I'm John Torek, and I'm Danny Sullivan. And you're listening to Speaking of Design, bringing you the stories of the engineers and architects who are transforming the world one project at a time. Today, we'll take you to what was once known as the richest hill on Earth and learn how a one of a kind water treatment plant is helping a community change its perception. The city of Butte has sort of had a reputation for having a poor quality water. Whether it was true or not, it's just something that
people think. That's Nathan Kudel, the lead engineer who worked with the Merge City and County of Butte Silver Bow to design the community's new drinking water plant. So it was very important for the citizens to try to dispel that image by coming up with a project that would give them some of the greatest drinking water in the whole state. Nathan got his degree from the South Dakota School of Mines in his hometown of Rapid City. Kind of a funny story, actually.
I had graduated once, started one year degree on a master's, and then met a girl and ended up moving home. And at that point, I didn't really know where my life was headed. And my mom said, well, you should become an engineer because there's an engineering school here in town, and engineers have a nice life. And she said, I'll give you $2,000 if you go back to school and graduate
with an engineering degree. Nathan works in the Missoula office of HDR, just under two hours from Butte in Western Montana. Today, Butte's a town of about 30,000 people, but their water needs are unusually complicated for a community that size. The city of Butte and the community of Butte Silver Vogue has three drinking water sources all remote from each other for quite some distances.
And all dating back about a hundred years, as they started looking for water outside of the area, they actually found water on three different sides of the Continental Divide and bring that into the city of Butte. It's resulted in a lot of complex pressures and piping arrangements that go along with it in the mountain community. The use of distant water sources was born out of necessity.
That community has ample groundwater below their feet, but they can't drink it because it's been contaminated by the community's mining history. The Butte community has a history in copper mining, and the copper mining took place right basically in town. And back in the late eighteen hundred, there weren't EPA regulations on discharge. So the surrounding community became kind of
polluted from the activities of the mining. Butte has a rich history, a history that it doesn't shy away from, both the good and the bad. Dirty water. Dirty water. Dirty water. When I first heard this years ago at a girl basketball game, when we were playing Missoula, The crowd from one side likes to taunt the crowd from the other side. So the taunt from Missoula was dirty water and and, you know, that affects some people.
But I heard recently that Butte High students will go to those games, and they have sweatshirts that say dirty water. That's Joe Griffin, a retired hydrogeologist who's still very active educating the public about environmental issues in Butte. To me, I appreciate the fact that the kids adopt the time and throw it back in our competitors' face. Yeah. Dirty water. That's Butte. It's kind of you know, it's funny. I
mean, they're just it's a joke. Right? Joe spent the better part of twenty five years working on two EPA Superfund sites in Butte, including more than a decade working for the Montana Department of Environmental Quality. Today, he's part of a local committee that helps translate EPA information into less technical jargon. His job is to help Butte residents understand the environmental issues they're facing. He could also be a part time historian.
Gone into, like, third grade classes or fourth grade classes to talk to them a little bit about some of the stuff. We can't really have a fascination with history going fairly far back. You can't live here without picking up a lot. Butte was founded in 1864 as prospectors made their way west in search of gold. They didn't find much, but they did find deposits of silver, quartz, and especially copper. The value of copper boomed with the onset of
the electrical age. By the end of the nineteenth century, Butte was supplying more than half of The US copper supply. With claims of more than 100,000 residents, it was the biggest city between Chicago and San Francisco. Butte became known as the richest hill on earth. Joe's interest in history ties into his career. Part of my fascination now is that the history is having watched a good portion of the history of managing the environment, trying to clean up the environment.
But that always goes back to how did it get this way in the first place. Joe explained some of the basic aspects of nineteenth century mining and how they caused environmental harm. Once you go underground and start getting in the ore bodies, you're having to pump groundwater out of the way. And when you do that, with all the mine workings you're doing, you're also opening up a lot of mineralized rock oxygen, and water. Which has a chemical effect on the groundwater. You oxidize
sulfide, they produce sulfuric acid. Sulfuric acid then leaches metal. And for all of the years of dewatering the mine, they were pumping that water straight out of the underground and straight into Silverbough Creek. And that had exorbitantly high levels of, say, copper and zinc and cadmium, which are very toxic to fish. So it's completely dead stream. On top of the toxic groundwater runoff, the old mining companies weren't exactly knowledgeable when it came to waste disposal.
