Goal: Mining His Own Business

For three decades, Ted Arman has been itching to mine his mountain for what he figures is a fortune in copper, gold and other metals.

The flinty 83-year-old entrepreneur still cruises the gravel roads in his faded 15-year-old Lincoln, envisioning riches beneath the rust-colored, heavily scarred flanks of Iron Mountain, nine miles northwest of town.

But just to enter his own property, Arman must go through a barbed-wire-topped, radio-controlled gate. Then he passes a maze of high-tech waste treatment facilities.

The mountain is one of the nation’s most toxic Superfund sites and the cleanup could go on indefinitely, which would make it almost impossible for Arman or anyone else to mine.

So Arman can only stew about what might have been -- or dream about what might still be, if the government would just get out of his way.

“Twenty-eight years I’ve been fighting the government,” he said. “Not even one day have I been able to mine the property.”

First prospected in the Gold Rush era, the mountain is a monument to two conflicting visions: a mine owner’s timeless dream of pulling wealth from the ground, and the government’s goal of protecting the surrounding environment.

There are many mines on the official list of the country’s 1,300 most polluted locations. But few are as notorious as Iron Mountain Mine -- and Arman has become part of the lore.

By the time he bought the 3,000-acre mining property, a century of digging and blasting had fractured the mountain, allowing rain and groundwater to mix with ore, forming sulfuric acid and leaching a brew of metals, including copper and cadmium.

The acidic runoff ate workers’ shovel heads and turned nearby creeks blood-red. State water officials said the mine killed millions of salmon downstream in the Sacramento River and contributed more heavy metals to the delta and San Francisco Bay than all other dischargers combined. Five years ago, scientists discovered an iron-eating microbe that they named after Arman.

Amid ghostly buildings that once housed a thriving mining operation is a modern wastewater complex that has captured millions of pounds of copper and zinc before they could foul the Sacramento River.

“They give us these sites because they are such messes,” said Richard Sugarek, the Environmental Protection Agency’s site manager. “They go slow, but sometimes we go beyond what we thought we could do.”

The EPA’s costly cleanup has reduced Iron Mountain’s metal discharges by 95%. Still, the site is expected to require treatment for 2,000 years. And a downstream reservoir contains toxic sediment that must be dredged to prevent spills into the Sacramento.

Future cleanup work will be financed through a $1-billion settlement that federal officials reached in 2000 with former owners, including a number of companies that had financial ties to the mine. The government is also trying to collect tens of millions of dollars in past cleanup costs from Arman, even though he has never been able to do much mining.

As the mine’s owner since 1976, he is being held accountable under federal law for years of pollution. But officials acknowledge his only major asset appears to be the mine -- which he claims is worth at least a billion dollars.

Just the mention of pollution and fish kills angers Arman, who maintains that Mother Nature -- not miners -- fouled the runoff. He considers the fish kills a myth, the monumental cleanup a waste of money.

By his count, he has hired and fired 17 lawyers to fight federal and state agencies. And he is looking for another to sue the government for $6 billion for depriving him of the use of his property’s reserves and scaring off potential backers.

“Now it’s my turn to take them down,” he said.

Yet there are times when the government’s demand for big money almost amuses him.

“I don’t have $15 in my pocket today,” he said. “I survive by the skin of my teeth.”

Over the years, court records show, landlords, vendors, lenders and state agencies have sued Arman over unpaid bills, taxes and fines -- some of which, he admits, he still owes. He said he is now living on borrowed money and sharing a leased home in Redding with a longtime female companion. His old Lincoln has 300,000 miles on the odometer.

On some days, Arman drives to Iron Mountain to drink from a spring that he regards as a source of marketable bottled water. Then he goes to the mountaintop to meditate and ponder the fate of his land. “They call it Superfund,” he said. “I call it a spiritual retreat.”

During its heyday in the 1900s, hundreds of miners lived and worked on Iron Mountain. A school was built there for their children. The mine had its own railroad and tram to carry ore.

The first fish kills were reported at the turn of the 20th century, when a British-owned company was operating the mining complex.

Despite government attempts to control the pollution, the fish losses persisted even after mining operations ceased in the early 1960s.

When Arman came along in the mid-1970s, Stauffer Chemical Co. owned the mine and was facing the possibility of millions of dollars in cleanup work as the result of a new state law.

At the time, Arman was living in Nevada, where he had gone years earlier to get a divorce. The former East Coast aviation instructor and airplane broker said he fell in love with the heady world of mining deals. “There was gold out there,” Arman said. “Gold has a way of doing that to people.”

Looking to buy pyrite tailings to fill a $5-million order from Israel for fertilizer material, Arman sent a representative to Iron Mountain. “They didn’t want to sell the tailings, but” they wanted to sell the property, he recalled. “They wanted out of the mine.”

Arman said that he was ignorant about environmental laws and that no one told him he could face millions of dollars in liability. “I was suckered, suckered, suckered,” he said.

But, in a court declaration, a state water official said Arman was warned about pollution problems. “I told him whoever buys the mine will be responsible for cleaning the pollution,” Jim Pedri, head of the regional water board office here, said in an interview. “He said, ‘I will fix the whole problem. Trust me.’ ”

When Arman bought the mine for $2.1 million, he planned to pay it off by selling low-grade ore and extracting copper from mine runoff, which would prevent the toxic metal from reaching streams.

But the extraction plants lost money. And, when he abandoned the effort, state regulators began issuing hefty pollution fines.

In the early 1980s, Arman’s hopes for the mine got a big boost when a consultant concluded the mountain contained rich reserves, which Arman said are worth $1.3 billion today.

Soon after, he was on the verge of sealing a deal with a Canadian company to reopen the mine when Iron Mountain was added to the list of federal Superfund sites facing mandatory cleanup. Interest in developing the mine dried up. Companies were reluctant to expose themselves to regulatory restrictions and potential liability for pollution by operating on the mountain.

“No one wants to deal with you when you’re a Superfund site,” Arman said.

He managed to eke out a living. He sold tailings -- piles of low-grade ore -- to cement and fertilizer companies. He sold some copper and provided hundreds of thousands of dollars’ worth of rock for Bay Area transportation projects. He unloaded mining equipment. And he logged Iron Mountain’s wooded slopes five times. “Every time I needed $50,000, I logged it,” he said.

Federal and state regulators remain skeptical that the resumption of mining would be profitable. “There may be $1 billion in there, but it may take $2 billion to get it,” said the EPA’s Sugarek.

Despite the years of cleanup work, nearby creeks remain biologically dead.

Everywhere he looks, however, Arman sees beauty and potential in his mountain, such as granite for countertops and colorful rock for gardens.

His latest scheme involves converting liquid mine waste into a mineral-laden fertilizer called Ag-Gel -- a project he figures would save the government money by reducing the runoff that needs to be treated.

“They call it pollution,” he said. “I call it product.”

Arman won a state Agriculture Department permit, which he is renewing. And he says he has potential buyers in several countries.

But his business plan needs more government approvals. And officials want assurances that he will not export toxic materials or disrupt the ongoing cleanup. “We’re trying to make sure he does not mess it up ... after we spent so much,” Sugarek said.

Although he has only a pilot plant in an old metal shed, Arman is confident he will be running a $200-million-a-year fertilizer business within several years.

He said he plans to give most of his profits to charity. But he also hopes to build a chalet for guests and a big house for himself on Iron Mountain, where he wants his ashes placed someday.

For now, he clings to his dreams and keeps battling. “I would love to be 120 years old just to fight these guys.”