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Summer 2001 Bulletin
Choosing a Restoration Economy
Sustainable Development' at Questa:
Last year Molycorp was draft Superfund-listed as a result of community pressure orchestrated by Amigos Bravos and our allies, and the mine put up a $150 million restoration bond. Now we wish to build on these successes, and further our mission to support sustainable communities, through outreach and advocacy efforts that foster community initiatives to achieve a sustainable and healthy environment. In other words we wish to stimulate sustainable development of what has up till now been a mining economy, unsustainable by its very nature. With the area dominated for so long by the mine, its quality of life – much of the basis for a future sustainable economy – has been significantly reduced. The Red River adjacent to the mine is now choked with metal precipitates and ‘biologically dead’ for eight miles, though it was once a blue ribbon trout fishery. The five-square-mile mine site itself has been vastly altered from its natural condition, with a 300 acre open pit, waste rock dumps that tower up to 700 ft high and which may be unstable, a subsidence zone of 100 acres and huge installed machinery and infrastructure. Acid mine drainage has contaminated the groundwater beneath the mine, the Red River aquifer (a drinking source for several properties), the river (which is fed by extensive seeps and springs), and possibly the aquifer beneath Questa itself. With the potential Superfund-listing of the mine and the prospect ofcorresponding public health studies, and the knowledge that mining communities have some of the highest disease rates in the country, Questa residents are increasingly coming forward with chronic health concerns that may or may not be related to mining groundwater, and tailings dust, Amigos Bravos’ present plan is to combine some specific outreach and public education activities in a sustainable development strategy, now that the battle to hold the mine accountable has been almost won. First, we propose to conduct a preliminary public health study to focus residents’ concerns about the chronic effects of groundwater pollution. We recognize that we do not have the resources or the expertise to conduct a full epidemiological study that draws cause-and-effect conclusions. However, Questa residents’ many public health concerns over the years have to a large extent been ignored by the relevant authorities, so our intention is to catalyze these authorities (including perhaps the EPA under Superfund) into a more conclusive study if our results indicate possible environmental linkages, and to provide a voice and a tool for the community to use in its own advocacy efforts. Our study will inventory water pollutants in the area, research their known health effects, assess (from interviews with residents and data such as death rolls) whether such effects are appearing in the population, and provide a report setting out advocacy options for the community. Secondly, we are helping to organize a community TAG (Technical Assistance Grant) group under Superfund. These community groups, which are funded by an EPA grant primarily to provide technical assistance, can provide invaluable community oversight of several different aspects of mine restoration: federal and state agency accountability, technically-sound restoration, and economic opportunities for the community such as the Superfund Job Training Initiative, which provides for retraining of mine workers in non-mining skills such as land restoration. We have already put on one meeting into the feasibility of setting up a TAG group, a meeting attended by state senator Carlos Cisneros and other local dignitaries, and we are working with Steve Blodgett of the Center for Science in Public Participation to continue this task. Third, we are now starting an economic study, in conjunction with the University of New Mexico, into the benefits of Questa mine restoration. This will assess non-market values, such as quality of life perceptions which are of importance in a more tourism-oriented economy, as well as direct economic effects such as the reclamation and river-based jobs created and the health impacts avoided. The study will involve the local The results will also be of great value in the forthcoming public hearings into mine groundwater pollution control and final restoration, permit hearings which must be concluded, under the New Mexico Mining Act, by 2002. Amigos Bravos and our technical experts (now formally part of the New Mexico Mining Act Network) will again represent grassroots environmental interests, and will argue strongly for comprehensive mine restoration to restore a ‘self-sustaining ecosystem’ – a provision that will integrate restoration of the degraded mine site (by landscaping and revegetation) with water quality protection, and which we believe will help provide employment and environmental security for the community long into the future. Amigos Bravos hopes that these activities will contribute to the process of empowering a disadvantaged local community already begun with the recent advances against a powerful mining corporation. We also believe that they will provide models of economic and environmental sustainability for similar communities across the country.
Mining dominates the town of Questa, a settlement of some 1,800 people originally founded, like most northern New Mexico Spanish communities, on irrigation farming, which still takes place in the short stretch of Red River floodplain between the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the Rio Grande gorge. The most visible results of hardrock mining by the Molycorp mine – over 300 million tons of dumped waste rock – loom above the town in mountains just to the east. In the 1960s the Molybdenum Corporation of America (later re-named Molycorp) dug a vast open pit to extract quantities of molybdenum that are minute in comparison to the ‘waste’ generated, dumping non-ore bearing rock in towering piles and sending slurried milling waste through pipelines along the Red River to tailings ponds just west of Questa. Pollution of the river and irrigation areas began almost immediately, with over 100 tailings spills of metal-laden slurry and milling chemicals (including cyanide) recorded in the next 25 years. Water contaminated with metals seeped from the unlined tailings ponds into local groundwater, and private wells for drinking and cattle watering were condemned.
Questa became, in effect, a company town. Although the substantial proportion of its population employed at the mine has enjoyed relatively good wages (in comparison to the region as a whole), employment has been subject to the extreme ‘boom and bust’ cycle of the molybdenum commodity market, with the mine shutting down completely in 1986-9 and 1992-6 (and presently on very low production), with layoffs of all or most of the workforce. There is also evidence of some harsh employment practices and wages well below industry standards during the mine’s 35-year history. There are now sufficient molybdenum deposits for continued mining only for another twenty years at most; Questa, in order to survive beyond this, must start to shift its
economic base.
contamination.
community in the research phase and by making the results available for advocacy (such as in the TAG group).
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