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~ • • <br />October 16, 1996 <br />Page 2 <br />None of this has saved Hendricks from the increasingly heavy hand <br />of State regulators. Hendricks has been threatened with fines approaching <br />three quarters of a million dollars, many for violations of discharge standards for <br />metallic concentrations reaching as low as fractional parts per billion. <br />Fines of this size are normally associated with the most vicious or <br />violent of criminal acts, including major violent felonies. In Colorado, these <br />fines are threatened or levied because of a theoretical threat to the dust sized <br />hatchlings of an organism which is born and bred in a laboratory, the <br />Ceriodaphnia dubia, the invertebrate water flee. Quite simply, these organisms <br />begin to die (if laboratory bred to avoid exposure to metals) at zinc <br />concentrations above one part in ten million. Yet, thousands of dollars must be <br />spent on testing and accelerated testing to demonstrate that this delicate <br />organism, not native to these streams, cannot tolerate even minute zing: <br />concentrations. <br />Increasingly stringent discharge standards must be met bared on a <br />series of "conservative" assumptions built into mass balance equations which <br />determine effluent limits. For example, it is assumed that mine water i~; <br />discharged into a highly acidic environment, even where, in reality, it is pH <br />neutral. As a result, zinc at the Cross Mine is regulated at certain time:: to as <br />low as seven parts per hundred million, or grams per day in the entire <br />discharge. Even the Department of Health cannot explain how to treat water to <br />this cleanliness at costs of less than a million or more dollars for treatment. <br />Yet none of this relates to the actual health of the stream. Offers <br />by Hendricks to demonstrate the health of the stream using expensive trio-assay <br />techniques and fisheries studies have been rejected out of hand. In the position <br />of the Department of Health, the full weight of the law must stand behind <br />computer generated and highly artificial effluent limitations, whether they make <br />sense, or not. <br />In cases like Hendricks', this approach generates huge costs, and <br />absolutely no measurable benefits. The costs to Colorado's mining industry are <br />much higher. <br />Years of effort between Hendricks' environmental scientist:: and the <br />State have not yielded a solution. The Board of Directors of Hendricks' new <br />parent has ordered that the operation be divested due to the risk of holding <br />