In the earliest days, the mill and smelter operations were right on Silver Bow Creek. And the creek itself just was a very convenient industrial sewer for them. So they could just slurry their tailings down into the creek, and the creek would take them away so that they could slurry some more tailings out there. The tailings are what you're left with after the ore is obstructed from the rock. They're usually a muddy combination of rock, chemicals, and
traces of the metals being mined. In nineteen o eight, there was the largest flood of record in Montana, and it washed those tailings down Silverbow Creek and down the Clark Fork. A lot of them got trapped behind the nearly complete Milltown Dam. In the early twentieth century, the Anaconda Mining Company was such a big part of Butte that many residents
just referred to it as the company. They built an incredible labyrinth of mine shafts that stretch below town, even beneath Downtown Main Street and many of the neighborhoods. So they made these calculations, and they came up with 10,000 miles of underground work. Keep in mind, above ground, Butte isn't that big of a city. Telling that to say some middle school or high school kids, they say, well, you would start out at, say, San Francisco, and you would start tunneling until you got
to New York. And then you'd turn around and tunnel back to San Francisco. And then you'd turn around and tunnel all the way back to New York. That's how much tunneling there is all wound up and noodled around under people. But we haven't even gotten to the most visible symbol of Butte's mining history. It's both an eyesore and a tourist attraction, the subject of both books and lawsuits, a truly one of a kind sight. Eventually, they they took to just building the Berkeley
Pit. That's Dan March, a senior hydraulic engineer at HDR. That's really hard to get a sense of the size of it when you're standing next to it. They call Butte the mile high city because it's at roughly elevation 5,200 or something along that line. The depth of the pit is nearly 1,800 feet below ground level. So it's amazingly, huge. By the nineteen fifties, Anaconda had experimented with an open pit mine and realized
far less expensive to operate. The Berkeley Pit became America's largest truck operated open pit copper mine. The first time that I got a better sense was when they were still mining it, and there was a visitor's viewpoint where you could stand on the edge of the pit. And they had one of the mining trucks parked there next to the visitor center. And so you could get a sense of
just how massive the mining trucks are. And then you could look all the way across the pit, and you could see those same trucks driving these roads down to the bottom of the pit and realize just how far away that was. Eventually, copper mines in Chile and Mexico flooded the market, and the value of copper dropped. Atlantic Richfield Company or ARCO bought Anaconda in 1977. They ceased operation of the Berkeley Pit in 1983. But as Dan explained, the pit was soon filled with more than history.
So when they opened up the pit, all that water would flow to the pit, and it pumps in the bottom so that they could keep the water out and continue to mine. But when mining shut down, all that water started flowing into the pit and bringing the minerals and the low pH water into the pit has been gradually filling up for decades now. It's a problem that everyone sees coming as the one mile long by half mile wide pit is now filled with about
900 feet of toxic water. I think pretty early on when they shut down the pumps, they knew that there was going to eventually be a problem. Here at some point, that water's gonna get high enough that it'll impact the groundwater up where the streams and people's houses are. It's a problem that's coming. In the nineteen nineties, the EPA issued a record of decision to allow the pit to serve as a giant capture well until it
reaches a certain level. At that point, the water will need to be pumped and treated to meet the state's strict water quality standards. The water in the pit contains arsenic, copper, and sulfuric acid. The acidity is often compared to lemon juice or cola. In 2016, thousands of snow geese were caught in a snowstorm and pushed off their migratory path. The
exhausted birds sought refuge in Butte. That has happened a couple times and made pretty big news when snow geese landed in Berkeley Pit and then all died because of our terrible water quality there. They do have systems in place, air guns going off on a regular basis, the Nat to try to spoons off of, Berkeley Pit. It works to a fair degree, but there have been a couple of times where nasty weather or whatever and the birds, they need a place to land, and
it doesn't turn out well. However, the Berkeley Pit is not a secret Butte residents shy away from. It was one of the first things we saw when we drove into town. There's a visitor center and a gift shop. And for $2, we could walk through a short tunnel to a viewing stand. It's a covered deck perched over the toxic water and a great vantage point for pictures. It includes displays about both the mining history and the environmental effects. Dan said the community still celebrates its history.
