Company says Rock Creek will prevail

A Montana judge’s ruling this week quashed Bill Orchow’s plans to start hiring this summer at the Rock Creek Mine. But Orchow, president of Revett Silver Co., says he’s still confident the company will prevail in a multiyear battle to extract copper and silver from beneath the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness.

U.S. District Judge Donald Malloy ruled this week that the federal government failed to acknowledge the risk the mine would pose to endangered grizzly bears and bull trout.

Even the loss of one or two female grizzlies would be devastating to the Cabinet Mountains’ breeding population, Malloy wrote.

Biologists estimate that just 15 grizzlies remain in the Cabinets.

Malloy’s ruling overturned a 2003 “no jeopardy” determination by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, which had allowed the mine to proceed.

Nine conservation groups filed the challenge to the determination.

“Certainly, we’re disappointed,” Orchow said. “We think what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service did in issuing the ‘no jeopardy’ decision was the right decision.”

As a mitigation measure, the company was required to purchase 2,400 acres of private forest to be set aside as habitat. Revett Silver would also have had to pay salaries for a state biologist and enforcement officer.

“They’d have done a lot of education over the life of the mine,” Orchow said. “With grizzlies, you try to avoid human contact. I think that education was going to be a positive, and I don’t think the benefits were weighed by the judge.”

Attorneys for Spokane Valley-based Revett Silver are still digesting the 38-page ruling, according to Orchow.

He said it’s too early to determine whether the company will appeal or whether it will wait to see how the Fish and Wildlife Service responds to the ruling.

Prior to the ruling, Orchow had planned to hire workers this summer to start underground drilling.

An 18-month “evaluation program” of the deposit would precede mine construction, which would last another 18 months to two years, Orchow said. Revett Silver recently raised $34 million in Canadian funds for the work.

The Rock Creek Mine, about 15 miles north of Noxon, Mont., would employ about 300 to 350 people.

According to company estimates, it would produce about 7 million ounces of silver annually, and 54 million pounds of copper.

Conservation groups, meanwhile, are hailing Malloy’s ruling as a significant victory in ongoing legal battles over the mine.