Butte Hill Will Always Be Dynamic
The Butte Hill will always be dynamic because it remains the richest hill on earth. In the year before the Superfund Law became a reality a number of community leaders and members of the scientific community met to think through how best to redevelop Butte, without such realities as the Superfund. I remember one of the internationally reknown scientists sent to our meetings by the Electric Power Research Institute, took me aside as we both looked out over Butte from the Montana School of Mines where we were meeting to formulate the technical questions we would be asking facilitated groups. His name was Walter Juda. He told me to remember two things about Butte: it’s a town with some of the finest earth scientists he ever met, “if the Japanese were in possession of The Butte Hill, it would be a beehive of industrial activity.”
Well we’ve had the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) in Butte during the more than 35 years since that unforgettable conversation. The EPA has done a great deal of good cleaning up, though I do sort of miss the ore dumps along Buffalo Street we used to clamber up in Corktown, I appreciate the storm water off The Hill being processed before heading down stream and the water from The Berkeley Pit being polished before it heads down stream, and I know more will be done to bring silver bow creek to be a lush place to reflect. However, it’s time for local leadership to begin accepting responsibility for the combinations of big decisions that will come our way as metals prices rise and fall, the credits for clean water and green hydrogen get really valuable and the quiet surface of the wind protected pit is able to float a fleet of solar panels, concentrating their energy on towers designed to produce high temperature steam, by far the most energy efficient way to make green hydrogen.
At page 58 of the attached (Internet Archived) Berkeley Pit, Reindustrialization and Mineral Recovery Project is a concept paper for a locally run authority missioned to offset costs of some needed technologies with the benefits of some of the more lucrative. The idea, with the help of EPA as it moves to its redevelopment phase with Butte, is to end the high-grading of Butte’s natural resources, while leaving future generations to clean up the mess. Unlike the initials ACM, which left us in the lurch, we need to begin working with the initials EPA to eventually stand on our own feet. It might take a little transfer of authority legislation, but I know we can do it.