Creede confronts an ugly past

CREEDE • From above this historic mining town, Willow Creek is a river of poisons, with cadmium, lead and zinc-contaminated water flowing at 33 cubic feet per second.

Devoid of fish, which can't live in the toxic water, the creek runs through the heart of town before washing out across a deltalike wasteland and into the Rio Grande, source of drinking water for 5 million people downstream.

In a town that loves its history, the creek is a constant reminder of the ugly side of the boomtown days. Silver was struck here in 1889, and the ensuing rush of fortune-seeking miners swelled its population to 10,000. They dumped waste rock on the mountainside and carved tunnels to drain metal-laden underground wa- ter into Willow Creek.

The main culprits of Willow Creek's woes are the Commodore Mine waste rock pile, an unstable mountainside of discarded rocks that threatens to wash down into town in a flood, and the Nelson Tunnel, which directs the contaminated mine drainage into the creek.

For a decade, this tiny community - Creede's yearround population is 409 - has worked to clean up the mess, in hopes of stopping the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency from declaring the town a Superfund site, a designation reserved for the nation's most polluted places. Community leaders had heard horror stories of what happens when an area is declared a Superfund site: The agency steps in, bullies the locals, mandates unpopular cleanup measures and the Superfund label stays attached for decades.

But this spring, the EPA finally added Creede's old mines to the Superfund list.

The fact that people are happy about that shows how some projects are just too big for any one town to tackle, and how the EPA may have shaken its once-tarnished image.

Learning by example

In many ways, this is a tale of two cities.

Leadville, 111 miles to the north, had its silver rush in the 1870s, and was left with a honeycomb network of mines above town that were never capped, and soil contaminated with lead from smelter operations. Because of high metal levels in the Arkansas River and dangerously unhealthy amounts of lead in the soil, the EPA declared the entire city a Superfund site in 1983.

The fighting hasn't stopped since.

The Superfund designation got Leadville cleaner water for the Arkansas River and treatment plants for mine drainage - as well as a host of regulations, including blood-lead tests for children, and the stigma of being a Superfund site, something community leaders can't shake. Lawsuits over who is responsible for the pollution have yet to be settled.

"We spend a considerable amount of time, effort and energy with regard to delisting, still after 25 years," said Lake County Commissioner Ken Olsen, a Superfund critic.

The EPA has refused to remove Leadville from the Superfund list. The agency also insists the blood tests continue, though, Olsen said, only one or two children a year out of 400 have high levels, usually traced to a source other than soil.

His suggestion to a community flirting with Superfund: "My first advice is try to do everything you could to not be a listed Superfund site. If you are, I think you better be in for a long, long, long community struggle to de-list your Superfund site."

People in Creede were well aware of Leadville's story when, in 1998, an EPA worker stood up at a public meeting and informed them the agency was considering designating the entire town of Creede as a Superfund site.

Zeke Ward, a ranch manager at the time, was at the meeting and recalls the shock people felt. After all, Willow Creek had been the source of their drinking water for 90 years, until 1991.

"Local government began to ask the question, ‘Are there any alternatives?'" said Ward, now a Mineral County commissioner. "We can't do nothing. That's not an option. So doing it ourselves through voluntary and cooperative measures was preferable to a large-scale Superfund project."

Ward found himself elected chairman of the newly created Willow Creek Reclamation Project.

An enormous task

In Creede, most locals seem to either have been miners themselves or had family members who were.

But since the last mine, the Bulldog Mine, was shuttered in 1985 because of low silver prices, Creede has built itself on tourism.

The mission of the reclamation project was to remove the need for Superfund designation. Just how to do that took four years of study. But it took only one summer of sampling to identify the main culprits.

The Commodore Mine is a mile out of Creede on the well-traveled Bachelor Loop road. Well-preserved and mighty-looking, it is the most-photographed spot in Mineral County, Ward said. It is also to blame for the waste rock that covers the mountainside and washes into Willow Creek with each rain, as well as the Nelson Tunnel, which was completed in 1899 to drain the mine.

