Iron Mountain Mines Defy Efforts to Stop Toxic Flow : Environment: Runoff into Sacramento River has been documented for 90 years but there’s no solution in sight.

In the surreal world of Iron Mountain, creeks run a brilliant red, sterile from high doses of heavy metals. Dark-green water, as caustic as battery acid, pours from underground caverns and poisoned springs bubble up from the ground as if from a steaming caldron.

Here on the outskirts of Redding is the largest toxic waste site in the West, responsible for killing hundreds of thousands of fish, depleting one of the state’s most important fisheries and posing a threat to the state’s water supply in the Sacramento River.

Environmental damage from the copper mines at Iron Mountain has been documented for more than 90 years, but so far no one has been able to stem the flow of contamination. More than 700 pounds of copper and zinc reach the Sacramento River each day--enough to cause an ecological catastrophe should there be insufficient fresh water to dilute the waste.

“It’s obviously a huge environmental problem,” said Rick Sugarek, the Environmental Protection Agency project manager who is heading cleanup efforts. “It’s just mind-boggling, the amount.”

Iron Mountain is emblematic of a widespread problem that officials in California are just beginning to come to terms with: the pollution of waterways by acidic mineral deposits that miners long ago stripped bare and abandoned.

A recent survey by the State Water Resources Control Board concluded that as many as 180 deserted mines--spread across more than half the counties in the state--could be polluting water supplies with acid waste and toxic metals. But many of these mines have not even been inspected to determine the extent of the threat.

In this old copper mining region near Shasta Lake, where some mines have been plugged to halt the contamination, miles and miles of remote creeks remain so toxic it is doubtful they can ever be made habitable again for fish or other wildlife.

“We have so much pollution coming from these mines that some streams, which once had trout in them, will never be clean,” said Jim Pedri, who heads the Redding office of the Central Valley Regional Water Quality Control Board. “We don’t feel those streams will ever support aquatic life.”

The witches’ brew of acid waste, copper, zinc, cadmium and other chemicals is not so much a threat to human health as it is a hazard for fish, whose systems are more sensitive to the metals.

In the late 1980s, acid runoff from the Penn Mine east of Lodi contributed to the death of nearly 400,000 young steelhead and salmon at a fish hatchery on the Mokelumne River. During the heavy rains this year, concentrated waste from the mine spilled into the Mokelumne and touched off a storm of protest from local environmentalists.

Acidic mine waste annually kills fish in tributaries of Shasta Lake and has poisoned trout streams in the Sierra Nevada.

But these problems are a drop in the bucket compared to Iron Mountain, which is so immense that it discharges one-fourth of all the copper and zinc that pollute surface waters in the entire nation.

Some biologists contrast the poison pouring from Iron Mountain with the Dunsmuir spill--the 1991 train derailment that dumped 19,000 gallons of the pesticide metam sodium into the upper Sacramento River, killing virtually all aquatic life for 40 miles.

Left untreated, the Iron Mountain waste has roughly the same toxicity as metam sodium and often flows in such volume it could fill a railroad tank car every hour. The nonstop stream of contamination has permanently sterilized 10 miles of creek below the mine. But because the Sacramento River is wider here than at Dunsmuir, the contamination has wreaked its havoc in a different way.

Dating back to 1899, there have been countless fish kills in the river below Iron Mountain. On at least three separate occasions in the 1950s and ‘60s, the mine waste killed hundreds of thousands of adult salmon and devastated the fishery.

In recent years, with increased efforts to control the waste--and declining salmon populations--the magnitude of fish fatalities has been reduced. Nevertheless, significant kills have occurred in at least three of the past six years.

When the toxicity is high enough to wipe out adult salmon, scientists estimate the death rate is seven times greater for eggs and fry, harming the four species that spawn in this part of the river, including the endangered winter-run chinook salmon.

Even if the poison does not kill the young salmon outright, it can hurt their chances of survival by slowing their growth rate and impairing their ability to adapt to sea water.

“There have been near total kills of the early life stages, which is what this area of the river is all about,” said Harry Rectenwald, a biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game. “It is depressing the productivity of the fishery.”

Despite its name, Iron Mountain was never successfully mined for iron. Its rich pyrite ore first attracted prospectors in the 1850s, but they searched for gold with little luck. Thirty years later, other miners discovered silver and started the first profitable mining operation. But it was not until the mid-1890s that an English company uncovered the real wealth of the mountain: copper.

For the next two decades, the town of Keswick at the base of the mountain and Redding, nine miles away, boomed as workers flocked to one of the world’s largest copper mines and its nearby smelters.

But even then, prosperity came at a price. The sulfur in the ore was so caustic that smoke from the smelter at Keswick destroyed the vegetation for miles around.

