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