The entire site is about 5 acres, though the tunnel drains many miles of underground mine passages.

The project volunteers knew they couldn't tackle those mammoth polluters on their own. So they focused on smaller problems, places where rain and snow melt-off regularly washed waste rock into the creek.

They dug channels between rock piles and the creek to direct runoff. They built walls to hold back rocks, hiring contractors to do the heaviest work. They planted willows along stream banks to hold the soil together and prevent erosion of contaminated soil. Ward estimates they spent $1.5 million, most of which came from grants.

All along, they knew they would have to deal eventually with the 800-pound gorilla.

"Unless we fix the Nelson Tunnel, everything else is a waste of time," Ward said. "But unless we fix everything else, fixing Nelson Tunnel is a waste of time."

It was actually the federal Clean Water Act hampering them. A 1993 court ruling said that anyone who tries to remediate water at an abandoned mine becomes legally liable for discharges there forever. Efforts in Congress in 2006 and 2007 to pass so-called "good Samaritan" legislation, legal protection for groups and government agencies that want to clean up mines, degenerated into partisan squabbling and failed.

After the 2007 legislation failed, Creede project leaders began discussing what had been previously unthinkable: Superfund.

The EPA, which had been working with the project from the outset, was happy to oblige. Colorado Gov. Bill Ritter sent a letter of support, and in March, the agency proposed just the Nelson Tunnel and Commodore rock pile for Superfund, not the entire town.

"It's an exceptional community, and they've done a lot," said Gwen Christiansen, the EPA's National Priorities List coordinator for the region.

The designation was up for 60-day public comment this spring. The only comment was from the community group, now known as the Willow Creek Reclamation Committee, which gave a tacit endorsement.

The agency this year will begin stabilizing the Commodore waste rock. The bigger problem of the Nelson Tunnel will take longer, and officials don't know what form the remediation will take.

Mixed feelings

Four months after the EPA announcement, there are mixed feelings about Superfund.

Kevin Leggitt, owner of Rio Grande Angler Fly Shop, doesn't think it will keep people from visiting.

Willow Creek is dead for four miles, but it has brook trout above the Nelson Tunnel, and he said he would like to see the entire stream be alive again.

"We're just surrounded by a pristine environment and this happens to be an eyesore," Leggitt said. "I can see the only way it would ever get done is to have it listed (as a Superfund site.)"

"If you're going to clean up the discharge from the tunnel, the standard method for doing that is to build a treatment plant," said Don Dustin, a project volunteer and retired chemist. "The cost of running a plant forever is, by definition, infinite. What funding agency is going to say, ‘We'll step in and spend infinite amounts of money to protect an insignificant twomile stretch of creek?'"

J.B. Anderson, a member of the reclamation project from the outset, is in it for the fish. He wants to get trout back in Willow Creek, even if it means the risks of ceding local control over the remediation to the EPA.

"They're ridiculously slow, inefficient and expensive," Anderson said. "It takes them forever and it costs them a fortune to do anything."

EPA officials acknowledge community relations in Leadville could have been better, and say these days, the agency works more closely with communities, rather than dictating remedies from on high.

"This might be a way for the EPA to turn around the reputation it has," Creede City Manager Clyde Dooley said. "Creede might be a poster child."

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Contact the Writer: 476-1605 or srappold@gazette.com  

More Details

Pollutants: Willow Creek has levels of cadmium, lead and zinc that exceed health standards for fish and birds. Because of the metals, no fish live in the creek between the Nelson Tunnel and the Rio Grande, a 4-mile stretch.
Proposed for Superfund: March 2008

Nelson Tunnel/Commodore waste rock superfund site

Size:. About 5 acres, though the tunnel itself is thought to go more than 2 miles beneath the mountain
History:. The tunnel was completed in 1899 to drain the Commodore Mine, which operated from 1891 to 1976 and was known as one of the greatest silver mines on Earth.