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Show Wed/Thurs/Fri, December 2-4, 2020 A-7 The Park Record Ranchers, landowners worry about copper mine’s proposal Company plans to use experimental method of mining ZAK PODMORE The Salt Lake Tribune LISBON VALLEY — When Mike Wilcox was a young man in the mid-1970s, he took a job at the Keystone-Wallace copper mine and mill near his home in Lisbon Valley, Utah. Some days, Wilcox went down in the open pit and dug a series of deep holes that were each loaded with 100 pounds of explosives. “We’d wire them all together and get way back on the road,” he recalled to the Salt Lake Tribune. “Then somebody would touch that puppy off. It was a wild deal. That whole mountain changed every time you done a shot. You couldn’t believe you was in the same place. Boy, it was scary.” The mine operated for five or six years, Wilcox said, but he only lasted two weeks on the job. Instead, he returned to the profession that has sustained six generations of the Wilcox family since Ephraim Wilcox, Mike’s grandfather, homesteaded in La Sal in 1917: ranching. He owns a 1,000-plus acre private ranch in Lisbon Valley and has permits to graze on state and federal land in the area. “Some people are just made to be cowboys,” Wilcox, 67, explained, adding that he hopes his 4-year-old great grandson, who is already learning to ride a horse, develops the same love of “punching cows” as he grows up. The mine shut down over 40 years ago, but Wilcox still deals with the mine’s mess. “Keystone-Wallace had a bond up, and they used to tell us, `When we’re done mining copper, you’re not going to be able to tell there was a copper mine here,” Wilcox said, standing in the old mill site on a sun- ny November day among piles of twisted metal and rebar. “I can still see it just like it was yesterday. They’ve done hardly anything to clean this thing up.” Tailings remain uncapped nearby, and few plants grow on the disturbed ground. Retention ponds were built to catch the erosion from the site, and Wilcox remembers when someone set fire to what looked like an oil slick on the surface of one of the ponds in the late ‘70s. “It burned for three or four days,” he said. “There was lots of big old black smoke coming out of that thing.” But the fences around the ponds that were put up decades ago have since fallen into disrepair, and it’s not uncommon for Wilcox to have to ride into the ponds, which are often dry, to push out wayward cattle. “When there’s a little green grass along them ditch banks, cows will go in and get it,” Wilcox said. “When they kick that dust up, it makes your eyes water. It gets in your nose. You can feel it. You can taste it.” Repeatedly throughout Wilcox’s life of ranching in the mineral rich valleys near the Utah-Colorado border about 40 miles south of Moab, he has heard similar promises as those made by Keystone-Wallace half a century ago. Each time a mining executive has proposed a new project, they point to their millions of dollars in bond money and say that reclamation will be so comprehensive the landscape will be restored to its original state as soon as the mining is complete. But those rosy projections rarely bear out. Just over the hill from the Keystone-Wallace mine, the Rio Algom Uranium Mill, which operated from 1972 to 1988, has leached contaminates into the groundwater, including uranium, molybdenum, selenium and arsenic. The plume is being actively monitored, and it’s less than 100 feet away from reaching Wilcox’s friends’ property. A scar from an abandoned limestone quarry slashes across a nearby hillside. Another uranium mine near La Sal known as the Rattlesnake Pit doesn’t look much different than it did in the 1960s when Wilcox and his school buddies held a raucous Halloween party in the abandoned shafts. Having seen so many mining companies sweep into the area, create a boom of jobs and brief prosperity only to leave behind denuded land and environmental contamination, Wilcox was skeptical when the Lisbon Valley Mining Company took over the largest active mine in the area in 2009, which is adjacent to the Wilcox Ranch. At first, however, Wilcox found a positive arrangement with the mine’s owners as they began expanding its footprint. “We leased them some ground and we sold them some ground,” he said, “and it helped us pay our bills. It hasn’t been all bad.” But that working relationship began to fizzle last year when the company filed a permit application to begin a new, experimental form of in-situ mining in the valley, which involves injecting diluted sulfuric acid into the ground to dissolve copper deposits with up to 2,700 wells. In-situ mining has been used in various forms for over a century, but the process that is being proposed in Lisbon Valley, which involves mining in sandstone as opposed to harder rock layers, would be a first globally. At a public meeting last year, a representative said Lisbon Valley Mining has been “putting in ... millions and millions of dollars to prove up a technology that eliminates the need for open-pit mining ... and (that) could benefit the overall industry on a global scale.” The geological analysis presented at the meeting suggested that the in-situ mining would only impact the shallow Burro Canyon Aquifer, between 200 and 900 feet below ground, Please see Ranchers, A-8 SNYDERVILLE BASIN WATER RECLAMATION DISTRICT The quality of our water reflects the quality of our community. NOTICE OF PUBLIC HEARING ON PROPOSED WASTEWATER USER FEE INCREASE The Board of Trustees of the Snyderville Basin Water Reclamation District will hold a public hearing on December 14, 2020 at 6:00 p.m. for the purpose of hearing comments on a proposed increase of the monthly Wastewater Volume Charge beginning January 1, 2021 from $2.77 per 1,000 gallons to $2.85 per 1,000 gallons and Wastewater Service Charge from $29.13 to $30.00 per month; and beginning January 1, 2022, to increase the monthly Wastewater Volume Charge to $2.94, and the Wastewater Service Charge to $30.90. The meeting will be held via GoToMeeting video conference. For more information and to obtain a link to the video conference, please call Brian Passey at 435-649-7993. Written comment may also be submitted at the District’s office located at 2800 Homestead Road, Park City, Utah. |