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SUMMARY REPORT <br />WEST ELK <br />GEOCHEMICAL ASSESSMENT: <br />OBSERVATIONS AND INTERPRETATIONS <br />Harry H. Posey <br />Mazch 30, 1998 <br />INTRODUCTION <br />As a result of nearly coincident occurrences of a landslide on the Bear mine property, the <br />appearance of anever-before-noticed warm spring on the Bear Mine property, and pumping of <br />warm fault waters to an underground sump in the West Elk mine, which was up-dip from the <br />slide and the seep, the Division of Minerals and Geology issued a notice of violation to the <br />operators of the West Elk mine. The underlying supposition in this NOV was that the West Elk <br />Mine fault waters, which had been stored in the tmderground sump, seeped through an unmined <br />section of the B-seam coal between the two operations and exited at the toe of a landslide <br />complex on the Beaz Mine property. The Beep's appeazance had been predicted in a previous <br />West Elk Mine report as a probable hydrological consequence of the underground Bumping. <br />Reports and a presentation by Dr. Alan Mayo for the West Elk Mine concluded that the <br />fault waters in the West Elk Mine are not the source of the seep on the Bear mine property. This <br />conclusion is based on Dr. Mayo's interpretations of a relatively large set of water chemistry <br />data. The purpose of the current report is to try to resolve whether the Edwazds Portal Seep <br />water could have come from some combination of B East Mains fault water, Southeast Headgate <br />fault water and other local fault waters in the West Elk mine, or whether the fault waters can be <br />eliminated as the major source of the seep water. <br />Data which were evaluated include two reports by Mayo and Associates dated January <br />20, 1998, and a letter from Dr. Mayo dated February 20, 1998. To augment Dr. Mayo's <br />interpretations, several plausible mineral/fluid reaction mechanisms were evaluated in a <br />qualitative geochemical model. <br />This report concludes that the fault waters cannot be eliminated, unequivocally, as <br />sources of the seep water. Although the Mayo reports indicate that there are shifts in major <br />element and isotopic compositions between the fault and seep waters, many of these shifts are <br />either very minor -- as in the case of some of the isotopic compositions -- or seep water analyses <br />lie within the range of fault values -- as in the case of sodium. Furthermore, where there are <br />multiple analyses from a single source, variations in composition are sometimes evident. <br />Therefore, it is the range of compositions, not the average values, which must be modeled. <br />