BLM again proposes withdrawing Little Rocky land from mining

The U.S. Bureau of Land Management is proposing continuing a withdrawal of federal land in the Little Rocky Mountains from mining, in an area still recovering from pollution caused by earlier mining.

In 1997, Pegasus Mining Company filed for bankruptcy after contaminating Fort Belknap Indian Reservation’s water using such practices as acid rock drainage while mining gold south of the reservation near Zortman and Landusky.

In the acid rock mining Pegausus used chemicals including cyanide to extract gold and silver from ore.

Since the bankruptcy, federal agencies have spent $77 million and the state of Montana has spent $32 million in an effort to repair the damage.

BLM is in the process of withdrawing federal land in the area from mining for the next 20 years.

A withdrawal from mining was put in place 20 years ago, expiring in October, and the action will be renewing that withdrawl.

Scott Haight the District Manager of BLM said there is quite a bit of history there. Modern mining began in 1979 at Zortman Landusky. The company went on for about 15 or 16 years where about 1,200 acres of land was disturbed, 600 private, 600 public. It’s all south of the Fort Belknap Reservation.

“In 2003 the BLM and Department of Environmental Quality collected the reclamation bonds and began reclamation and water treatment,” Haight said, “along with (forming) a technical working group that included Fort Belknap, where the specialists got together and decided what reclamation measures were needed and what treatment measures were best.”

Haight said that for the last 20 years they have been implementing water treatment and reclamation.

Tom Darrington the BLM Malta Field Office Manager will be in charge of a public Zoom meeting regarding the withdrawal of the current circle boundary. The meeting is open to the public at 6:30 p.m. Dec. 2 at http://ow.l/UfdK50BKWsZ and the passcode is 683324.

The meeting will discuss the proposal that the area will be withdrawn from any sort of mining activity. The Zoom meeting’s impetus is to pass another 20 year withdrawal on that mine site.

“So no one will be able to establish any additional claims on that site,” Darrington said.

The damage from the acid rock drainage is still an issue, and that is essentially what water clarifiers are dealing with at the site by taking the heavy metals out of the water and then releasing the non-contaminated waters back into the original drainages, Darrington said.

And public comment is being taken for a proposed mine on private land at the Zortman site with a private landowner seeking approval of an exploration license.

“A draft environmental assessment for an exploration mining project at the former Zortman Mine is open for public comment through Nov. 30,” Montana Department of Environmental Quality Representative Moira Davin said.

A press release about that says DEQ received March 3 an application for an exploration license from the landowner, Blue Arc LLC, to extract a 1,000-ton bulk sample from a single trench site at an exposed highwall of the former Zortman Mine. The sample would then be shipped for testing at a facility in Nevada to determine the quality for potential future mining activities. The entire proposed project would be located on private land and disturb about 1.4 acres.

The proposed exploration activities from Blue Arc LLC would only disturb approximately 0.04 acre of reclaimed mining area and the proposal includes mitigation measures to minimize any substantive impacts to this reclaimed area, the release said.

Davin said that it needs to fit criteria for a Small Miner Exclusion Statement and they must submit an operating permit application and go through a permitting process.

The release, available at https://news.mt.gov/deq-releases-draft-environmental-assessment-for-a-proposed-exploration-mining-project-in-phillips-county, includes a link to the site to make comments, at http://deq.mt.gov/public/publiccomment .