3,000 Geese Die From Water Contamination
By Sara Jerome,
@sarmje
Thousands of geese migrating over Butte, MT, were killed when they came into contact with toxic mining water over the weekend.
A flock of geese was “blown off course by a snowstorm, which sent the birds toward the abandoned copper mine. They splashed down into the 50bn-gallon pool, polluted heavily by acidic chemicals and metals, and died en masse,” The Guardian reported.
“It was an unusual and unfortunate confluence of events: A larger-than-normal number of geese was making a later-than-normal migration over Montana when a snowstorm blew in at the wrong time and sent them soaring to the wrong place,” the Associated Press reported.
The geese died at a former copper mine closed since 1982. At least 3,000 birds died, reports said.
Since the mine closure, a “1,780-foot pit began filling with groundwater. The water reacted with sulfides and metals in the soil, gradually creating a body of water that was less like a lake than it was a vat of poisonous stew,” the Los Angeles Times reported.
“The liquid is expected to reach a critical level in 2023, and environmental officials are finalizing a plan for keeping it from contaminating Butte’s groundwater and Silver Bow creek, a stream at the headwaters of the Columbia river basin,” the report said.
The solution to threats posed by contaminated mining pit has in large part centered on a treatment plant, which appears to need upgrades, according to The Guardian:
The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), Anaconda’s owner Atlantic Richfield and Montana Resources, owner of an adjacent mine, negotiated a solution that relies on a water treatment plant built near the pit in 2000.The Horseshoe Bend plant now treats more than 4m gallons of water a day that would otherwise flow into the pit, and the plan is for it to treat another 3m gallons a day directly from the pit starting in 2023. The plant has never handled 7m gallons at once, but EPA officials say there is enough time for a thorough review to ensure the contaminated water will never escape into the city’s Silver Bow creek, whose banks have yet to be cleaned of the mine waste that was dumped there for decades.
The former copper mine is part of the nation’s largest Superfund site. This is not the first time it has posed a threat to wildlife. “In 1995, 342 geese landed on the pit, drank its water, and suffered fatal burns to their tracheae and other internal organs,” the Los Angeles Times reported.