The latest: We scored an important victory in December 2008 when a Montana Supreme Court ruling voided a state water discharge permit for Rock Creek, further delaying the proposed copper and silver mine that would tunnel beneath the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness.  The ruling came as a result of a lawsuit filed against DEQ by the Clark Fork Coalition, Trout Unlimited, the Rock Creek Alliance, Cabinet Resource Group and Montana Environmental Information Center.

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Threats
Players
Updates
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In late June of 2003, regulators granted permits for a giant silver and copper mine that would sit above the Clark Fork River near Noxon, Montana, just upstream of Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille. The proposal is immense, indicating it will take five years to develop the mine before actual construction begins.  The mine will burrow a length of three miles under the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness in the cedar-hemlock Rock Creek drainage, 900 feet below its snowy ridges and alpine lakes, and well under the area’s water table. Proposed by Revett Silver—a newly-formed subsidiary of Revett Minerals based in Spokane, Washington—the so-called “Rock Creek Project” will blast out and chemically process 100 million tons of ore alongside trout-filled Rock Creek. In the process of extracting 115 million ounces of silver and 935 million pounds of copper over its 30-year lifetime, the mine will dump 3 million gallons of wastewater into the Clark Fork River every single day. And it will generate a 100-million-ton mix of leftover crushed ore, processing chemicals, and waste, which Revett plans to stack in a 324-acre tailings impoundment near the river. What this proposal adds up to is one of the largest underground mines in North America, and the first mine to be permitted beneath a wilderness area.

Threats 

Following 16 years of analysis, officials with the Forest Service and Montana’s Dept. of Environmental Quality decided the Rock Creek mine can be done right—or at least that “it meets all applicable laws and regulations.” We’re not convinced-- not at all.

Although a sizable reclamation bond—up to $77 million—is required of Revett Silver, the potential for lasting environmental damage is huge. Perhaps the biggest danger is the possibility that the mine will drain a string of lakes in the Cabinet Mountains Wilderness and seriously affect the macroinvertebrates, which are critical to the wilderness food chain and which rely on groundwater for the trace minerals they need to survive. Ore removal could also cause soils above the mine tunnels to collapse—known as subsidence—as it has at other underground metal mines. While some subsidence is considered tolerable at certain mines, here it would occur in a protected wilderness area. And after the mine closes and begins to re-fill with water, it will begin leaking poisonous metal-rich waste into area waters—either from an adit above Rock Creek, or, if the adit is plugged, from seeps and springs within the wilderness. Between all the sediment-loading, the metals-leaching, and the groundwater-lowering, Rock Creek’s native bull trout population will be severely damaged. The daily dumping of metals-laced wastewater into the Clark Fork will also degrade the lower stretch of river, and, ultimately, Idaho’s Lake Pend Oreille.

From a clean water perspective, this mining project has far too much room for error. Some think it’s amazing that the Forest Service and Montana’s Department of Environmental Quality even entertained—let alone permitted—the proposal. Eight of twelve major mines in Montana developed severe water quality problems, which permitting agencies never expected. There’s no reason to think the Rock Creek mine—given its interplay with wilderness lakes, groundwater, Rock Creek, and the Clark Fork—will evolve any differently.

Players 

Revett Silver is a subsidiary of Revett Minerals, which formed as Sterling Mining Co. in 1999 specifically to buy the proposed Rock Creek mining project and the nearby Troy Mine from a financially-stressed ASARCO. Based in Spokane, Washington and traded on the Toronto Stock Exchange, Revett Mineral’s key players have reputations for foul play and environmental callousness.

President and CEO William Orchow's business background includes eight years heading up Kenecott Minerals Company (KMC)—a far from “green” company. Between 1995 and 2002, under Orchow’s watch, KMC mines produced some 89 million pounds of toxic releases per year, and were cited for violations nearly 300 times by the U.S. Mine Safety & Health Administration.

Frank Duval, Revett’s CEO until 2003 and its current Manager of Government Affairs, has a particularly shabby track record in the mining industry. Of the eight mining companies Duval has been involved with—either as top executive, director or major investor—three ended up in bankruptcy court, two left behind federal Superfund sites, and two stuck taxpayers with multi-million dollar cleanup tabs.

To sum up, the resumés of Revett principals contain an astounding number of failed business ventures as well as mining operations that have caused significant environmental harm or impeded the cleanup of inherited environmental problems. This leaves good reason to question the wisdom of allowing these individuals to proceed with the environmentally sensitive Rock Creek proposal.

Updates 

Despite the late-June 2003 approval of Revett’s Rock Creek project, there are still lots of big and unanswered questions about how such a mine could be allowed to operate in the Clark Fork watershed. Forest Service officials maintain that mining-related laws prevent the agency from denying Revett a permit to go forward with this mine.

We don’t see it that way. By the looks of the project plan and its environmental impact statement, the decision to give the mine the go-ahead does not comply with the many requirements of the National Environmental Policy Act, the National Forest Management Act, the Federal Land Policy and Management Act, the 1872 Mining Law, the Forest Service Organic Act of 1897, the Wilderness Act, the Endangered Species Act, the Clean Water Act, the Clean Air Act, not to mention several other mining and land use implementing regulations. And that is why the Clark Fork Coalition and other conservation groups jumped into what has quickly morphed into a legal battle to decide the fate of the mine and the future of the lower Clark Fork watershed.

In Aug. of 2003, we filed an administrative appeal, asking the Forest Service to take a good hard look at the environmental soundness of the proposed mine and the agency’s flawed environmental analysis, so that we wouldn’t have to turn to the federal courts to do so. The agency rejected our appeal.

We continue to carry on with a state lawsuit we and other conservation groups filed against Montana’s Dept. of Environmental Quality. As lead plaintiff, we filed the suit in the winter of 2002 after DEQ violated its own reclamation and water quality laws when it issued the necessary state permits for the mine without conducting a ”non-degradation review” to see how project-area waterways would be affected. In June 2008, we were one of four conservation groups to file suit to block activity at the proposed Rock Creek Mine.  We are working with our partner groups, including Trout Unlimited, the Rock Creek Alliance, and Earthworks, to oppose Revett's attempts to develop a mine in this highly sensitive wilderness area.

Resource Library

To supplement your learning about the proposed Rock Creek Mine, see the following resources:

A Less Than Sterling Reputation (commissioned by the Clark Fork Coalition and researched and written by the Washington, DC-based Corporate Research Project) (PDF, 408kb, 29 pages)
Revett Mineral’s company website
Kootenai National Forest Rock Creek Project web site
Montana Dept. of Environmental Quality’s Rock Creek Project web site