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Land<IB> mine<IB> Page 5 of 20 Galactic's vision was for an enormous operation, far larger than any of the experimental versions tried in Colorado, e The plan was for Cropsy Creek to be rechanneled and a dike built across the small valley where the creek used to run, Using giant diglling equipment, hundreds of thousands of tons of ore would be heaped behmd the dike and bathed in the cyanide solution, The dike would keep the cyanide solution from flowing into area creeks, A layer of clay. covered by two I:ilyers of plastic, would keep the solution away from groundwater, The operation was intended to cover 2 square miles, according to the permit application, Only 1 square mile was developed before the company went bankrupt. Members of the state permitting board, who never visited Summitville, may not have grasped the enormity of what Galactic was proposing, said Dickie Lee Hullinghorst, the environmental representative on the panel. Environmentalists, who would carefully scrutinize such a project today, didn't seem to understand either, said Hullinghorst, now Boulder County's intergovernmental relations director. "There was just no recognition of the extreme difficulty you would have at this altitude," she said, Concedes Barry: 'We didn't have a lot of experience with cyanide heap- leaching. Nobody did," Galactic's promise was not only to reclaim its own site when mining was finished, but also to reduce the flow of acidic water from the abandoned mines that dotted the area, e That sounded good, Barry recalled, Acid mine drainage - the toxic liquid released when water flows over rock exposed to the air in mines throughout the West - was a statewide problem and still is, 'We go, 'Oh, terrific!' We'd been waiting for some man on a white horse to do that," Barry said, But it was a claim the company's own mining consultant said he warned Galactic officials not to make, . 'We do not show, and presently could not perform an analysis to support this contention," Phillip DeDycker of Denver-based Steffen Robertson and Kirsten wrote in a letter to Ed Roper. a Galactic officer. It was Roper who shepherded the company's application through the state bureaucracy. "There is a strong likelihood tMt the acid runoff generated in the area of the project will be significantly greater after the reclamation of the Galactic activities than that currently being produced from the old mine workings," DeDycker wrote to Roper in August 1984, shortly after the application was filed, "It appears that this impact Will be largely unmitigable," If mining officials learned the truth, DeDycker wamed, "the loss of credibility which the organization would suffer may likely retard the permitting process," e Roper said in his deposition that he doesn't recall the DeDycker letter. http://www.denver-mm.com/news/0507smmtl.shtrnl 5/7/00