BOARD01932

• Board Meeting Date: 5/22/2000
• Description: Flood Section - Rio Grande Basin - Alamosa River Watershed Project
• Board Meetings - Doc Type: Memo

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"There was hardly any place you could look on the
site that wasn't generating acid rock drainage," said
Hays Griswold, who led the EPA rescue effort.
"Wherever rainfall, snowfall would hit, you would
get puddles of it."

The snow was 50 inches deep and 150 percent of
normal on the peaks above Summitville, Griswold
said.

"So we were expecting a huge spring runoff,"
Griswold recalls. "We weren't disappointed when
spring came either."

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The solution was to get the water treatment plant to
work, but EPA and a private subcontractor were
hardly more successful than Galactic had been, and
much of the polluted water was released to
streams. But the federal agency was able to fashion
an additional water treatment plant out of the
equipment that had been used to extract gold from
the cyanide solution.

The water levels stabilized behind the dike.

Drainage from the old mine workings were plugged
to halt the flow of acid water into creeks, and the
water was routed through the treatment plants.

Then, in a campaign of massive earth-moving, the
mounds of acid-forming waste rock were piled back
into the pit from which they had been dug and
covered with clay. Other areas have been
revegetated.

But Victor Ketellapper, the EPA official who now
heads the cleanup, said that the treatment plants
can't handle the huge spring runoff, and that some
acidic water still gets into creeks.

Wyman, the Galactic executive, has concluded that
the mine was doomed from the start.

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"You could fiddle with it all you wanted, but you
never got over the problem that it was a dumb idea
to start (the mine) high up in the Rocky Mountains,"
he said.

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