Court agreement sets stage for penalty, remediation
Crown Resources has admitted liability for thousands of violations of the Clean Water Act in its operation of the Buckhorn Mountain gold mine near Chesaw. The admission is part of a stipulation entered in federal court in a lawsuit filed by the Okanogan Highlands Alliance (OHA) and Washington Attorney General Bob Ferguson.
The stipulation means that Crown Resources has accepted partial liability for failure to capture and treat contaminated water from the mine before it was released to nearby streams and waterways, OHA Co-Executive Director Sarah Kliegman told the Methow Valley News.
U.S. District Court Judge Mary Dimke entered the agreement in the Eastern District of Washington on Oct. 18. Dimke will supervise development of a plan to address the violations. Specific penalties and plans for rehabilitating the contamination are yet to be decided.
“We’re really happy that Crown has agreed to this large number of violations. We’re hopeful that this means they’re ready to take the steps to clean up the pollution and prevent further contamination,” Kliegman told the News.
The court order includes 115 pages of monitoring results for contaminants at the mine going back to 2015. Crown didn’t acknowledge all the violations, but all three parties — Crown, OHA and the attorney general — agreed to move forward based on the violations Crown has conceded, Kliegman said.
“They’ve agreed to a lot, but not the whole geography of violations they’ve committed,” Kliegman said. “But they’re moving in the right direction.”
The agreement acknowledges more than 3,500 monthly violations of the Clean Water Act, which translates to more than 100,000 daily violations, Kliegman said.
OHA, a citizen group based in Tonasket that has long monitored water quality issues at the Buckhorn mine, filed its lawsuit in April 2020. Ferguson filed a lawsuit over the same issues a few months later. The two lawsuits were ultimately consolidated.
The plaintiffs asserted that Crown Resources and its parent company, Kinross Gold, repeatedly violated the Clean Water Act and the Washington Water Pollution Control Act over six years. The companies did little to comply with their water quality permit nor contain the pollution from the mine, Ferguson said.
Kinross Gold was also named in the case, but that part of the lawsuit is still ongoing, according to Ferguson’s office.
Extensive data
Crown mined gold at Buckhorn Mountain from 2008 to 2017. Because of a previous proposal for an open-pit mine, there is a comprehensive record of baseline water-quality data going back to the early 1990s, Kliegman said.
Before the mine was built, these streams and water bodies were largely untouched and showed little evidence of contamination from human activity, Ferguson’s office said. That data helped show the connection between the mining and contamination, Kliegman told the News.
The treatment plant at the mine is highly effective — once water is treated, it comes out clean, Kliegman said. The pollution resulted because Crown failed to capture all the contaminated water and send it through the plant before discharging it into the streams, according to the court agreement.
Penalties against Crown Resources will be determined in a later phase of the case. Both Crown and Kinross could face millions of dollars in penalties for polluting groundwater and streams that flow into the Kettle River, according to Ferguson’s office.
The Washington Department of Ecology had previously fined the mine operators after monitoring showed they had failed to capture contaminants, which allowed polluted water to run into a nearby creek and contributed to a landslide.
OHA sent a notice letter to Kinross and Crown in 2013, charging them with violations of the Clean Water Act and their pollution-discharge permit. OHA asserted that the operators had discharged pollutants into ground and surface water during five years of mining.
Crown and Kinross knew about the potential for pollution even before the mine was constructed, according to Ferguson’s office. A state environmental review before the mine was built identified potential impacts to nearby waters, including the risk of contamination with highly acidic liquids and toxic metals.
Since its construction, the mine has released pollutants including sulfates, nitrates and arsenic into the water, according to the monitoring data. These are all known to harm people, fish and the overall ecosystem, Ferguson said.
The lawsuit asked the court to require Crown to remediate the damage from years of pollution. The maximum penalty under the Clean Water Act is $54,800 per violation, per day, for up to five years.
Decades of controversy
The Buckhorn mine is a 50-acre underground mine about 4 miles from the Canadian border. From 2008 to 2017, Crown and Kinross extracted approximately $1.3 billion in gold from underground tunnels. Although the companies ceased mining in 2017, contaminants continue to be released from the mine there, according to Ferguson’s office.
OHA formed in 1992 in response to a proposed open-pit gold mine that would have blasted the top off Buckhorn Mountain and dug deep into the aquifer. That project was abandoned in 2000 when the state’s Pollution Control Hearings Board vacated the water quality certification Ecology had issued.
After emerging from bankruptcy in 2002, Crown Resources proposed mining the same ore body, but using an underground mine. Kinross acquired Crown the following year.
Through a series of complicated land transfers and sales from the federal government to the company in the 2000s, responsibility for permitting and environmental oversight of the mine fell to Ecology.
OHA fought the project and permits at every juncture. In 2008, the group reached an agreement with Crown/Kinross that provided for additional monitoring and mitigation with oversight by OHA.
This September, the Colville National Forest accepted initial comments on a proposal by Adamera Minerals, which acquired mining claims from Kinross, to conduct exploratory drilling at six locations near Buckhorn Mountain.
This story was revised on Nov. 3, 2022, to correct the description of the court order and the history of actions by the Okanogan Highlands Alliance (OHA) against Crown Resources and Kinross Gold. The court order contains 115 pages of monitoring results for contaminants at the mine going back to 2015, not 2005. And OHA did not sue the companies in 2013 for violations of the Clean Water Act, but sent a notice letter to the companies.
