51 Years Ago
The March 20, 1974 Golden Transcript featured an article entitled “Tailing pollution called no health hazard.” A graduate student at the School of Mines had been studying the effluent from the Argo Tunnel in Idaho Springs. At that time it was draining 750,000 gallons of acidic mine water into Clear Creek daily. The researcher said that the water was not known to be harmful to humans drinking it; nonetheless, few fish lived in Clear Creek between Idaho Springs and Golden.
The water quality was worse when the Creek was low, since that made the concentration of pollutants even higher. Tge grad student remarked that the mine discharge “probably is not going to change much during our lifetime.” The article concluded that If reclamation proves too expensive or impractical, he said it would be necessary to “wait til the laws are there to force people to do it.”
Fortunately, a few years later clean water standards were enacted, the whole drainage area was declared a Superfund site, the tailings were cleaned up, and a water treatment plant was built to treat the water coming out of the Argo Tunnel. As a result, Golden now has a trout stream, kayak park, and tourist attraction instead of an industrial sewer running through town.
