40 Gals/Minute Of Mercury, Nickel And More: New Idria Mine Named California's Newest Superfund Site

[hatrack]

Every second of every day it flows: a river of poison gushing from the hillsides. Forty gallons a minute, 21 million gallons a year. It bubbles and gurgles across the landscape, a bright orange toxic brew, nearly as corrosive as battery acid, teeming with mercury, aluminum, iron and nickel, the legacy of a long-abandoned mine, relentlessly pouring into nearby streams.

For 120 years, the mining town of New Idria in the rugged back country of southern San Benito County was a colorful California outpost, a Wild West community frequented by prospectors and speculators, stagecoaches and famous bandits like Joaquin Murrieta, known as the "Mexican Robin Hood.'' Herbert Hoover even owned part of the claim at one point.

Today, after decades of neglect, this remote landscape with so much history may finally have a future.

In September, the Environmental Protection Agency declared New Idria a Superfund site, placing it among the most polluted properties in the nation. Since then, workers with hard hats and heavy machinery have combed the landscape -- once North America's second largest mercury mine, but today a ghost town -- on the first phase of a cleanup that could ultimately cost $10 million and take five years or more to complete. "It is a toxic hell," said Jared Blumenfeld, regional administrator for the EPA in San Francisco. "It epitomizes what Superfund is for."

EDIT

http://www.santacruzsentinel.com/localnews/ci_19467102

[madrchsod]

1. there`s some really interesting youtube vids about this site.

[Gregorian]

2. New Idria! We used to ride our dirtbikes there when we were younger. The town recently burned.

I was always leery of the place. Asbestos, for one thing.

And New Idria is not the only mine that's spewing toxins. Our ghosts are coming back to haunt us. I imagine our nuclear ghosts are yet to come.

[MineralMan]

3. America's most beautiful gemstone, benitoite, also comes

from that area. Pretty much exclusive to this one location, it's an amazingly beautiful mineral, both as found and as a cut gemstone.