- New law establishes a new EPA pilot program to permit up to 15 low-risk projects.
- Provides a “do no harm” conditional liability shield for Good Samaritans.
- Requires public notice, NEPA analysis, comment period and public hearing.
- Targets projects designed to improve environmental conditions.
Utah has an estimated 17,000 abandoned mine openings scattered across the state that should be addressed.
New legislation signed into law and announced Thursday may lend a hand to that effort, especially when it comes to protecting water quality if it is at stake.
Sen. Martin Heinrich, D-N.M., announced that his Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act was signed into law by President Joe Biden. Co-led with U.S. Sen. Jim Risch, R-Idaho, the law will make it easier for “Good Samaritans,” such as state agencies, nonprofits and other groups to clean up and improve water quality in and around abandoned hardrock mines.
The House companion legislation was led by Reps. Celeste Maloy, R-Utah, Mary Peltola, D-Alaska, and Susie Lee, D-Nev.
“Our Good Samaritan legislation is now the law of the land, after more than 25 years of hard work to get it over the finish line. Good Samaritans will no longer face hurdles preventing them from helping to protect the land, water, fish, and wildlife our communities rely on,” Heinrich said.
Maloy said it was a time for celebration, especially Utah.
“With this bill signed into law, Utahns can bypass bureaucratic hurdles and senseless lawsuits to clean up abandoned mines for the benefit of their communities. This achievement is the culmination of decades of bipartisan work, and I want to thank everyone who helped get this commonsense bill across the finish line.”
What’s the problem?
The U.S. has hundreds of thousands of abandoned hardrock mine features, of which at least 33,000 pose environmental hazards according to the U.S. General Accountability Office. Organizations that have no legal or financial responsibility to an abandoned mine — true Good Samaritans — want to volunteer to remediate some of these sites. Unfortunately, liability rules leave these Good Samaritans legally responsible for all the preexisting pollution from a mine, even though they had no involvement with the mine prior to cleaning it up, according to the announcement.
The Good Samaritan Remediation of Abandoned Hardrock Mines Act creates a pilot permitting program to enable not-for-profit cleanup efforts to move forward, while ensuring Good Samaritans have the skills and resources to comply with federal oversight. The pilot program is designed for lower risk projects that will improve water and soil quality or otherwise protect human health.
Utah has a history rich in mining including copper, silver and uranium. Often when mines no longer produced, they were simply abandoned, leaving equipment, open shafts, tunnels and piles of waste rock. In 1975, the Utah Mined Reclamation Act was passed making it illegal for mines to be abandoned.
Utah maintains a database to show a project’s status and if reclamation was completed.
The Utah Division of Oil, Gas and Mining employs a number of ways to tackle these mines. Some are as simple as hiking to the site, while others require helicopters or even mule trains to haul heavy equipment up steep mountainsides.
Closure of mine openings is a top priority in Utah and around the country, especially if they are close enough to threaten critical drinking water supplies. The openings also pose extremely dangerous public safety threats, with unwitting explorers risking cave-ins, falls into deep underground tunnels, exposure to dangerous fumes and other hazards.
One such example of a cataclysmic abandoned mine event was the Gold King Mine blowout in Colorado in 2015. Heavy metal concentrations were flushed into Lake Powell, carried by the San Juan River. At the time, it was estimated that 540 tons of those heavy metals rested at the bottom of the nation’s second largest human-made reservoir.