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| Jul 29, 2010 - 06:39 PM |
Queen City News - Helena's FREE Weekly Newspaper |
Helena, Montana |
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The State of Montana and an army of remediation contractors have cleaned up about 40 percent of Silver Bow Creek, a 21.6-mile stretch of polluted water between Butte and Warm Springs Ponds that is part of the largest Superfund site in the country.
Things have gone so well since 1999 when the state, federal government and tribes reached a $215-million natural resource damage settlement with Atlantic Richfield Co. that those overseeing the cleanup anticipate returning some of the $80 million plus interest designated for the Silver Bow segment back to state coffers.
“To date, we have spent close to $35 million, and we’ve got approximately $93 million left,” said Joel Chavez, Helena-based project officer for the Department of Environmental Quality. “We think we will have a lot of money (left) and will be able to give some back to NRD (the Natural Resource Damage Program).”
Greg Mullen, environmental specialist with the NRD Program in Helena, said the leftover funds could either go back into Silver Bow Creek projects or be spent on restoration work somewhere else in the Upper Clark Fork River Basin.
“There’s maintenance, operations, and greenway trails,” he noted. According to documents Mullen provided, NRD has spent or obligated nearly $30 million on 28 environmental restoration projects underway in the basin between 2000 and 2004.
The work on Silver Bow Creek started in fall 1999 and began with removal and remediation of the first mile of the stream channel, Chavez said. Subsequent work has been in three-mile chunks.
Unlike many Superfund sites in Montana, the state has the lead role in cleaning up Silver Bow Creek, with oversight by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.
So far, 1,300 acres of denuded floodplain has been scraped away and replaced with fresh soil, the original stream grade has been restored and replanted, and the riparian areas wrapped and stabilized with a coconut fabric called “coir” that disintegrates over time.
“This is the biggest total floodplain removal and restoration on the face of the planet,” Chavez said.
The before-and-after photos are dramatic. Stretches of Silver Bow Creek that were barren of both vegetation and fish since the early 1900s are now reconstructed and replanted with mostly native plants, and suckers and insects are beginning to show up.
Chavez said workers stunned fish this week in some areas of the creek to see what species have moved into the refurbished digs. “We’ll shock the areas that are done to see if we’ve got more than suckers now,” he explained. “When we started, there weren’t any.”
Those involved believe the cleanup work has benefited by having competitive bids from local firms, warmer-than-normal winter weather, and even some unexpected strokes of good luck.
“I’ve been surprised at how well things have gone,” Chavez noted. “We thought vegetation was a goner, and then we got miraculous rains in the midst of drought.”
Some aspen have volunteered at the reclaimed site as well, most likely blowing off the east ridge above Butte, he added. “They’re there, and we didn’t plant them,” he said. “Nature’s that way if you give it a break.”
With such a huge project, not everything has gone smoothly, Chavez acknowledged. “Some of the things we’ve done are fairly innovative, and we have had to communicate why we’re doing it this way.”
There continues to be local opposition to transporting any more polluted soils to the Opportunity Ponds repository near Anaconda, a feeling exacerbated by recently announced plans to bring in by rail an additional 2.6-million cubic yards of contaminated sediments to be dug out from behind Milltown Dam starting next year. That’s approximately the same amount taken there to date from the Silver Bow project.
Some residents of the area, between Interstate 90 and the old smelter, are tired of being the dumping ground for environmental pollution and are concerned about the cumulative effect on their town. As a result, they formed the Opportunity Citizens Protection Association and hope to cash in on some of the Milltown redevelopment money.
Meanwhile, communicating what the state has been doing on Silver Bow Creek has been successful enough to earn the project two significant awards, one national and one international.
The first is from the National Association of Environmental Professionals, which recognized Mullen for the “Silver Bow Creek Remediation and Restoration: A Superfund Success Story” with its National Environmental Excellence Award earlier this year. Both he and Chavez went to Washington, D.C, in April to accept it.
And now, out of 1,000 entries from around the world, the project has won a Green Organisation “Green Apple Award” for innovative technologies in reclamation. Chavez said Tim Reilly, DEQ’s manager of Silver Bow Creek east side field operations, will accept the award on behalf of the state early next month at the House of Commons in London. Shellie Haaland is field operations manager for the project’s west side.
The Silver Bow cleanup should be done, weather permitting, by 2011, Chavez said. “That’s within the 13-year time limit predicted,” he said, adding that the work was originally scheduled to begin in 1998 and finish in 2010.
“We have to keep our eyes open because it’s very costly work, and you’ve always got to look for savings without short-cutting the work,” he said. “It’s a work in progress.”
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The Queen City News is published every Wednesday in Helena, MT, by Mossback Media, LLC.
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