[CPEO-BIF] New Idria Mercury Mine, San Benito County, California

[Lenny Siegel <lsiegel@cpeo.org>]

Cleaning up California's Wild West: EPA takes on polluted mercury  
mine in San Benito ghost town

By Paul Rogers
San Jose Mercury News (CA)
December 6, 2011

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 U.S. 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

...

For the entire article, see
http://www.mercurynews.com/science/ci_19468465

--

Lenny Siegel
Executive Director, Center for Public Environmental Oversight
a project of the Pacific Studies Center
278-A Hope St., Mountain View, CA 94041
Voice: 650/961-8918 or 650/969-1545
Fax: 650/961-8918
<lsiegel@cpeo.org>
http://www.cpeo.org

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