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CALIFORNIA PLACER GOLD -
Mining Problems and Solutions
Abstract
The purpose of this paper was to investigate the most critical and
lasting effects of hydraulic mining during the California Gold Rush. Surprisingly, most of the recent publications available
concerning this period were focused on mercury contamination.
Through quite a significant literature review, the reason for this was clearly due to a recently discovered link to historical gold
mining. Of course, historians
and recreational miners already knew this, but environmental officials
believed the source of contamination was deposition from modern air
pollution.
The finding of this research is that despite new environmental
regulations and steps to protect California’s environment, much of that
work may have been in vain with this “new” discovery of widespread
contamination. Many would
argue that such is not the case, because it is generally better to protect
than to allow further degradation. While
that stance does provide the foundation of our greatly successful
environmental protection regulation, it is difficult to argue the
preservation of a hazardous environment with the potential to cause so
much harm. Nonetheless, in order to protect human health and the
environment in this case, a decision must be made how to best remedy this
problem.
My recommendation is to simply allow mining
companies to clean up this contamination in the California watershed
through large dredging and sluicing operations without risk of civil or
criminal liability, and possibly for a profit.
We must also allow recreational miners greater access with fewer
restrictions in the smaller creeks and streams that would be inaccessible
to mining companies. Both of
these groups would be able to clean up a significant portion of mercury
and reduce the problem. No
government superfund project will ever be able to make the same degree of
progress that these groups will have.
The premise of this paper is that the
best solution for successfully mitigating mercury contamination in
California’s watershed, is to somewhat paradoxically restore individual
rights in waterway mining to promote proactive approaches in environmental
management.
The
Problem
In 1998, the Seattle Post Intelligencer reported:
California
will celebrate the sesquicentennial of the Gold Rush throughout this year
with hundreds of events ranging from a re-enactment of the famous Pony
Express ride and tours of working gold mines to gold panning
championships. It's a good time to plan a trip to the state's gold-rush
country, one of the most romantic and colorful destinations in America.
However, after the EPA learned that a recreational
miner left the Polar Star Mine, with four pounds of gold and 40 pounds of
mercury,
California’s history didn’t seem quite so romantic any more (Stoll,
2002). California
environmental officials discovered that widespread mercury contamination
in the waters were not so much from air pollution as they had previously
suspected, but from mining, and now the question on their mind is whether
they’ll have something to celebrate during the bicentennial in 2049.
Introduction
Since the early beginnings of our country, Americans have sternly
pressed individual rights and freedom.
Today, as it was in the mid-nineteenth century, no other rights are
held more unequivocal in the western US than those of landowners and
claimholders. Many Westerners
shiver at the footsteps of big government stomping through their land, and
wonder how large regulatory volumes will grow as they slowly lose their
individual rights. On the
other hand, if their child grew sick with leukemia from drinking
contaminated water resulting from an adjacent property owner’s
“condoned” activities, those very same people would ask why the
government couldn’t have done more.
Of course, this blatant example was only used to drive the point
home that one cannot decisively choose sides on either extreme, because
even tree-huggers buy paper products and paper companies need to conserve
trees. However, a line
can be drawn. When it comes
to balancing the rights of individuals with the needs of society, measures
to conserve shared resources and to protect human health must always come
first. Understandably, unless you’re familiar with Garrett
Hardin’s Tragedy of the Commons (1968), in which everyone
depleted resources faster than they could be replenished with their own
interest in mind, leaving nothing for anybody, such a stance is difficult
for many to swallow. This is
because if our society always placed the good of the group before the
individual, we would be a communist state, and not the freedom endearing
and powerful nation that we are today.
Balance must therefore be our watchword.
Unfortunately,
there may not be a better example of the impact that unfettered resource
grabbing has had on the community than in the west.
California was finally forced to implement environmental conscious
regulation by prohibiting hydraulic mining in 1884 (Woodruff
Vs North Bloomfield) after
these operations destabilized slopes resulting in significantly worsened
flood conditions and destroyed large expanses of
prime farmland. Luckily, this
prohibition was enacted when it was, because these effects were only the
surface of a much more deleterious issue yet unknown at the time.
Hydraulic mining left a legacy of havoc in the form of arsenic,
mercury, cyanide, and acid contamination of soil, groundwater, rivers, and
lakes.
The
problem back then, and until recently, is that the government operated in
a reactive role towards environmental problems.
Now that we have reached a mature understanding that it is better
to protect the environment than to mediate it later, the dilemma facing us
today is determining the extent to which measures are to be taken for the
greater good, without unnecessarily impeding individual rights. To further complicate matters, what must policy makers decide
when sound blanket regulations are in place, but are in conflict with the
best measures to remedy particular problematic sites?
The
underlying fact is that the magnitude and complexity of today’s
environmental issues often require creative approaches.