That's a big part of who Butte is and who the people that live there are. They have a mining museum there, and the history of Butte is pretty spectacular. The history of the copper kings and the, you know, the wars between them, there's amazing history, and they definitely embrace that, use it as a tourist attraction. The EPA establishes Superfund sites for land that has been contaminated by hazardous waste and poses a risk to human health or the environment.
Today, there are three separate Superfund sites in direct proximity to Butte and several other smaller contaminated sites in the area. Combined, the Upper Clark Fork River is considered the largest Superfund mega site in The United States, spanning about a hundred miles. Before his time at HDR, Dan March spent much of his career working on a variety of projects to help remediate the area.
I first started as a summer intern, and then after I graduated from MSU, I had the opportunity to work full time for that same firm. And one of the main things that they did was historical mine cleanup. Dan's worked on a number of mine related projects during his career. That's included emergency mine closures, sometimes where you least expect of them. The issue with that was that there were mines and shafts all over town, and oftentimes, those would just get pushed
in. So you might have a 700 foot deep shaft, and somebody just bulldozed dirt into the top of it, and then, you know, maybe folks forgot that that shaft was even there and buildings would be put up. And so you'd hear the stories of some guy getting up in the morning to pour himself a cup of coffee and kind of a rainy morning, and he looks out his window into the backyard, and there's a big hole that opened up. And it ends up that
there's a mine shaft in his backyard. But a lot of Dan's work was assessing abandoned mines and cleaning up the waste left behind. Our job was to go in there and map those areas out, determine volume of material, figure out what to do with that material, and then we would deal with chemical aspects of the soil that is remaining and reestablish vegetation. So the goal was to remove the mine waste and to prevent runoff from taking nasty chemicals into local streams.
Doing this kind of work, Dan met Joe Griffin, who explained the risk posed by mine waste. Those waste piles had two reasons that they had to cap them. The main driver was, are they high in lead or arsenic? So it was a human health issue. But the other thing you can imagine is every time it rains, that stuff would wash down off the hill and then creek.
So that capping, first of all, was to protect people from breathing the dust off them or, you know, playing with it, getting it on your hands and then eating your lunch or whatever. But the other thing was really to protect Silver Bow Creek and protect it from stormwater runoff. Dan said a lot of the work was about cutting off the source of future contamination. A century of mining had already done plenty
of damage to the water quality. When Montana went through the process of taking a closer look at quality of streams and then they ranked streams throughout the state based on water quality and what their impairments are, There's one category called I, and it stood for impaired. There were only two streams in the state that ended up with an I ranking. One of those was Silver Bow Creek right there in Butte. The elephant in the room, of course, is who pays for the Superfund cleanup.
According to federal law, it's the party responsible. Arco has been working with EPA and Montana DEQ for a couple decades now to do cleanup for the environmental damage that was done over the decades and decades of works at Anaconda Copper Company was mining in the area. There's been a lot of litigation, and it certainly can be contentious when it comes to millions of dollars in settlement money and long term environmental effects.
But even as a former Department of Environmental Quality employee, Joe said Arco has been a big part of the solution. I would say they have been a pretty good partner here. A lot of the people and the consultants that work for them are people that live here, and they do care about this place. And I've seen it work where the EPA, Montana DEQ, and Atlantic Richfield, and all of those consultants that work for all of those entities work pretty well together as a good team.
