Jessica Cejnar Andrews / Wednesday, March 29, 2023 @ 1:55 p.m. / Environment, Local Government
Abandoned Mines Leaching Arsenic, Other Heavy Metals Into Rowdy Creek Headwaters, Smith River Collaborative Representative Says
More than 90 abandoned mines are leaching arsenic and heavy metals into creeks and streams in the Smith River National Recreation Area. | Map Courtesy of the U.S. Forest Service
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More than 90 abandoned mines are leaching arsenic and other heavy metals into the Smith River’s tributaries with several sites clustered around the headwaters of the creek that supplies drinking water to the town of Smith River.
But while Del Norte County supervisors said this news is concerning, they delayed sending a letter to federal officials supporting the U.S. Forest Service’s efforts to obtain Superfund grant dollars to stop the contamination.
With the proposed letter appearing on Tuesday’s consent agenda, most on the Board of Supervisors told Grant Werschkull, acting chair of the Smith River Collaborative, they needed more information before they could make a decision.
“I had to Google search,” District 2 Supervisor Valerie Starkey told Werschkull. “… for me to feel comfortable signing off on this, I’d like to be educated some more on it through some sort of Board report, other than just a letter and me having to do my own Google search.”
The Smith River Collaborative consists of Del Norte County supervisors, local and regional conservation groups, including the Smith River Alliance, the Del Norte Fire Safe Council, Elk Valley Rancheria, the Tolowa Dee-ni’ Nation, the American Forest Resource Council and the Six Rivers National Forest.
The Collaborative was formed in 2016 and was initially co-chaired by former supervisor Gerry Hemmingsen, whose name Werschkull invoked on Tuesday to convince county elected officials to agree to sign the letter to the U.S. Forest Service.
“He operated on wisdom (and) familiarity with the agency,” Werschkull said of Hemmingsen. “He knew who to listen to and then he stepped forward to lead and what we want to do is follow in those footsteps.”
The collaborative’s focus on legacy mines comes at the request of Gasquet District Ranger Kathy Allen. In most cases, officials can’t find the parties that had mined these sites. They’ve become hazardous to the community and need to be remediated, Werschkull said.
Many of the legacy mines in the Smith River National Recreation Area are clustered around the headwaters of Rowdy Creek, which provides drinking water to the Smith River Community Services District. Other mines are located alongside Hardscrabble Creek, which drains into Middle Fork Smith River.
The Union-Zaar Mine is an example of a legacy mine the U.S. Forest Service remediated, Werschkull said.
According to the state Division of Mine Reclamation’s Abandoned Mine Lands Unit, the U.S. Forest Service closed the shaft after a fatality and an injury in October 2003.
The Union-Zaar mine was also a source of contamination to Rowdy Creek’s headwaters, Werschkull said.
“What remediation meant there is you went in with bulldozers and pulled out the material that had been mined out of the pit that was left but not used,” he told supervisors. “That material was pulled back from the creek and contained in an area that was removed from the water so it would not leach anymore.”
Remediating these mines is a $2.5 million effort, Werschkull said. Smith River Collaborative members hope to harness multi-party support to try to obtain nationally competitive Superfund dollars to spearhead those cleanup efforts.
Werschkull said he has also briefed the county’s Natural Resources Goal Committee, who agreed that the community’s drinking water needs protection. He said he felt like the Board of Supervisors’ support on this endeavor was a “no-brainer” since drinking water is a top priority.
All but one member of the Board of Supervisors expressed confusion at the letter Werschkull was asking them to sign. Board Chair Darrin Short said he looked at water quality reports prepared by Crescent City, which draws its water from the Smith River just east of the Dr. Fine Bridge.
“Water quality reports show there’s no contaminants in the water right now,” Short said. “So, it seems, and I’m no expert, but it seems like going up and disturbing the ground around those mining minerals would kind of have an opposite effect of what we want.”
Werschkull pointed out that Rowdy Creek enters the Smith River downstream of where Crescent City gets its water.
“We can’t use the City of Crescent City monitoring, but what you can use is the City of Crescent City is absolutely the biggest champion on dealing with threats to our drinking water,” Werschkull said, “consistently voting unanimously to deal with mining-related threats.”
District 5 Supervisor Dean Wilson said he also wants to see the facts and the reports on the issue, particularly since it's coming from the U.S. Forest Service. The former sheriff, who pulled the proposed letter from the consent agenda, was skeptical about the Forest Service’s conclusion that heavy metals from those legacy mines were leaching into the water.
Wilson also accused the U.S. Forest Service of grossly mismanaging Del Norte County’s public lands.
“I’d love to see them do a far better job, but unfortunately they’re in the same boat we are,” Wilson said of the Forest Service. “They are spending over 90 percent of their budget on operational costs and not putting the tools to the ground to maintain the forests and keep our roads open.”
District 3 Supervisor Chris Howard, who asked the proposed letter be placed on Tuesday’s consent agenda, said the advantage of partnering with the Smith River Collaborative is its multi-party approach to solving these challenges and others, including protecting Gasquet and other communities from catastrophic wildfire.
Though he said supporting the letter “seemed like an easy thing,” Howard apologized to his colleagues for not discussing the issue in more detail and proposed tabling the matter.
“I understand the reason to abstain on a decision,” he said. “I would choose to table it until the Board has necessary information from the collaborative in order to make the right decision. I would hate to see us pass up an opportunity to address some of these legacy mine issues that are leaching harmful metallic contaminants into (our) water sources.”
Howard said he hoped the item would come back before his colleagues at its next meeting.
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