What Is that Dust?

Every Tuesday and Thursday we drive up NM 180 to Silver City so that Agapi might fulfill her role as adjunct instructor in Sustainable Design -- and I as lay-about and starry-eyed poet in the Western New Mexico University library and in the Bullard Street and Yankie Street cafes. A little more than half way to our destination we pass the tailings ponds that harbor slurry deposited there from the Chino/Santa Rita de Cobre open pit copper mine about 15 miles away. 

 

According to the local activist organization, Gila Resources Information Project (GRIP), both inactive and active tailings ponds at the site cover about 3,703 acres. The open pit mine itself is about 2 miles across, and deeper than the eye can see from the observation point the company has provided tourists on NM 152.

Pick and shovel mining at this site began in earnest around 1800 with accelerated incursions into New Mexico from New Spain. Open pit operations started in 1910 and have been steadily expanding ever since. 

In 1955 or so, the mines gobbled up a town. The people of Santa Rita, living since the 1930s on an "island" connected by a road between the two pits, were relocated to barracks at Fort Bayard until such time they could secure new homes. It had been your regular American town with kids enjoying baseball, chewing gum, and movies, amid the daily and nightly rumble of trucks and dust of dynamite blasts.

So there we are traveling at least twice-weekly past these giant berms on NM 180. Though most of the tailings ponds have the look of being reclaimed or at least inactive, the one closest as we approach from Deming has working cranes perched all along the rim. This rim is covered with a four to five-foot wall of a fine white dust. One day, on our return from Silver City, high winds were blowing that dust off the top of the berm nearly all the way to City of Rocks, about 10 miles away. Another day it was blowing across the road. We took our dust masks out of the glove compartment and fastened them on as best as we could. 

What is that dust?

Well, poke an extractive industry and one is sure to come up with at least one lawsuit and subsequent slap-on-the-wrist settlements. The current owner of the Chino/Santa Rita mine is Freeport-McMoran Corporation, the largest mining company in the world. In 2008, it bought out previous owner, industry giant Phelps Dodge, for $26 billion. Since then, Freeport-McMoran has been sued at least twice by the Department of the Interior and the State of New Mexico for releasing hazardous substances that caused injury to surface and ground water as well as wildlife habitats.

In 2011, it settled with New Mexico for $13 million, while taking in $20 billion in revenues worldwide that year and posting a $5 billion profit. In 2012, it settled with the DOI for $5.5 million, ceding as well 715 acres of land below City of Rocks to the State of New Mexico. (Ouch, that hurt!) Last year, it and the entire copper industry in the state, through its influence on Governor Susana Martinez and her staff in Santa Fe, secured an exemption from the New Mexico Water Quality Act. 

The ruling essentially allows Freeport-McMoran to pollute at will in areas of "hydrologic containment" and "open pit surface water drainage," i.e., in areas related to the supply of its tailings ponds, i.e., they may continue to use the creek that passes near the mine to transport the finely ground rock materials left over after raw ore is processed, known as tailings, to their ponds 15 miles away.

The hazardous materials that gave them such trouble before? Lead, arsenic, mercury, sulfuric acid, among others.

P.S. Philips Dodge is the name of the hall on the campus of Western New Mexico University in which Agapi teaches Sustainable Design. FreeportMcMoran is co-sponsor of an upcoming symposium on disaster preparedness put on at WMNU's Besse-Forward Global Resources Center, where Agapi has her office. One has to ask:

Can life on this planet survive having to be cost-effective?

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Addendum

As this blog entry goes to press, per se, I find I am compelled to write an addendum. I have tried to elicit a response from the GRIP folks regarding the dust on the rim that gets blown down the valley. Two emails later (about a week apart), and no one has replied. Today, however, sitting in the Yankie Creek Cafe in Silver City, I met Woody, a petrogeologist who freelances in the oil fields and shale fields of America. He seems to be an expert. He said the rim and maybe the entire berm (?) is actually lined with a form of calcium carbonate that is trucked in. It serves, after it hardens in the rain or by hosing with the cranes, to protect against dust getting into the air. We talked of many other things so I am not certain I am remembering clearly. So anyway it's protective -- and floating through the air down the valley.