Climate and Environment

A once-powerful Montana mining town warily awaits final cleanup of its toxic past



The Berkeley Pit, a toxic vestige of copper mining in Butte, Mont., is the centerpiece of the nation’s largest Superfund complex. Further cleanup of it and other sites in the city has been under negotiation for years. (Janie Osborne for The Washington Post)

By Kathleen McLaughlin
Feb. 10, 2020 at 7:00 a.m. EST

BUTTE, Mont. — High above this storied copper town, one of the tallest earth-filled dams in the country holds back more than 6.5 trillion gallons of toxic sludge from an open-pit mine.

The dam is set to grow even taller. Yet it is the least of Butte’s immediate concerns.

Residents have been waiting years to learn how the Environmental Protection Agency will finish cleaning up a different part of mining’s legacy here — the cavernous Berkeley Pit, now a mile-long, 900-foot-deep poison lake, and a vast network of contaminated subterranean tunnels. Together, they constitute the nation’s largest Superfund complex. State and federal officials and the company on the hook for cleanup have negotiated privately; the outcome may be revealed within weeks, if not days.

There is both weariness and wariness in the city of 34,000, a fading political and financial powerhouse that remains a Democratic stronghold. Many residents are exhausted by the closed-door dealings, technical and bureaucratic jargon and the seemingly endless process. They are suspicious of regulators’ insistence that public input has been critical to their decision-making.

“Butte, Montana, has paid its dues. We deserve to have this place cleaned up right,” said Fritz Daily, a retired high school teacher, state legislator and perpetual thorn in the side of mining companies and government officials. In the 1990s, he would stand on the floor of the House of Representatives in Helena and read off a list of alarming statistics about the abandoned mines and their potential risk to drinking water.

“People ask me why I keep doing this, and the thing I always go back to is, people forget how important this community was in the shaping and creating of this great nation,” Daily explained recently.

That’s not just hometown pride talking. Butte has been called the most mined city in the world, and much of the world’s copper once came from here. When the bulk of the mines shut down in the 1980s, the fighting began over how to mitigate the damage and who would pay for it.

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A 2006 photo taken from space of Butte, Mont., and the surrounding region shows the dark waters of the Berkeley Pit, center, and the growing parameters of the terraced Continental Pit copper mine, upper right. The big blue-gray area on the left is the Yankee Doodle Tailings pond, which holds waste from the Continental Pit behind a 750-foot-high dam. (NASA)

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Gallows frames, which once lowered thousands of workers into Butte’s copper mines, remain scattered throughout town. (Janie Osborne for The Washington Post)