Superfund money to clean 'mouth of the beast'

Peter Fimrite, Chronicle Staff Writer

Friday, June 12, 2009

Rick Sugarek knows not to splash through the puddles inside "the mouth of the beast."

That is what he calls the gaping wound near Redding known to everybody else as the Iron Mountain Mine, which is widely regarded by scientists as one of the most polluted places in the world.

The project manager for the Environmental Protection Agency said he once dropped a pen in some running water inside the mine and when he recovered it, it was coated in copper. The water is so acidic that droplets eat holes in blue jeans and dissolve the stitching on boots, much like battery acid.

Sugarek stood Thursday in a shaft once known as the Richmond Mine. It is the source of the toxic stew that has polluted the Sacramento River and its tributaries for more than a century, killed thousands of fish and turned a once-majestic mountain into a hellish breeding ground for nasty bacterial slime that helps create what geologists say is the "world's worst water.

Lethal blend of copper, iron

Tens of thousands of fish have been killed since then. By the time the EPA took over management of the area in the 1980s, a ton of acidic water and heavy metals a day were flowing into the river, Sugarek said. The water in the debris dam was blood red from a mixture of iron and copper.

Desperate, the EPA built the Slick Rock Creek Retention Dam in 2004, which captured 98 percent of the sludge. The sludge is dried and dumped in the open pit mine on top of the mountain. Now the EPA is concentrating on the leftover mess.

But money cannot completely resolve the problem. Researchers recently found six unique strains of bacteria that live in a bed of pink slime that is part of a little-understood biochemical cycle that devours iron, produces sulfuric acid, and creates a nightmarish broth of copper, zinc and arsenic. That toxic broth will continue pouring out of the mine forever, or until someone figures out a way to neutralize the chemical and biological reactions, scientists say.