Environmental Damage Related To Mining Operations
Mining, mineral processing and smelting activities in the area have produced gold, silver, lead and zinc for more than 130 years. Wastes generated during the mining and ore processing activities contained metals such as arsenic and lead at levels posing a threat to human health and the environment. These wastes remained on the land surface and migrated through the environment by washing into streams and leaching contaminants into surface water and groundwater. The site was added to the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) National Priorities List in 1983,. Investigation of the site began in the mid-1980s. Since 1995, EPA and the potentially responsible parties have conducted removal and remedial activities to consolidate, contain and control more than 350,000 yards of contaminated soils, sediments and mine-processing wastes. Cleanups by the potentially responsible parties have involved drainage controls to prevent acid mine runoff, consolidation and capping of mine piles, cleanup of residential properties and reuse of slag. As of September 2011, most of the cleanup had been completed so current risk of exposure is low, although pregnant women, nursing mothers and young children are still encouraged to have their blood-lead levels checked.
Read more about this topic: Leadville Mining District
Famous quotes containing the words damage, related, mining and/or operations:
“If every man possessed everything he wanted, and no one had the power to interfere with such possession; or if no man desired that which could damage his fellow-man, justice would have no part to play in the universe.”
—Thomas Henry Huxley (1825–95)
“Women stand related to beautiful nature around us, and the enamoured youth mixes their form with moon and stars, with woods and waters, and the pomp of summer. They heal us of awkwardness by their words and looks. We observe their intellectual influence on the most serious student. They refine and clear his mind: teach him to put a pleasing method into what is dry and difficult.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“For every nineteenth-century middle-class family that protected its wife and child within the family circle, there was an Irish or a German girl scrubbing floors in that home, a Welsh boy mining coal to keep the home-baked goodies warm, a black girl doing the family laundry, a black mother and child picking cotton to be made into clothes for the family, and a Jewish or an Italian daughter in a sweatshop making “ladies” dresses or artificial flowers for the family to purchase.”
—Stephanie Coontz (20th century)
“You can’t have operations without screams. Pain and the knife—they’re inseparable.”
—Jean Scott Rogers. Robert Day. Mr. Blount (Frank Pettingell)