BILLINGS – It may be hard to understand, but the historic June floods that destroyed roads, bridges, and buildings in Yellowstone National Park, resulting in its temporary closure, may also have been worse.
Flooding swept away Soda Butte Creek from tributaries of the Beartooth Mountains, carving rocks, trees and soil into a gushing stream. Upon entering the park near the northeast entrance, the creek is one of the main arteries of the Lamar River, which joins the Yellowstone River. approximately 11 miles downstream.
Had it not been for previous recovery paintings at historic mine and mill sites in the Cooke City area, flood waters could have dumped tons of heavy metals and acidic mine water into the Lamar and Yellowstone Rivers. This happened, on a small scale, in June 1950 when the tailings dam on the site of the former McLaren factory partially ruptured in a series of storms and floods.
“What this tailings pond would have looked like in 1950 was just a large, soaked, forged mass that looked like fine-grained mine tea jelly, and when the dam failed, those things would have spilled out of there in a very concentrated way. “said Grant Meyer, who wrote his doctoral thesis in 1993 on contamination of Soda Butte Creek’s tailings.
The 1950 flood deposited tailings dust and infected water up to 15 miles into the floodplain, where it can be washed away by rains like this year’s. Although the 1950 flood was small, Meyer said it had an effect on pollutants. It was significant. A 5-mile segment of Soda Butte Creek was eventually added to Montana’s list of degraded waters due to high levels of copper, iron, lead and manganese. oxidized iron deposits.
“The explanation I insist on this is that this is not something that happened in the old days, when we didn’t have smart environmental regulations,” Meyer said. “This happens all over the world, every year, adding the United States. There are messes from those dams of mining waste that still cause a lot of pollution.
The Montana Department of Environmental Quality estimates there are 7,000 abandoned mines in the state.
Not all waterways have as much voice and a coalition as Yellowstone National Park, Meyer said.
“It took national attention to make (the cleanup) happen,” he said.
More than two decades ago, MaryBeth Marks, a retired geologist with the Custer Gallatin National Forest, oversaw the Forest Service’s New World Mining District Recovery Project. The $23 million company sealed 27 galleries to the mine, covered tailings piles and revegeted mountainsides and bare roads. Approximately 430,000 cubic yards of mining waste were removed. The mining district, situated at elevations of 7,900 to 10,400 feet, covered 25,600 acres.
Work began in 1999 and continued until 2010 on a giant domain upstream of Soda Butte Creek.
“One of the most important things we did in the recovery work, which would actually be positive for any flooding, was to remove infected fabrics from the landscape and consolidate them in a waste repository, in a safe place,” Marks said. The purpose of this deposit was to require little maintenance, to be in a domain that is not affected by erosion of streams or other herbal factors. “
The other remediation supervised through the Forest Service to level, revegetate and load blank canopy soil in former mining areas, making sure the new soil is solid and less prone to erosion, he charged.
Downstream of the logging work, just east of Cooke City, the Montana Department of Environmental Quality oversaw a $20 million allocation to remove approximately 200,000 cubic meters of tailings from the site of McLaren’s 10-acre plant, treating one million gallons of infected groundwater in the process. The work, which also included rebuilding sections of Miller Creek and Soda Butte Creek, was completed in 2014.
Previously, the poorly constructed dam at the McLaren plant site had leaked metal-laden water into Soda Butte Creek for decades, wiping out most of the aquatic life without delay downstream. Because of the pollutants Meyer analyzed in his study, the creek was the only stream. altered through the Clean Water Act entering Yellowstone National Park.
Bill Snoddy, manager of DEQ’s deserted mining land segment, said he doesn’t think the old dam survived this spring’s flooding. Valley in Yellowstone National Park, a popular spot for tourists to see bison, wolves, and grizzly bears.
“It would have been an ecological crisis of almost biblical proportions,” Snoddy said. “The paintings proactively protected Soda Butte Creek and Lamar Valley from genuine serious problems. Imagine liquefying all the fines and washing them downstream. It would have been terrible.
Snoddy said that’s why the Abandoned Mining Land Section is there, to deal with such issues. As a result of state and federal paintings in the Cooke City area, Soda Butte Creek is the first creek in Montana to be removed from the list of altered bodies of water. Snoddy cited other projects to cover up the former Belt and Roundup coal mining tea as other examples of the department’s achievements.
“The list of those successes goes on and on,” he added, pointing to the removal of coal seam fires and even Butte’s owner’s loss of his garden to a mine cave as other examples. “Without the AML program, none of this could have happened. “
Mike Clark, retired executive director of the Greater Yellowstone Coalition, at the forefront of the fight that eventually led to the mine’s destruction. The war began when Crown Butte Mining proposed reopening old mines in the domain in the 1990s. Due to public opposition to mining so close to Yellowstone National Park and the edge of the Absaroka-Beartooth desert, the federal government signed an agreement to buy Crown Butte as part of an agreement under which the company would pay to clean up the domain.
“My sense is that those two separate incidents, the Henderson Mountain sell-off and the McLaren moat cleanup, averted a disaster,” Clark said.
Climate replacement is making weather patterns more unpredictable around the world, Clark noted, as evidenced by this summer’s fatal flooding in Kentucky and Pakistan, as well as prolonged drought in the West.
“We’re going to see more incidents like this,” he predicted.
A climate assessment for the Yellowstone region, released last year, predicts more extreme weather events as the planet warms, adding floods like the one that swept through Yellowstone.
“It’s getting a lot worse,” Kim Cobb, director of the Brown Institute for Environment and Society, The New York Times.
The Yellowstone flood caused by an atmospheric river stationary in the snowy mountains last spring. Rain on the snow caused immediate and heavy runoff.
Conversely, snow also exceeded elevations due to erosion, said Annica Brown, a geologist with Custer Gallatin National Forest. When surveying the domain around Cooke City in July, the only position that had been remedied where it saw flood damage was near the former Great Republic. In 2005, the infected soil was removed and the site recovered. Brown also oversees the long-term monitoring of revegetation projects in the region, as well as ongoing sampling of surface and groundwater.
“The erosion is the erosion of the world with those top mountains,” Marks said. “The key to forging recovery paints is to have solid shapes in place. “
Last year, Louisa Willcox, an environmentalist from Livingston, Montana, helped a rally to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the government’s takeover of Crown Butte Mining. millions of tons of waste. Because of the threats posed by the mine, in 1995 the World Heritage Committee designated Yellowstone as “endangered”.
Willcox said he visited the Cooke City domain this summer and was inspired by the recovery paints after June’s floods, noting that wildflowers such as the aquiline were once developing where McLaren’s former waste pond once stood.
“It’s smart news for everyone,” he said.