Riddle, OR's Abandoned Formosa Mine Continues to Contaminate Water

August 29, 2010 - Three thousand feet above the city of Riddle is Silver Butte, a quiet mountaintop with panoramic views of Douglas County's vast forestland. The mountain is breathtaking. It's also home to one of the most contaminated sites in the nation — the abandoned Formosa Mine.

"If you walk in the water flowing out of the mine, the soles of your shoes will be mush," said Denise Baker-Kercher, the Environmental Protection Agency official in charge of the cleanup. "That's how acidic the mine drainage is."

When the mine closed in 1993, the operators failed to clean up the waste they left behind after extracting copper and zinc. For nearly two decades, rain and ground water have been absorbing the waste and flowing into Middle Creek at the base of Silver Butte.

The site produces each year five million gallons of acid drainage, containing up to 30,000 pounds of dissolved copper, zinc and other metals, according to an EPA study. The runoff has poisoned Middle and Cow creeks, killing all aquatic life along 18 miles of habitat.

"If the problem is left unattended, the contamination will eventually reach Riddle's city water source," Baker-Kercher said.

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Questions Persist for Asbestos-ravaged Libby, Montana

May 24, 2010 - Gayla Benefield and Eva Thomson are sisters who have grown used to death. For two decades, they have watched asbestos from a nearby vermiculite mine strangle their parents, Thomson’s husband, an aunt, several in-laws and numerous neighbors and friends.

The sisters’ town, Libby, population 3,000, has emerged as the deadliest Superfund site in the nation’s history.

Health workers tracking Libby’s plight estimate that at least 400 people have died of asbestos-related illnesses — from W.R. Grace mine workers and family members who breathed in the dust they brought home in their clothes, to those who played as kids in waste piles dumped by the company behind the community baseball field. Some 1,500 locals and others who were exposed have chest X-rays revealing the faint, cloudy shadows of asbestos scarring on their lungs.

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Polluted Kansas Mining Town Seeks $3.5 Million From Federal Government to Buy Out Residents

August 24, 2009- It is barely a town. A ghostly remnant of nearly a century of mining is more like it — not much left except for a few dilapidated houses nestled amid mountains of gray mine wastes. Massive sinkholes and uncapped shafts dot the landscape, a deadly reminder for the unwary of the abandoned underground mining caverns below. The smell of sulfur wafts across the road. A creek runs red from minerals left behind by long-gone lead- and zinc-mining operations.

Children have grown up here swimming in some of the 200-feet deep sinkholes where the blue water is so acidic that for years people thought they were getting a sunburn playing in them. Toxic dunes of lead-ridden crushed rock and sand called chat have beckoned a generation of motorcycle and four-wheeler enthusiasts.

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