Mine Planned In Wilderness Proponents Cite Increased Employment, While Detractors Fear Environmental Damage

The Cabinet Mountains Wilderness Area has the Clark Fork River at its feet, grizzly bears on its shoulders, Lake Pend Oreille in its line of sight.

And valuable metals in its veins.

Asarco Inc. is proposing to extract that silver and copper by digging a shaft into the heart of the wilderness.

If approved, the Rock Creek Mine would create a mountain of tailings in a forested playground. The pile of finely crushed rock would cover 340 acres and climb half-again higher than The Coeur d’Alene Resort.

The mine also would bring 355 well-paying jobs for up to 30 years in Sanders County. Some of those workers likely would come from North Idaho’s Bonner and Shoshone counties, home to former miners.

Layoffs in the timber industry have left the area starving for jobs. So, many people welcome the possibility of Rock Creek opening someday.

“Absolutely we want it here,” said Cherie Hooten, Sanders County commissioner. “It would be a very good boost to the economy. We have one of the highest unemployment rates in the state up here.”

Hooten and the county want to work with Asarco to make sure the Noxon area’s infrastructure could handle hundreds of people moving in to work the mine. Hooten said if the mine follows Montana’s water quality laws, Asarco should win approval from those who have doubts about the project.

Others consider Rock Creek’s economic bounty too uncertain, the environmental price too high.

“I don’t think people here want to trade clean water for jobs,” said Diane Williams of the Clark Fork Coalition, who is concerned water would be diverted from mine shafts to the river.

Asarco is proposing to filter nutrients and trace metals from the water using experimental technology.

Mine project manager Dave Young referred to the bioreactive treatment system as a “witch’s brew” of sand, hay, alfalfa, sawdust, cow manure and bacteria. He chuckled at the description, but insisted the technology will be perfected by the time mine development begins. That’s 1997 at the earliest.

Williams, on the other hand, pointed to Asarco’s environmental record, which includes 20 sites on the Superfund cleanup list - including Kellogg’s Bunker Hill, Tacoma’s Commencement Bay and Butte’s Silver Bow.

“I didn’t make Asarco’s track record. They did. …,” Williams said. “We don’t have faith that there will be clean water coming out of the pipe.”

Any mining company that’s been around for long has had environmental problems, responded Young. Asarco, he said, is determined to avoid any more expensive messes.

“The stockholders and the board of directors said we’re not going to create any more Superfund sites.”

The debate between Young and Williams is bound to be repeated many times over, including discussions at two upcoming public hearings.

The first will be on Nov. 14 in Noxon, a small town just down state Highway 200 from Rock Creek. The second will be Nov. 15 in Sandpoint, some 50 miles to the west.

The hearings are being held by the U.S. Forest Service and the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. Both must issue permits before work can begin on the mine, whose surface facilities would lie partly upon Kootenai National Forest land.

The Forest Service manages the wilderness area, too.

Public comment is being taken on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement for the Rock Creek project. It includes four alternatives.

The first alternative is to do nothing.

The second is to proceed with the mine as Asarco prefers to do it.

The third and the fourth would allow mining, although with greater environmental restrictions. The fourth reflects the current thinking of state and federal officials, said Paul Kaiser, project manager for the Forest Service.

The issues covered in the environmental documents are enormously complex. Here are just a few:

THE WATER TREATMENT PLANT, a “box” of 10, one-acre cells on the shore of the Clark Fork River. The system is promising, but largely unproven. Montana water quality officials would require Asarco to build a backup system.

THE TAILINGS IMPOUNDMENT. Only 1 percent of the rock that comes out of the mine would be ore, “the good stuff,” as Young calls it. The rest would be crushed into sand.

It would be piled up, starting 400 feet from the river. The pile would grow into a 340-acre, 300-foot-tall plateau.

Government engineers are insisting on an impoundment design that’s more stable, and more expensive, than what Asarco has planned.

Environmentalists think an impermeable liner should be put under the pile to prevent seepage of potentially polluted water. At $20 million, such a liner would be too expensive, said Young.

Grasses and trees wouldn’t completely cover the tailings pile until the mine’s closed. Debbie Boots, who lives down the highway, said it would be ugly.

“As you’re driving along, you’d be seeing a desert in a beautiful forest area,” complained Boots. “It’s archaic to have those tailings. Why can’t they make cement blocks out of them, or put them back in the hole?”

WILDLIFE. About 15 aging grizzly bears live in the Cabinets. In recent years, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service brought in four young female bears from Canada in hopes of reviving the population.

The bears could be stressed out by noise from ventilation shafts in the wilderness, or blasting on its edge. Of more concern to federal biologist Wayne Kasworm is the presence of more people on the edge of the wilderness. And the fact Noranda Inc. already has approval to build a similar mine on the east side of the mountains. Together, he said, the mines could keep bears from using the whole lower third of the ecosystem.

Ninety acres of old-growth trees would either be removed or become less valuable as habitat.

RECREATION. As wilderness areas go, the Cabinet is small but well-visited. Spokane climbers have scaled its peaks; Coeur d’Alene camera buffs make pilgrimages there.

“People use this land for hunting, fishing, horseback riding, huckleberry picking. When they know the scope of the project, people are going to be really disturbed,” said Boots.

She is a member of the Cabinet Resource Group, an environmental organization. So is Mary Mitchell, a biologist who thinks the mine would be bad for the economy as well as the environment.

“Noxon will become a mining town. It will turn back into the boom-and-bust economy that Troy’s in,” she said.

Asarco’s mine at Troy, Mont., to the north, closed two years ago because of low silver prices.

The activists worry about a lack of housing in Sanders County, and a drop in the quality of life.

Under Montana law, Asarco must help local government make up for increased demands on schools, roads and other services.

“There’s a lot of unemployment and underemployment,” said Young. “Some people look at the mine and see it only as a negative. We see it only as a positive.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo; Graphic: “Proposed Rock Creek Mine”