Big mine. Bigger trouble.

The bigger the mine, the bigger the risks—financial and environmental—and make no mistake, the Rock Creek Mine as proposed is immense. Revett’s proposal calls for tunneling three miles deep into the heart of the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness. Ore will be mined by blasting and hauling of the rock to a mill facility located within grizzly bear habitat in the Rock Creek drainage. Mining will create large underground rooms held up by rock pillars. One hundred million tons of waste rock will be dumped in an unlined pile just a quarter mile upstream from the Clark Fork River.

• Approximately 10,000 tons of rock will be moved per day.
• More than 3,000,000 gallons of wastewater will be discharged into the Clark Fork River each day, eventually ending up in Lake Pend Oreille.
• The 3,000,000 gallons of mine water would require treatment long after the mine’s closure. Treatment facilities would have to be maintained for generations to continuously treat mine effluent prior to its discharge into the Clark Fork River.
• The mine would produce a mountain of waste rock (tailings) over 300 feet high, consuming a half square mile, and would contain metals such as arsenic, lead, copper and zinc, plus nitrates from blasting compounds.
• A 64-acre underground reservoir containing 207 million gallons of once pristine water now polluted by mining operations would be left behind to leach pollutants into ground and surface waters, requiring treatment in perpetuity and forever altering the hydrology of the wilderness.

Needless to say, the Rock Creek Mine is massive in any venue, but with the proposed project adjacent to a federally protected wilderness and a mere 25 miles upstream from Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille, the magnitude of its impacts are much more significant. The risks are real, and Montana Department of Environmental Quality acknowledges that the alpine lakes within the wilderness would suffer water loss from development of this mine. Unfortunately, the remediation bond would not cover damage to wilderness lakes and streams or to Lake Pend Oreille.

The Rock Creek Mine will destroy bull trout habitat, cripple grizzly bear populations, pollute the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness with industrial light and noise, and leave an unsightly, toxic mess for future generations of Montanans and Idahoans to deal with.

The Rock Creek Mine is big. The disaster it is likely to unleash is even bigger.