Since the Gold Rush, a significant amount of work, capital
investments, and regulations have attempted to restore California’s
environment, but now appear to have been largely in vain due to the
newfound discovery of pervasive mercury in the watershed.
While the California Gold Rush created several negative
environmental effects, the scope of this paper is limited to the issue of
mercury contamination, which probably ranks as the most complex problem,
worst outcome, and endearing consequence of this event.
The premise of this paper is that the best solution for
successfully mitigating mercury contamination in California’s watershed,
is to somewhat paradoxically restore individual rights in waterway mining
to promote proactive approaches in environmental management.
“It was in the first part of
January, 1848, when the gold was discovered at Coloma, where I was then
building a saw-mill. The contractor and builder of this mill was James W.
Marshall, from New Jersey. Marshall took a rag from his pocket, showing me the yellow
metal: he had about two ounces of it; but how quick Mr. M. put the yellow
metal in his pocket again can hardly be described.”
(Sutter, 1857)
Natural
History
California Mother Lode’s history began 400 million years ago as
tectonic plates collided off the coast of what would later be Arizona.
Countless volcanic eruptions ensued and together with the rock that
was scraped off the sea floor, became the metamorphic rocks that make up
the bedrock found in the Mother Lode region.
Further plate shifting pushed the sea floor beneath the American
continent beginning around 200 millions years ago. After this material heated and pressurized, molten rock oozed
out and slowly cooled to form the granite-laden Sierra Nevada Mountains.
Surface water found its way to the magma through the countless
fissures left over from the plate movement, and dissolved quartz, gold,
silver, copper and zinc. This
mineral rich concentration heated back up to the surface along the Melones
Fault Zone in the Mother Lode. Large
veins of quartz with gold and silver, along with iron, copper and zinc
sulfides precipitated out as it cooled.
Erosion caused by rain, ice, and wind exposed these rich veins and
further washed the contents into the valleys. (Landefeld and Snow, 1990)
California’s ecosystem looked differently before the gold rush
than it does today. Streams
and creeks were filled with salmon; antelope, deer, mountain lions, big
horn sheep, and grizzly bears roamed in vast numbers; and dense forests
dominated the valleys. While
the Native Americans lived fairly close to a balance with nature, the
Spanish undoubtedly contributed greatly to the decline of these natural
resources. However, when
prospectors arrived and California’s population rose from 90,000 by the
end of 1849 to 220,000 by 1852, the grizzly bear was mostly eliminated,
other predators were decimated, elk and antelope were left in protected or
isolated remnants only, and the whaling industry had destroyed entire
populations. By 1900, the
Native American population had declined by as much as 90% since the
mid-eighteenth century when the Spanish first arrived.
(Lee, 2002)
Geology
Gold can be found in innumerable locations
around the state in the streams, rivers, and creeks in and out of the
Mother Lode. In fact, the
1993 Gold Prospecting Association of America’s (GPAA) Mining Guide lists
confirmed occurrences in 40 counties. The richest of all, Tuolumne County, has produced 7,500,000
troy ounces of placer gold (GPAA, 1993).
Not surprisingly, thousands of Americans and immigrants from all
around the globe poured into the state from the start of the Mexican War
through the beginning of the industrial age to find wealth.
The result was securing the west for America and building
cities that rivaled those in the east.
Ingrained into our collective consciousness are images of these
rugged western pioneers heading along western trails “To California or
Bust” to fill their pockets
with nuggets ready for the taking. Heralded
as heroic entrepreneurs living the American dream, early prospectors
needed only a pick, pan, and shovel to pick out large nuggets at first.
As easy pickings grew slim, numerous inventions to collect gold
sprung out of necessity. In
1852, the first hydraulic method was created by gravity feeding water from
an elevated water source into a hose to blast the banks of the river.
The debris washed away was fed into riffles and sluices.
This invention provided an inexpensive means of gathering high
volumes of earth with low concentrations of gold to make continued mining
operations feasible. The idea
caught on, and with further improvements, allowed tons of earth to be
processed daily. Geologically
speaking, California’s terrain and stream character transformed
overnight. According to
California park ranger Ken Huie:
A
single monitor [water cannon] with an eight-inch nozzle could direct
16,000 gallons of water a minute. It could tear away 4,000 cubic yards of
earth from the hillside every day. Into the sluices went the result, out
came the gold, and the rest was dumped into the river and sent
downstream.” (Kiester,
1999)
Later perfections of this method was to pour buckets of elemental mercury
into sluices to trap flour gold in a clay mix.
This mix was heated in kilns to separate the heavier gold from the
lighter mercury and substrate. While
some of the mercury was captured for reuse, much of it was emitted into
the air. All throughout this
process, mercury spilled into streams and contaminated the watershed
throughout California. According
to David
Jones, an administrator in the Environmental Protection Agency's regional
office:
More
than 26 million pounds of elemental mercury were used by the gold mining
industry between 1850 and 1900, and much of that mercury is still in soils
and sediments in California and Nevada.
