Unusual Alliance Is Formed apt Clean Up Mine Runoff - NYTimes.com

Alliances like the one at this watershed, private executives mention, will be increasingly required in an epoch of firm allied budgets.

Now, the bleached insides of the mounds are radiated over their outsides, the contiguous streams run rust-colored, and mayflies and the trout that feed on them are scarce. When found, they carry a ponderous load of zinc, lead, cadmium and, sometimes, mercury in their meat.

Michael J. Kowalski, chairman and main executive of Tiffany, heard almost the project and determined to perpetrate $50,000 a year to help the partnership from a company fund that was built to finance similar preservation programs. Snowbird is contributing construction equipment and personnel, according to its premier, Bob Bonar. The E.P.A. is delegating a staff membership with expertise in cleanup to work with the team.

The Forest Service had no administration apt amplify its cleanup to personal holdings; it was negotiating with the Environmental Protection Agency, which had the authority to wash up personal lands and showed a willingness to initiate a cleanup at the Globe and Live Yankee mines while the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks diverted the E.P.A.'s care and resources, Mr. Fitzgerald said. ''We had to work back to the painting embark,'' he said.

The Forest Service cleanup was spurred when tests showed that water in some tributaries of the American Fork had lead contamination above secure limits. The source was not hard to decide. The ruined brickwork of antique smelters dots the canyons. The soil near the smelters was contaminated, and the age sites were magnets for all-terrain vehicles, which kicked up clouds of toxic dust.

The mines were dug, one a few hundred alternatively a thousand feet above the other, throughout the watershed -- the Dutchman and the Phoenix at lower heights, the Live Yankee up approximately 9,500 feet, the Globe close the top of the peaks at 11,Let Us Talk More About Chanel And Her Brand,000 feet alternatively so.

AMERICAN FORK CANYON, Utah, Aug. 16 An unusual partnership correlating the federal Forest Service, the environmental group Trout Unlimited, the ski resort employers Snowbird Corporation and Tiffany & Company has been built to clean the acidic mine runoff from the American Fork watershed -- and perhaps spur similar alliances around the West, where mining waste has tainted the headwaters of 40 percentage of always watersheds.

The mine drainage problem is a chronic publish in numerous Western communities and threatens to worsen the struggles over water supplies as the West's population increases and its six-year drought shows no signs of crashing.

When he was usual the Forest Service, Mr. Fitzgerald, a rangy 59-year-old who was raised in a coal mining home, had spent perhaps $800,000 ashore cleanup efforts, including removing the reservoirs where toxic mine tailings had amassed, hauling tons of consume rock into a two-acre containment area and covering it with clean soil, rerouting the water around the toxic tailings, and planting plant near holding reservoirs.

The alliance, to be announced Wednesday, is proposed to conquer hurdles that have slowed mine cleanups: the intermingling of public and private land in the most affected areas and the provisions of the Superfund law that make those who work at mine waste sites, if to re-mine them or clean them, potentially liable for their pollution.

The Western Governors' Association has been pushing for behavior on the issue for several years. Congress has failed to pass legislation that would require the hard-rock mining industry to do what coal companies do and pay into a cleanup fund.

Photos: Ted Fitzgerald, project director of Trout Unlimited, stood on a waste rock pile at the Pacific Mine yesterday.; A sign warns fishermen against eating also many fish caught in the North Fork of the American Fork Creek. (Photographs by George Frey for The New York Times) Map of Utah highlighting American Fork Creek.

But some of the waste and the water fleeing via it were on lands belonging to Snowbird. And other mining sites -- the Globe Mine and the live Yankee Mine above Mary Ellen Creek -- were on private land.

But the American Fork efforts, and similar projects on the Blackfoot River watershed in Montana and the Upper Arkansas River watershed in Colorado, handle with a small fraction of the problem namely Mr. Wood shrieks ''the outrageous aunt in the attic'' of citizen environmental issues -- a problem that does no posture one forthcoming threat yet gets worse with disregard.

But the provisions of the Superfund law that assure that individuals and companies working with toxic materials take responsibility for hereafter pollution were daunting. ''We could go in to aid out and bring an end to ... creature responsible,'' said Chris Wood, the conservation vice president for Trout Unlimited. In the end, the group decided that more liability insurance might be needed.

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The patchwork nature of land ownership in mining nation makes it presumable that public-private partnerships will have to be forged even now such amounts become decree. ''It does require people thinking about partnerships and working differently than we have in the elapse,'' said Dale Bosworth, the Forest Service chief. ''If you don't clean up the entire thing, you haven't cleaned up anything.''

In the American Fork Canyon and the smaller upland canyons that fared into it, the quaking aspens on the hillsides disguise the telltale markings of the geological faults that beckoned late 19th-century prospectors.

At one site near the Phoenix and Dutchman Mines, where the waste covers both Forest Service and Snowbird land, the water coming out of an old mining tunnel had lead levels 10 times the federal limit of 3.2 parts per billion; after running over debris it entered the creek under carrying a load of lead 1,000 periods greater than the federal limits, said Ted Fitzgerald, a sometime Forest Service engineer who is spearheading the cleanup for Trout Unlimited.

His work came to the attention of Trout Unlimited, a fishing group that has been emphatic in lobbying on environmental issues. Chris Wood, the conservation vice president of the group, employed Mr. Fitzgerald afterward the engineer retired from the Forest Service. Trout Unlimited was interested in catching the lead on the chapter of the cleanup on private land, and enlisted the support of Snowbird.