Estimated read time: 2-3 minutes
This archived news story is available only for your personal, non-commercial use. Information in the story may be outdated or superseded by additional information. Reading or replaying the story in its archived form does not constitute a republication of the story.
There's a major milestone tonight for Utah's most prominent mine and the communities surrounding it. Tomorrow the federal government is expected to announce Kennecott won't be included on the list of sites among the most polluted in the country.
We're talking about so-called "superfund" status, a label that brings with it years and years of government oversight and, in some minds, a serious stigma. Kennecott avoided making that list by spending hundreds of millions of dollars in cleanup costs.
Kennecott's Bingham Canyon mine is huge, located next to a major population center, and cleaning up its wastes has been a monumental task.
Kelly Payne, manager for remediation at Kennecott Utah Copper, said, "One of the biggest challenges we faced is certainly the magnitude of the cleanup. I've been told if you put all of the superfund sites in the entire nation together, we've moved more contaminated material than all of them put together."
Tomorrow, the Kennecott South Zone, which encompasses parts of West Jordan, South Jordan, Riverton, Herriman and Copperton, will be taken off an EPA list of proposed superfund sites.
Kennecott Utah Copper CEO Andrew Harding said, "I think the benefits to the community from this event is that people living in the valley won't be living next to what was going to become a superfund site, so there's no stigma attached to that, the environment is now healthy for people to live next to."
Doug Bacon, an environmental scientist with the Utah Department of Environmental Quality, said, "It does acknowledge that the environmental concerns or the health concerns that are there or have been there in the past have been addressed or will be addressed in the future, still with state or EPA oversight."
Kennecott agreed to undertake the $400-million soil cleanup job in hopes of avoiding even more expensive superfund status, in which the feds take over cleanup efforts.
Still, environmental watchdogs say concerns over contaminated water, waste rock and tailings remain. Ivan Weber, a mining activist, called it a "mixed bag." He said, "Without question, they did a great job on the soils cleanups, no question about it, but it's only a part of the picture. And we shouldn't exaggerate its importance really. There's still lots of things to do."
Kennecott's CEO says the company plans to continue to mine in Bingham Canyon for many decades to come. He says eventually that will likely include underground mining of copper and molybdenum.
E-mail: jdaley@ksl.com
