The history and future of Butte, Montana

I was lucky enough to teach one of our summer teacher ASM camps in Butte, Montana - at Montana Tech - the first time that city held such a camp. My time in Butte was great, and I am thrilled to have been able to visit Berkley Pit, a major feature in today's video.

This video is slightly about the history of Butte's mining industry but much more about the revitalization of the city's environment and the reclaiming of the environment around such a huge mining operation. 

There's a huge amount of clean-up to be done, but they've come a long, long way from a city surrounded by barren hillsides with the US's tallest free-standing masonry structure, one designed to spread the 75 tons of arsenic-laden dust produced daily a little further from the smelter. 

Butte, America (part 2 - Montana Resources)

When last we left our intrepid explorers, they had seen the eventual outcome of the strip mining of copper, a toxic-water-filled pit.

Today our scene opens on the pit to the east of Berkeley Pit in the creatively named East Pit (or the Continental Pit according to Wikipedia) where copper and molybdenum ore is still being mined, ground, and purified by Montana Resources who were nice enough to host our teacher camp participants for a field trip. Big, big, big thanks to Tad Dale and the folks at Montana Resources. They were great hosts.

Check out their video of the processes at the pit.


Montana Resources module SD from Washington Corporations on Vimeo.

We started toward the end of the process, in the grinding and flotation plant.

Mike McGivern, in yellow, was our tour guide. Here we started our tour outside the flotation plant. Big thanks to Courtney Young (in white), our Montana Tech host.

Be warned, lots of photos after the jump...

Butte, America (part 1 - Berkley Pit)

I just got back from Butte, Montana for our first ASM Teachers Camp under the Big Sky.

While there, we got to tour a couple of places that might be worth sharing.

On Monday night we took a trolley tour of Butte from a Butte High School history teacher, Chris Fisk. Yes, the Chris Fisk of 'saving a pig from Berkeley Pit' fame. (The tour was phenomenal, by the way. If ever you're in town, check the tours out. It was seriously outstanding.)

This post is going to focus on the portion of the field trip that visited the Berkeley Pit, an abandoned, open-pit mine that was operational from 1955 until 1979. For three years then, pumps kept water out of the Pit, water that would otherwise have filled the Pit and filled the various shaft mines loosely connected to the Pit, an interconnected honeycomb of mines that laced the ground underneath all of Butte.

The Pit as we saw it on 7/21/14 on a nearly windless day.

Then, in 1982 the pumps were turned off, and the Pit began to fill...and fill...and fill with water. The water continues to rise at a rate of eight to ten inches a month, headed for a water treatment plant that has already been built at an elevation of 5410' above sea level, the critical height at which water will start to flow out of the Pit, contaminating the aquifer that is the source of Butte's drinking water. At that point, the water treatment plant will come online and maintain the water at a level just below that critical level...forever. As I write this, the water level in the Pit is 5318.01' (check current level here).

So, to our trip...(I warn you, there are lot and LOTS of photos after the jump.)