Landslide Fear Hovers Over Mining Town

From the scrubby yard between his antique store and his house, Jake Gonzales glanced up the mountain at this mining town’s latest crisis: at least 8 million tons of creeping rock that a severe rainstorm could send thundering into the village below, according to a recent engineering report.

“One of these days, that’s exactly what will happen,” said Gonzales, a retired water treatment technician. “It has to; just look at how steep it is up there.”

But in the dim light of the El Monte Carlo bar just down the road, former Mayor Lawrence Gallegos was equally certain that the million cubic yards of waste rock deposited over decades by the town’s biggest employer are going nowhere.

“Let me tell you something, my friend,” he said. “The chance of those rocks coming down and burying this town is a lot less than the chance of Los Angeles being hit by an earthquake and dropping into the sea.”

The 1,863 residents of Questa speak with one voice about very little where the Molycorp molybdenum mine is concerned, including the risk of disaster in a hail of falling rock. They’ve argued for years about everything connected with the mine, which has been a boon for local workers, who make an average of more than three times the state minimum wage. But the mine is also a site with enough hazardous waste to warrant consideration for the Environmental Protection Agency’s Superfund for the cleanup of the nation’s most polluted areas.

The warning of a huge rock slide at Goathill Gulch -- and Gov. Bill Richardson’s demand for a planned solution by July 15 -- have sharpened the dispute.

“Even families are divided,” said Roberto Vigil, a furniture maker and lifelong Questa resident who has opposed the mine for years. “There have been confrontations and fights over it. It’s worse than religion.”

But in Questa, not choosing sides over the mine would be like having no opinion on UFOs in Roswell. Molycorp permeates Questa, a 174-year-old town so small that phone numbers are given in just four digits. The company has donated to the youth center, the fire department, the water system, the village government and the school district. Cynics still bring up the 1968 donation that backfired -- a now-closed recreational lake where on opening weekend hundreds of stocked trout went belly-up from the mine’s tailings.

Three and a half miles from town, Unocal-owned Molycorp digs into the Sangre de Cristo Mountains for molybdenum, an element used to strengthen steel. From 1965 to 1983, it extracted the ore from an open pit 900 feet deep and nearly a mile across. Nearly 300 million tons of waste rock, ranging in size from grains of sand to compact cars, were dumped in nine immense piles through the company’s canyons and gulches.

Until recently, the stability of the rock piles was hardly an issue, dwarfed by the mine’s repeated violations of air and water quality rules.

Over 30 years, there were more than 200 spills of various kinds at the mine, state records show. In 1994, the New Mexico Water Quality Commission declared an eight-mile stretch of the adjacent Red River biologically “dead,” blaming acid runoff from the rock piles for destroying prime fish habitat. In the spring, winds would whip clouds of metal-laden dust from the tailing ponds over two nearby schools and the entire village.

Then three years ago, engineers for Molycorp and for the Taos-based environmental group Amigos Bravos clashed over the notion that the piles could come crashing down.

To settle the issue, Molycorp and the state commissioned a study from three nationally known consulting engineers. Released last month, the report found “an immediate public safety issue” at Goathill Gulch.

Amigos Bravos director Bryan Shields, a thorn in the mine’s side for 15 years, wasn’t surprised. “You can see deep crevices in them from thunderstorms and snowmelt. Gravity will bring them down,” he said.

Creeping down the mountain at a rate of about 2 inches a month, the rocks could be triggered into a catastrophic slide by a major storm soaking the dirt beneath them, the report said.

“Under the kinetic energy generated by the 2,000-foot vertical descent, its momentum would carry it across the river and up the opposite side of the valley, then down-valley along the highway to the mouth of the canyon and possibly beyond,” the report warned.

In other words, a slide could crush the mining company offices at its base, choke off and flood the Red River, shut down the state highway used by Questa residents to get to jobs in the tourist town of Red River and, perhaps, rumble into the village.

Atop Goathill Gulch, at an elevation of 10,000 feet, Molycorp official Leroy Apodaca was skeptical about the engineers’ vision. A member of the New Mexico Mining Commission, Apodaca pointed out that the rocks have been slowly moving for decades, crawling over the old dirt roads that were used to haul material from the open pit.

If the pile were to cascade down, most of it would be slowed in a narrow rock opening and caught in a bowl at the gulch’s bottom, he said.

The company already has experimented with a variety of trees and native grasses to keep the rock piles in place. It has hired experts on rock slides to help avert one. It has stuck instruments in the piles to measure their moisture and movement; one of them was sheared off in December by the rocks’ slow downhill dance.

“Whether their fears are real or perceived, we want to make the people in Questa feel comfortable,” Apodaca said. “We’re going to use the best science we can possibly get and do what it takes, regardless of the cost.”

A spokeswoman for Molycorp, which also runs a mine in San Bernardino County, called environmental violations “legacy issues” that company officials appointed in the last few years have taken pains to clean up.

Some perceived pollution has stemmed from substances occurring naturally in the area’s rock formations, said Kirsten S. Knoepfle. But, she added, the company has stopped all the pollution that it once caused.

“Molycorp is doing business in a very different way now,” she said. “All of us want to be proud of where we work.”

Ron Curry, secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department, agreed on the company’s “better management attitude.” At the same time, however, he said the company should be more aggressive in its plans to prevent a slide.

In the bright blue morning on Goathill Gulch, Questa -- with its boarded-up shops and weed-filled lots -- was visible far below. Half of the mine’s contingent of about 150 workers, down from more than 700 a generation ago, hail from the town. Other Questa residents commute to hotel and restaurant jobs in communities more alluring to outsiders.

To the south, Taos was filled with tourists basking in New Mexico chic. To the north, Red River, a ski town in the winter, entertained Texans seeking a break from the heat.

But over beers at El Monte Carlo, the familiar debate about potential catastrophe went on.

Self-described whistle-blower Joe Cisneros produced the clippings that he customarily shows to strangers. They said he was the inspiration for the scrappy hero Joe Mondragon in John Nichols’ novel “The Milagro Beanfield War,” a story about a small farmer battling a corrupt developer and crooked politicians in a New Mexico village.

“You can’t trust them,” he said of both Molycorp and the agencies that regulate it. “We’re a small Hispanic town out here in the boondocks, and they don’t [care].”

But Larry Gutierrez, a mine employee for 34 years, called Cisneros “a radical.” He expressed sympathy for the mine owners and shareholders.

“One day they’ll just have too much and they’ll leave,” he said, suggesting that opposition to the mine is part of an environmentalist scheme to shut it down. “They’re like Jesus taking his blows on the way to Calvary.”

Cisneros, a member of Questa’s school board, insisted that 80 of the district’s 430 students had landed in special-education classes because of tainted water. Gutierrez joked that Questa was so small that people couldn’t help but marry their cousins.

The discussion flared and subsided, time and again. One of the only undisputed points was scored by the former mayor, an ex-miner who also once owned the El Monte Carlo.

“If the mine goes, those rocks might as well come down,” he said. “This town will be dead.”