The EPA and the state of Montana have reached separate settlement agreements with ARCO in 1999, '2 thousand '5, and 02/2008 to remediate the area impacted by mining. Today, Atlantic Richfield has paid more than $400,000,000. The natural resource damage program under the Montana Department of Justice determines how that money will be spent. Butte's a good case in point. We have lost access to our groundwater. Many Montana towns rely on groundwater. We can't. The EPA has written off
two of our groundwater systems. That water has been deemed unfixable, and so we've lost that resource. Which brings us back to the beginning of our story. Both of the price of that water treatment plant at Basin Creek was paid for by damage lawsuit. It's a great program and it helps compensate you. This water source that this plant treats has been in operation since the late eighteen hundreds. So over a hundred years, this source has actually operated and sent water to town,
because it's a very clean water source. That's Jim Keenan, chief operator for the Basin Creek Water Treatment Plant in Butte, Montana. This plant makes a really good neighbor. People driving by, you know, you can't hear any noise coming from the plant. It can be a little a little bit noisy on this level sometimes when certain sequences are taking place. Jim was giving us a tour of the shiny new drinking water facility in the merged city and county of Butte
Silver Bow. We weren't his first guests. We've had visitors from plants in Montana, and we've had visitors come as far away from Ukraine. And we have a a group of Israelis who are here. So we're getting interest from people all over the world, actually, which is pretty exciting. We're getting pretty good at giving tours around here. The plant has received a lot of attention for its unique design, the first of its kind in The US.
Well, there's a lot of different innovative technologies and equipment being used here, but, the most obvious one and the biggest one is the ceramic membrane. This is the first plant of its kind in the country that uses this ceramic membrane that's manufactured in Japan. And it's widely used there and in different parts of the world, but in the country, this is basically the first plant of its kind that
uses this ceramic membrane. Jim said another notable feature is that gravity brings the high mountain water from the Basin Creek Reservoir to the plant, and from the plant to the people's taps in town. It was a pretty unique design requirement wanting to build a plant that would do that, you know, where there's no finished water tank at the end of the plant, plant and no pumping up to a tank and just having a plant that treats water real time as needed. Jim told us about
what spurred the project. So in 02/2010, we exceeded the MCL for a certain type of disinfection byproduct, and we lost the filtration waiver that had been in place since this source had gone into use. So that prompted the construction of this plant. Nathan Kudel, the designer of the plant, explained the basics of how water
is treated. So usually, when you're talking about treatment of water to remove things that you don't want in the water and when it comes to drinking water, it's usually a physical chemical process. So we add chemicals that bind with things we wanna remove, and then we have physical processes to remove them. Then we tend to add additional chemicals for disinfecting viruses and bacteria that we don't want
in the water. The high mountain water of Basin Creek was so pure that it had not needed a treatment plant before 02/2010. With the new facility, Butte Silver Bow officials wanted to continue taking advantage of gravity to carry the water to town. Usually, invention is born of necessity. And in this case, the fact we wanted to maintain gravity through the whole system, and then as we began selecting equipment, it just started to grow
into something very unique. Nathan said that created a one of a kind water treatment system. Probably the most unique feature of the facility is the on demand nature. Being that when users in the distribution system turn on their sprinklers or require more water, then more water just flows through the filtration plant. And at night when they go to sleep and they use less water, then less
water flows through the treatment plant. And so that's kind of unusual for drinking water treatment plants which usually they select and set a daily flow rate that they plan to produce, and they do that regardless of what the distribution system may be consuming. Whereas this one, it just reacts to the distribution system and produces exactly what's needed. The design was also efficient by cutting down on the equipment and
facilities needed to treat the water. The treat on demand system provides a lot of benefits for the treatment plant and probably most notably is the fact that storage is not required, which saves money in terms of building a clear well. It also provides reliability because the pumping is not required
to fill a clear well. The reason that a a reservoir and pumping aren't required is because the reservoir itself or the Basin Creek Reservoir, the 370 some million gallons of water stored in the lake, basically become the storage because the only barrier between that and the distribution system is a filter that operates on demand. As the first fully operational drinking water plant in The US to use ceramic filters, Jim said the facility boasts a lot of other efficiencies.