“People have told me there was so much sulfur dust around you could comb it out of your hair and taste it in your food,” said retired Superior Court Judge Richard B. Eaton, a local historian. “What it smelled like was a sulfur match. In Redding, it killed flowers, corroded window screens and tarnished silver.”

Spurred by complaints from prune growers in Anderson 20 miles to the south, the federal government took its first environmental enforcement action at Iron Mountain and shut down the Keswick smelter in 1907.

Over the following decades, the miners dug huge caverns inside the mountain, some of them large enough to hold a 20-story office building. Before mining operations were halted in 1963, they also cut off the top of the mountain, leaving a large crater at the summit.

By accident, the miners also created a giant chemical reactor.

When pyrite, commonly known as fool’s gold, is exposed to air and water, it turns into sulfuric acid, freeing the copper, zinc and other metals trapped within.

With all the excavation at Iron Mountain, rainwater now percolates easily through the exposed earth while oxygen is sucked in through the network of tunnels, combining to create perfect conditions for a chemical reaction that could continue uninterrupted for 3,000 years.

Inside the mountain, the temperature is 120 degrees, just a few degrees short of igniting the ore deposit. In places, the acid is so concentrated it has a negative pH--the lowest ever measured in the natural world.

At the same time, the caverns are a feast for the eyes, with 40-foot-long stalactites of extremely rare minerals glistening in shades of blue, violet, orange, yellow and green.

“It just glitters,” said Rick Humphreys, a geologist with the state water board. “It’s a place only a geologist could love.”

The water, laden with acid and heavy metals, pours out through tunnels, fissures and springs in the mountain. With an average rainfall at Iron Mountain of 80 inches a year, the flow increases dramatically during the wet season.

Eventually, all of the tainted water runs into Spring Creek Reservoir, the state’s largest poisoned lake. The murky reservoir has the acidity of vinegar and an orange ring around it.

The reservoir was built by the federal government in 1963 to hold the contaminated runoff and control its flow into the Sacramento River at Keswick Reservoir. But when the volume of waste is too great, it spills over the dam and overwhelms the river’s ability to dilute it, killing salmon and other fish.

To dissipate the acid and heavy metals, the Bureau of Reclamation releases water from Shasta Lake above Keswick. But the supply of fresh water from Shasta is not always guaranteed.

In January, a spill that could have wiped out aquatic life along a 25-mile stretch of the Sacramento was narrowly averted.

After days of heavy rain, the toxic lake was on the verge of overflowing, but no water could be released from Shasta because of the danger of flooding farther down river. Only a break in the storm prevented a disaster.

So far, more than $30 million has been spent to clean up the mess. Acidic waste from one tunnel is now piped to a treatment plant where, using rather primitive technology, it is neutralized with lime. The sludge is then trucked to the summit, where it is dumped into the old mine pit. Two smaller plants also have been built on the mountain to extract copper from the waste water.

The Environmental Protection Agency, which has declared the mountain a Superfund site, now proposes to spend $100 million to build a larger treatment plant and a new dam that would quadruple the capacity of Spring Creek Reservoir.

EPA officials consider the proposal an interim plan, designed to prevent a major spill during the next 30 years and buy time for scientists to come up with a more permanent solution.

But Ted Arman, the president of Iron Mountain Mines Inc., objects to the whole idea, contending that the government should ignore cleanup work and allow the resumption of mining.

“It is not an environmental hazard,” Arman says. “That has been propagated by the state, the EPA and everyone else. . . . They made up a big thing about fish kills. It’s not true about fish kills.”

Arman says he has a profitable new method for extracting the metals that would produce “pure clean water.” But EPA officials are skeptical of Arman’s claims, saying they have seen no evidence his extraction system would work.

Past owners who share liability for the mine are more subdued in their criticism but also oppose the EPA plan. They would prefer instead to plug the mine and flood it with water, shutting down the chemical reaction.

Plugging mines is a method that has been used with some success on smaller mines in California, but federal and state officials are concerned that Iron Mountain is too large to seal off. Water in the mine would be under tremendous pressure, they point out, and might find its way out through new cracks and fissures, forming toxic streams in new locations.

No matter what they do, government scientists agree it is unlikely that the flow of toxic waste from Iron Mountain will ever be completely stopped. In parts of England, they note, there are mines that have been producing acid waste since Roman times.

“There’s a lot of trial and error involved with abandoned-mines cleanup,” said Dennis Heiman, an environmental specialist with the regional water board, as he looked down into the crater on Iron Mountain. “Personally, I can’t believe that in 50 years we’ll still be driving trucks up and dumping sludge in the pit.”