remove Butte from the face of the earth.

Less absurd but still not feasible - fill up the Berkeley Pit and the inter-connected 10,000 miles of underground mine workings with grout or neutralizing lime. The price tag for grouting or neutralizing - somewhere between $9 billion and $13 billion, with the caveat that even at that price it might not be effective.

Through that process of elimination, it becomes evident that there is only one reliable remedy - manage by pumping and treating mine-impacted water forever.

Fact: The Berkeley Pit is not “the largest Superfund site in the United States,” as Daines so heedlessly stated. It is, in fact, at the very headwaters of what is arguably the largest Superfund Complex. Mining damages to the upper Clark Fork of the Columbia extend 120 miles, from Butte to Missoula - the result of over 100 years of unregulated mining. Without question, the EPA, Montana DEQ and British Petroleum have been largely successful in tackling a world-class environmental problem.

The Clark Fork Complex and the Berkeley Pit are environmental cautionary tales for Montana voters.

If we treasure clean rivers and a healthy environment, we will depend on political leaders who are brave and willing enough to tackle the complexities of environmental management and regulation through sound science. Leaders who recognize that the decisions we make today will have consequences that last forever.

Steve Daines has shown his stripes.

In Montana we like to say that whiskey is for drinking, water is for fighting. Montana voters need to elect fighters who aim carefully before pulling the trigger.