HELENA, Mont. – The hillside and stream channel covered with waste rock from the Lilly/Orphan Boy Mine may look today like a bomb went off, said Autumn Coleman, Abandoned Mine Lands Program manager for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. But once removed, it will give Trout Unlimited an unpolluted blank slate to restore this mountain stream.
“So Telegraph Creek is in that pipe now,” she said, pointing out the black pipe running above a sludge of contaminated mud where miners dumped waste into the creek. “We speculate they built a dam across the floodplain, then Telegraph backed up and blew it out. The whole flood plain is contaminated with heavy metals from the mine.”
The Little Blackfoot drainage is dotted with more than 200 abandoned hard-rock mines and about 100 sources of acid mine drainage, she said. In 2008, the Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) investigated the shuttered silver and lead Lilly/Orphan Boy located 10.5 miles south of Elliston, with the goal of treating or stopping acid-producing discharge and removing heavy metal contamination.
Piles of waste rock including one pile split by Telegraph Creek were identified as pollution sources, along with a collapsed adit turned orange from acid mine drainage.
The efforts to neutralize the acid discharge, including introducing tons of manure into the mine as one remediation technique, were unsuccessful.
In 2012, the AML program stopped funding hard-rock projects to focus on abandoned coal mines, Coleman said, essentially shelving the work done up to that point.
In 2015 Trout Unlimited secured state funding to develop a metals reclamation plan for the Little Blackfoot and requested the state’s documents and data. The nonprofit then approached the state about reviving the project and has since secured additional grants toward its completion.
DEQ was able to tap funding from its “orphan share” account, funded through taxes on natural resource development such as oil and gas and hard-rock mining.
The partnership is the first between a private organization and the AML program, Coleman said.
“We focus on mine reclamation; Trout Unlimited is focused on restoration,” she said.
The project design calls for the ongoing removal of 7,500 cubic yards of waste rock to be trucked a few miles to the Luttrell Repository on the Continental Divide. Trout Unlimited will follow this September to redesign the stream channel and restore it to a more natural state.
“We’ve used this model in the past. For liability reasons, the state reclaims the site by removing hazardous waste, and we complete the stream restoration,” said Rob Roberts with Trout Unlimited. “Our goal is to restore Telegraph Creek with a proper pattern and profile and re-establish vegetation for wildlife habitat.”
