If you were to take a 0.2% solution of cyanide in water on a teaspoon, it would kill you. This is the story of Consolidated Mining Company in the United States, where 3000 gallons of sodium cyanide leaked from its workings every minute. There are thousands of comparable mining operations around the world.

In ages now gone,
To the gold rush
South Mountain gave.
Where waters of life arose
There the Alamosa sprung.
Here prospectors
Fell for lust of gold
In chasms deep.

8,000 bars of gold
They dug in Wightman Fork,
As indigenous Ute
Fought for tribal home.
Government and miner did collude,
A treaty with Ute, for pittance procured.
Four million acres stolen
From this native heartland.

When all was gone
Save rust and decay,
Men unsated,
More they wanted.
So, these great mountain slopes
They scraped and stripped,
Dug and crushed
The ore and stone.

This Summitville Consolidated
Took beauteous land,
To turn to open pit.
There they laid vast plastic sheets
Of such proficiency
They tore and went unreplaced.
Upon this, they heaped
Great mound of ore.

Like children
Playing in pit of sand
With cup and water,
They poured their deadly mix.
10 million tons of stone
With Sodium Cyanide they sprayed,
To leach out each last grain of gold.
20,000 ingots of gold and silver, spirited away.

And when all was done,
In lust for gold they left
Great heap of toxic spoil
To leach and foul
The Alamosa.
Millions made,
they for-closed,
From the hills they ran.

Doors ajar, a settling dust
Every minute
Three thousand gallons
Slipped from noxious mire
To land and water pollute.
‘No harm done’, they did say
As great Rainbow Trout of Alamosa died.

Now, what is left?
This leach pit vast, 200 million gallons
Laced with cyanide.
Bills await, in dollars
150 million to date.
Who pays? The state,
And so, you,
As governments and corporations still connive.

DE 2020

The verse here tells the tale of the Summitville Mining Disaster in Rio Grande County, and the clean up operation continues ’till this day, It is an example of man’s disregard for his environment in his pursuit of profit. This is not a sole example, there are thousands of mines around the world similar to this. The following is a summary of what actually happened.

Most people who wear a ring on their finger, a gold bracelet, a locket around the neck as a token of great and enduring love little understand that their love is contributing to destroying our planet in the most toxic way.

The significance of the Summitville Mining Disaster is lost on many; nobody died, there was no cataclysmic explosion, BUT the Alamosa river and surrounding lands were contaminated, killing all aquatic life for 17 miles, agriculture was affected as was the ecology of the area.

Although occurring in 1992 the clean-up is still on-going and will never cease, it is seen as a ‘perpetual clean-up’.

There are thousands of open cast mines around the world that use the same dangerous and toxic process used at Summitville with little or no regulation. The cyanide leaching process used at Summitville is the standard process now used, called the Mac Arthur-Forest Process. The question is should we we let these companies and governments collude and allow the use of these processes for the sake of a metal with limited use? (In the US alone, there are 75,000 abandoned mines).

We could ask are we fit to be guardians of a planet while we let this happen?

In the case of the Alamosa, the mining company were refused a licence to mine at Summitville in the first place by the Mining Regulatory Agency, they appealed to the state legislature who sided with the mining company and changed the requirements to get a permit resulting in the company getting an automatic licence.

To mine in the US, you are required to give a bond, an amount of money, to ensure appropriate precautions are undertaken, Summitville’s bond was $3,000,000. The amount required for a bond was increased under the Clinton administration, and then revoked under the Bush Administration, highlighting the fact that many Governments ‘walk hand in hand’ with large companies and multinationals in the drive for huge profits.

The Summitville Mining disaster or Alamosa River Disaster as I choose to call it*, finally came to the attention of the public in 1992, after Summitville Consolidated Mining Company had used the cyanide leaching process to extract gold since 1986. Toxic heavy metals in solution with the cyanide leaked through a torn liner, whilst heavy snow and rains caused run off. An estimated 3000 gallons of contaminated water laced with heavy metals and cyanide poured every minute into the soil and watercourses both from the leach pits and old workings.