Ten percent of the land mass of California would have to be dredged
or bulldozed to remove all contamination sources.
(Krist, 2002)
The problem for the EPA, though, is that while they are used to
looking at point sources and specific sites for remediation, 150 years of
erosion and drainage has dispersed mercury contamination on such a wide
scale throughout the watershed, that there is virtually no practical means
for any government ran cleanup to put a dent into it.
Right now, the plan is to continue
to review known highly contaminated sites (comparatively speaking of
course) and then try to find an acceptable solution.
The EPA states: “There
are very limited resources for conducting detailed AML [Abandoned Mine
Land] investigations; very, very limited money for remediation of AML
sites; and there is no AML funding source.”
However, the bright side is that
“California Mining Association has stated that problems from some
AML sites could be mitigated by mining companies if they could be released
from third party liability.” (EPA, 2002)
Biological
Concerns
It can be said with certainty that
California’s environment was permanently altered in the 1800s.
No amount of remediation will ever come close to restoring it to
pre-mining conditions. Stream
character has changed, and salmon were replaced with bass as several
rivers were diverted and later dammed.
The subtle truth is, most of the damage can be and is lived with.
In fact, California recently declared Malakoff mine a state park,
which is probably the worst example of erosion created by hydraulic
mining.
Quite possibly, many people would be against such an operation,
because it would significantly increase turbidity, further jeopardizes
listed endangered species, and injure ecosystems that have spent the last
century recovering. News
coverage of the probable fish kills wouldn’t be good for anyone’s
reputation (especially the EPA), but what’s the alternative? Massive people kills as seen in the
Japanese town, Minamata? Home
to a chemical plant that dumped mercury waste into the local bay for
decades, many people died there as a result of exposure from eating
contaminated fish. Several
thousands more suffered mental impairment, physical disabilities, and gave
birth to children with severe neurological defects (Krist, 2002).
Also according to Krist,
The
horrifying images that emerged from Minamata — men, women, and children
with twisted bodies and blank stares — became a potent symbol of
industrial pollution and helped launch the modern environmental movement.
The town even gave its name to the syndrome caused by acute mercury
poisoning: Minamata disease. Nothing like it had ever been seen before.
Could it happen in California?
Dr. Khalil Abu-Saba
of the San Francisco Bay Regional Water Quality Control Board
said that “over 150,000
people fish the Bay to feed 10,000 children and 50,000 women of
childbearing age” (Olsen, 2001).
Hopefully, nothing
like Minamata will ever be seen again.
Freeing the public and environment from contamination and averting
a Minamata-like disaster, once the recovery operation is complete, the EPA
could take over and start anew.
Political
Issues
The
second step would be to lift many of the restrictions now imposed on
recreational miners to allow greater access and use of various equipment
to get to the smaller streams and tributaries that wouldn’t be
accessible to the mining companies. As
Michael Stoll of the Examiner reported:
Dave
Jones, a mine cleanup specialist at the federal EPA, says government
agencies should work with hobbyists to collect and properly dispose of the
mercury they find without going through environmental red tape.
"Hundreds of pounds of mercury were collected over the past three
months," Jones told conferees in San Francisco. "And the cost to
collect the mercury was probably about 5 percent of what the cost would
have been if it had been collected as a hazardous waste."
The red tape that Jones is referring to is a mesh of county, state
and federal regulations and procedures that doesn’t make prospecting
worthwhile for many. All
water located in national parks, national monuments, state parks and
wilderness areas are closed to all dredging operations at all times.
Areas outside of these lands, to include private property, have
anywhere from the same strict limitations to fewer, may be based
seasonally, and may have restrictions to particular bodies of water.
Dredging operations in areas that aren’t already closed, require
a dredge permit from the California Department of Fish and Game, which may
or may not be approved. Other
than panning, any type of prospecting on National Forest lands require a
Notice of Intent or formal Plans of Operation, which can be an intensely
time consuming process that many would-be prospectors simply don’t want
to bother with. (GPAA, 1993)
Important
to remember is that these restrictions and requirements were emplaced
before California discovered that they were dealing with the remediation
of vast expanses of contamination, and not the protection of a recovered
or even pristine environment. Otherwise,
one would assume that resource constrained governments would have taken
advantage of the now lost, countless “volunteered” man-hours to
recover mercury through weekend prospecting.
Human Health Considerations
The one
drawback to this idea is that while recreational gold prospectors know how
to very efficiently collect mercury, they don’t always know how to
properly process it to separate out gold, or for that matter, dispose of
it. Education will ensure
that they are not posing risks to either themselves by evaporating mercury
on their household stovetops or to the environment by dumping it in the
stream behind their backyard. Through a certifying training program, one that can be
ran by their own club (such as the GPAA), we can put a small army to work
throughout California’s watershed to safely reduce mercury
contamination.