Membranes in general, these are a microfilter, so they will remove impurities down to 0.1 micron is the nominal pore size in these membranes. The thing that was unique about this membrane was they were all compared on a a twenty year present worth analysis, and this membrane was the lowest cost overall. And it also gave us the ability to have a 99.95% recovery of our raw water. So there's very little wastewater associated with this membrane. It's very efficient. So we didn't have to have big
wastewater lagoons or anything outside. We have a very small volume of wastewater that we have to deal with with this membrane. Most importantly, that technology and that efficiency impact the community. This facility benefits the citizens of Butte because it provides the lowest cost, best quality drinking water reliably to their homes. It does that because gravity is reliable and free. Also, the water in the Basin Creek Reservoir is pristine high mountain water, so they can
take advantage of that through this project. In Butte, that clean drinking water isn't taken for granted. It's helping remove a stigma for residents and even for prospective businesses, a fact that's not lost on people like Joe Griffin, who spent his career trying to restore the environment in Butte. The funny thing is, you know, people think somehow we're connected. Our drinking water is connected to the Berkeley
Pit or something. I mean, really, we have probably with this Basin Creek water plant, We probably have the most modern facility in the state of Montana, and it's probably the highest quality water in the state of Montana to drink. So it's an irony. There have been other milestones to celebrate in Butte, such as in 02/2012 when then governor Brian Schweitzer strapped on some leaders and cast a fishing line into Silver Bow Creek.
He noted that no one had been able to fish in the creek since his great great grandparents were alive. Joe said it took a lot of work to reach that point. Removing the tailings that had washed out of Butte and Down Silver Bow Creek, removing those from roughly 26 miles of Silver Bow Creek and completely rebuilding that stormy. Pretty exciting. It still needs work, but it went from a completely dead stream, and now we do
have fish in the stream. As someone who's helped restore streams in the area, Dan March said that part of the job is making sure that they remain that way. They've done a lot of work to get Silver Bowl Creek back into a a form that supports fisheries. That's a big tell is they can actually go fish that stream again, you know, and that there's fish in it. So they wanna make sure that it stays that way, that there isn't something upstream still that causes problems with all the work that
they've accomplished so far. As for the most visible memento to the mining contamination, the mining companies have been working with the EPA in the state for about twenty years to develop a plan to address the rising waters of the Berkeley Pit. Just recently, a pilot program was announced to begin pumping and treating the toxic water possibly as soon as this year. So the decisions were made for how to take care of that mine water, and that will be that they will only allow it
to drive to a certain point. And then if they will have to control the elevation of that water level so that it never goes any higher, and they will have to be treating that water to be all water quality standards and then they'll release it into Silver Bow Creek. Just last week, they announced here's what we're gonna do, and we are gonna start treating. And we're gonna do this as a pilot program. That was pretty exciting to the community, I think.
It's work like that that's always motivated Dan March as an engineer. You know, that's some of my favorite kind of work as an engineer is to be able to take something that's not to its full potential that's been damaged in the past and to make it function properly again. That is very satisfying work, some of the most satisfying work that I do as an engineer. I've really enjoyed both the historical mine cleanup and then also the upstream restoration.
In closing, we want to leave you with a story that Dan told us that perhaps best describes how his work affects people. We were doing work out by the little town of Rocker, so just a little bit West of Butte. A coworker and I, and we're out in these old mine tailings, and so there's not any vegetation at all. And the reason for that is because the soil
qualities are just so poor. And we're collecting soil samples, trying to figure out intent of contamination and what we're gonna do for the cleanup. And there's a full little kids, hot summer day, and they're over there in shorts, barefoot, no shirts on, playing with their dump trucks in the dirt. We had all of our personal protection gear on and doing the proper safety stuff. And when we get our samples back, some of the samples that we collected were in I I think the worst one is, like,
it was almost straight arsenic. It was, like, 70% arsenic. And then I think about these little kids that are over there, you know, just in a pair of shorts playing in that stuff.
So I think back on that moment when we got those sample results back and then knowing that we cleaned up all that material and made a place for those kids to to play just out in normal dirt and grass instead of in a historical mine waste, that makes me feel pretty good about things, making that a safer community for people to live in. For more information on this podcast, visit h d r inc dot com slash
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