When traditional mining has worked out an area then the remaining ore can be crushed, dumped on a huge plastic liner in the open air, and continually sprayed with sodium cyanide. The highest pile of ore at Summitville was over 190 feet high (58 metres). This pile on a liner is known as a leach pad, the cyanide has an affinity with gold and silver and dissolves in it, just like sugar in tea. This is then reclaimed using a carbon strip tank. The run off, leakage and evaporation of highly toxic substances, are some of the obvious hazards.

Although this type of process may seem complex, it is almost naïve in its simplicity, astonishing in its risks, and amazing that it has never been banned, and it has become the main process of gold recovery after mining, and is used throughout the world. It amounts to half of the world’s production of gold.

The Summitville Mining Disaster or Alamosa River Disaster has cost the State and therefore the public more than $150, 000,000 so far.
The amount of gold and silver reclaimed from 1985 to when the open mine closed in 1992 through the leach pad process at Summitville amounts to 9,155.8kg of gold and 9,947.3kg of silver.

By my somewhat primitive methods of calculation, taken as an average between 1984 and 1992 the amounts produced were worth:
Gold – $209, 587,880
Silver – $4,653,329

The company declared itself bankrupt in 1992 and lost its bond of $3,000,000
When you consider how much the company made from the mining, losing this much is nothing, even if you factor in set-up and production costs.
They walked away, never helped with the clean-up and never even locked the doors.

In my verse I have used gold bars and ingots to denote amounts, as the figures involved were so huge, they were beginning to overwhelm me, and so the gold and silver in the verse is based on 1 kilo bars.

Using such a toxic substance as cyanide with very little oversight or regulation out in the open, so that we may hoard the gold produced in vaults, or theoretically stabilise economies, or wear it as a symbol of love, continues to astonish me. The leach pads are prone to leakage and methods of cyanide reclamation are poor. Other metals within the ore leach out along with the cyanide itself and are not reclaimed, flowing into groundwater and soil, poisoning the land and the living. The residues are held in holding ponds, which are prone to leakage and collapse.

This leach pad process replaces an even worse method of gold reclamation which used mercury. In some areas like the Amazon there is evidence that this process is still being used. The mercury is poured into the crushed ore and the gold forms a bond or amalgam with the mercury. Not all the mercury is reclaimed and again leaches into rivers and watercourses. Sometimes the dams that held the tailings from the mining/crushing process broke pouring a mercury laced silt onto land and into rivers.

The gold we do need to use for contacts on computers, phones and other technological applications is so infinitesimally small that we could use stock around the world without making an impression on the total amount that has ever been mined.

It has been suggested that the amount of gold mined world-wide is actually greater than declared, but is supressed to keep gold prices high.

The indigenous Ute’s tribal homeland was in the San Juan mountains and the Rio Grande Forest area, which included South Mountain. Miners were initially forced out by the Ute. Pressure from the government was put on the tribe to give up 4 million acres, which they did for $25,000 a year, but when you consider the value of the thousands of kilos of the declared gold which were produced in the early period and value of all the undeclared gold, the Ute gained little from ‘pressurised eviction’ under the Brunot Treaty of 1873.

Green or Eco gold is produced through alluvial panning by villagers or indigenous tribes in South America they are paid a Fair-Trade wage and no chemicals are used. You just need a metal pan, a river, and some skill. It’s more expensive, but do you want to buy an engagement or wedding ring for your loved one at the expense of the earth, or do you want to give something back and protect the planet? The pioneer of eco-gold in the UK is an eco-jeweller called Greg Valerio, and he has more recently been trying to source ‘eco-gemstones’. Gold is finally beginning to become more widely available but struggles with ensuring validity due to intermediary buyers who sell on, so if you intend to buy check out sources carefully.

*It was the river and those who lived along its banks that were worst affected.

Sources include:

http://snobear.colorado.edu/Markw/Intro/Summitville/summitville.html

https://www.cpr.org/2018/07/10/epa-tells-colorado-to-take-over-the-summitville-mine-cleanup/

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Summitville_mine

Image by Dink: Dead Rainbow Trout, leaping, with an aerial view of Cosolidated Mine Workings integrated into its body.