Community

Ask anyone who lives in northern Idaho or northwest Montana why they live here and you’ll hear the same three words over and over again—quality of life. That quality comes from the surrounding beauty to be sure, but it also comes from the lack of traffic, the safety of neighborhoods, the peace and quiet, the sense that you live in a place that others envy. The Rock Creek Mine will surely diminish our quality of life. Here’s how.

Hand-Me-Down Pollution

The negative impacts from the Rock Creek Mine will be both permanent and perpetual. Area residents will be forced to live with the mine’s legacy of pollution, and Montana and Idaho taxpayers with the costs of cleaning it up. An unlined tailings pile will forever leak into groundwater, and be so large that it will literally alter the topography of the region, creating a new mountain on the landscape. The mine's discharge of 3,000,000 gallons of polluted effluent into the Clark Fork River every day will require treatment for generations. The water treatment facility, pipelines and diffusers will likely need to be maintained for centuries. Waste rock with acid-generating and metal-leaching potential from the evaluation adit would be "end dumped" adjacent to the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness and the west fork of Rock Creek, creating yet another source of contamination. Around-the-clock diligence would be required to monitor and attempt to treat the multitude of long-term impacts from the Rock Creek Mine.

Population Explosion

The communities in the region of the proposed Rock Creek Mine would grow by 50 – 75% in a matter of a few months. The towns of Trout Creek, Noxon, and Heron would bear the brunt of the adverse social impacts from the Rock Creek Mine, producing a classic “boom and bust ” situation for these small communities. Due to a lack of available temporary housing for the transient workforce, many will be forced to live in sub-standard housing including sites that are not suited for residential use. The federal agencies that permitted the Rock Creek Mine acknowledge that medical services, police, emergency services, and schools will have difficulty responding to the increased demand and may be forced to “tough it out.” These same agencies also admit that limited law enforcement resources would be in demand because many of the employees would have few, if any, ties to the community and limited access to social opportunities.