Other
Options
Some may
say that such drastic steps wouldn’t be necessary when the USGS is
considering methods to reduce sulfate content in water to slow the growth
of naturally occurring bacterial content that create methylated mercury
(Olsen, 2001). The obvious argument against this, however, is that a sterile
environment is not a healthy environment, and any actions to reduce
bacterial levels to the required amount would be enormously costly to both
the long term health of the ecosystem and taxpayer.
Most importantly, this method would never actually solve the
problem.
Another
option being considered is breaking up dams throughout the gold-bearing
regions. California lakes have been found to be notorious breeding
grounds of methylmercury, since heavy elemental mercury sinks to
lake-bottom mucks where bacteria actively transform it.
Destroying water reservoirs in desert southwestern areas with
booming populations does sound a little off, but even before mercury
contamination levels were realized, a state and federal partnership
program named CALFED was formed to mediate a host of other environmental
concerns, such as removing several large upstream dams for habitat
restoration.
While this does seem like a worthy cause by itself, and breaking up
dams would certainly slow down methylmercury production, there lies a
significant consequence. Breaking up
these dams would release a huge reservoir of mercury that these dams have
been collecting since the 1930’s into California’s bays.
Therefore, this wouldn’t solve the problem, but only make it more
difficult to handle. To
alleviate the risk of mercury exposure, we will still have to dredge.
(Krist, 2002)
The last
option is to do nothing. Continuing
the current status quo, we will pour millions of tax dollars into
restoring a site here and a site there, largely ignoring the overall
watershed, and misleading California citizens and congressmen that we are
making strides. According to Mike
Hunerlach, a mine hydrologist with the U.S. Geological Survey,
“addressing all the contamination in the mines, many now occupying
public lands, would cost hundreds of millions of dollars, he said, and
probably will never happen (Stoll, 2002).
Conclusion
In summary, the most critical and lasting effects of hydraulic
mining during the California Gold Rush is large-scale mercury
contamination of California’s watershed created by hydraulic mining
techniques during the 19th century, becoming problematic today
through bacterial action creating methylmercury.
Despite new
environmental regulations and steps to protect California’s environment,
much of that work has been in vain. In
order to protect human health and the environment in this case, the
decision that must be made to successfully
mitigate mercury contamination in California’s watershed, is to somewhat
paradoxically restore individual rights in waterway mining to promote
proactive approaches in environmental management.
We must allow mining companies and recreational gold miners to
clean up the damage done by their predecessors in the California
watershed. Such an enormous
cleanup would be far too costly for any taxpayer to bear otherwise.
While there exists several alternatives, no other method will
reduce the problem as well as dredging and sluicing operations currently
restricted. The only means to
get the job accomplished is through special concessions with miners
disallowing environmental liability and providing much greater access with
fewer restrictions.
References
Edward A. Keller (2002), Environmental Geology, Prentice
Hall Publishers, Upper Saddle River, New Jersey, 564 pgs
Barry and Hilda Anderson (1998, Janurary 29), California
celebrates 150th anniversary of a Golden State legacy,
Seattle Post-Intelligencer.
Available: http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/getaways/012998/dest29.html
M.D. Lee (2002), Overview of California History and
Environmental Changes, Available: http://isis.csuhayward.edu/alss/geography/mlee/ensc2800/CAEHistorys02.doc
General John A. Sutter (1857, November), The Discovery of Gold
in California, Hutchings’ California Magazine
Landefeld, L.A., and Snow, G.G.(1990), Guidebook
to Yosemite and the Mother Lode gold belt: Geology, tectonics, and the
evolution of hydrothermal fluids in the Sierra Nevada of California,
with articles on operating mines in the Mother Lode, land use and
permitting, history and natural history of the Sierra Nevada: Pacific
Section, American Association of Petroleum Geologists, Guidebook 68, 200
pages.
Kiester, Edwin Jr. (1999, August),
Turning Water to Gold, Available:
http://www.smithsonianmag.si.edu/smithsonian/issues99/aug99/phenom_aug99.html
Krist, John (2002) California is haunted by Gold Rush legacy of
toxic mercury
Available: http://www.enn.com/news/enn-stories/2002/08/08152002/s_47781.asp
Stoll, Michael (2002,
November 11): Gold rush
mines prolong toxic legacy, Available: http://www.examiner.com/news/default.jsp?story=mercury.12100
EPA Presentation. Available:
http://www.epa.gov/
Olsen, Michelle (2001, December), Gold Rush's toxic legacy, Available:
http://www.newsreview.com/issues/sacto/2001-12-13/enviro.asp
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