Regulators Ignored Open-Pit Gold Mine in Colorado Until Calamity Hit : Environment: A firm sought to squeeze more ore from an old mine by using cyanide. Jobs and taxes kept the county happy while a river died.

When the historic Summitville gold mine was reopened by a Canadian company seven years ago, it seemed like a godsend to economically depressed Rio Grande County.

Now, officials worry that it was a curse.

The open-pit mine in southern Colorado, owned by Galactic Resources Ltd. and operated by its subsidiary, Summitville Consolidated Mining Co., from 1985 to 1992, closed last winter and the firms went into bankruptcy.

It left as a legacy a dead river--the Alamosa River, lifeblood of neighboring Conejos County--and a host of economic problems.

There’s more than enough blame to go around. State officials--including Gov. Roy Romer--are the first to take some of the heat.

“We got too hot to trot on Summitville,” Romer told a recent economic development conference.

Too hot with permits, too hot on an unproven mining technology, but too cold when it came to enforcing laws.

Since the mine was shut down, the Environmental Protection Agency has spent $3.5 million and continues to spend $30,000 a day on cleanup and to prevent 160 million gallons of cyanide solution from spilling into the headwaters of the Alamosa and Conejos rivers.

The disaster was the result of “a cascading chain of failures,” according to a 60-page report called “The Summitville Mine: What Went Wrong.”

The study by the Mined Land Reclamation Board spread the blame among the Legislature, Galactic and several state agencies, in addition to local officials.

“All doubtful decisions erred on the side of keeping the mine operating on schedule,” the report said.

The debacle has attracted national attention. The Rio Grande River recently was proclaimed by an environmental group, American Rivers, as the most endangered in the country, in part because of minerals leaching from mines. And 11 environmental groups recently testified before a U.S. Senate subcommittee about regulatory breakdowns at Summitville.

The mine’s failure and environmental problems have harmed the economy of Rio Grande County, costing it jobs and tax revenue. Farmers and ranchers throughout much of the mostly pastoral San Luis Valley also are affected.

Rio Grande County commissioners Melvin Getz and Robert Schaefer agree that the blame doesn’t end with the mine operators.

“Maybe we’re all at fault a little bit for being a little greedy,” Getz said in an interview.

Rio Grande County has one of the highest unemployment rates in the state and all counties in the San Luis Valley are at the bottom end of the family income spectrum.

The Summitville mine, about 25 miles southwest of Del Norte, was first opened in the 1880s and has produced gold off and on by different operators since then.

But past mine owners never operated on the scale undertaken by Galactic.

Galactic employed 350 people at the mine during peak construction in 1985 and 1986. The company recovered about 148,000 troy ounces of gold, equaling what was taken from the mine during the previous 100 years, said Jim Pendleton of the Mined Land Reclamation Division.

The company employed a cyanide leaching process that had not been used by previous Summitville operators. The process chemically squeezed out tiny bits of gold in ore left from the earlier operations as well as new ore.

“It’s pretty hard to tell how much damage was done by each operation,” said Schaefer, the county commissioner. “But the thing we do know is that this last operation by Galactic was by far the largest and by far did the most damage.”

The study by the Mined Land Reclamation Board, written by Luke Danielson, said the first cyanide leak was reported June 11, 1986, just six days after Summitville commenced operation. But the report said state officials did nothing.

Despite its problems, the mine generated tax revenue for the county.

“At one time, the taxes on the mine, including the school taxes and county property taxes, were running about $900,000, plus all the employment it was providing,” Getz said. “So it was a big economic boost to the county.”

Schaefer said Galactic had planned to clean up Summitville when the mining ended, but now that apparently will be up to the EPA.

“I think they have the cyanide under control,” he said. “But they opened up that mountain, and it’s leaching all the minerals out of the mountains. That’s the biggest concern right now.”

A heavier-than-normal snowpack in the mountains exacerbates the problem, with runoff seeping through the Summitville mine tunnels and pulling dissolved heavy metals such as copper and manganese into the river drainages. Sulfuric acid, a by-product of the complex chemical reaction in the cyanide process, also has been seeping from the mine.

The Alamosa-La Jara Water Conservancy District hired Agro Engineering Inc., an agriculture consulting firm in Alamosa, to study the Alamosa River two years ago after noticing the water in the Alamosa River was acidic and high in dissolved metals.

Agro Engineering’s Leroy Salazar said his firm has found devastating problems, mostly with dissolved heavy metals, copper and manganese and high acidity.

“The cyanide hasn’t been a problem, except in 1991 when it killed off the fish,” Salazar said. “Terrace Reservoir and the Alamosa River are dead. There are no plants growing in them.”

He said high metal levels are dangerous to livestock, wells and irrigation systems.

“One farmer told me he had put in a structure just a year ago, and it looks like it is 20 years old,” Salazar said.

Summitville, he said, appears to be the principal villain.

Ranchers and farmers in Conejos County rely almost totally on irrigation water from such Rio Grande tributaries as the Alamosa and Conejos rivers and La Jara Creek.

Sanford rancher Phil Reynolds, whose alfalfa and small grain farmland is irrigated from the Alamosa and Conejos rivers, said, “I think the people who were responsible, who did the mining, should pay for the cleanup.

“Now they don’t have the responsibility of cleaning it up, and that is a gross wrong.”