Excerpt from this story from Grist:
As she drove into Butte, Montana, six years ago to visit her son, environmental epidemiologist Suzanne McDermott couldn’t ignore the gouged-out mountain that loomed over the town.
It’s the result of decades of open-pit mining that continues to this day in Butte. McDermott was stunned at how close the mining pits were to homes and businesses. In town, she noticed parked cars with a film of dust that looked as if ash had fallen from a fire. Her son, who worked for the local newspaper, later told her of children who had developed mysterious ailments in Butte.
“It just struck me that there’s something very unhealthy going on here,” said McDermott, a professor at City University of New York Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy.
Butte, a once-booming city, is home to a massive Superfund site overseen by the Environmental Protection Agency. Past mining has polluted the soil and water in and around Butte, and when Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) abandoned the mine in 1982, it left a pit that’s since filled with water so toxic that it kills flocks of birds that land on it.
But what troubled McDermott most wasn’t the poisoned Berkeley Pit. It was the active copper and molybdenum mine right next to it, operated by Montana Resources, a company owned by the richest man in the state, Dennis Washington. At the edge of town, she could look across the street and watch the dust from the mine rise into the air and drift over to people’s homes.
Locals have wondered for years whether that dust carries heavy metals that may be slowly poisoning them. The EPA and health officials, however, have maintained what strikes many as two conflicting messages: One, that previous open-pit mining in Butte left behind a toxic legacy necessitating a major cleanup effort. And two, that the current open-pit mining operation is safe.
Emails obtained by InvestigateWest reveal a cozy relationship between EPA officials and the mining companies in Butte. Thousands of pages of documents detail how the EPA coordinated with the very companies they’re supposed to be regulating to attack researchers like McDermott and smear peer-reviewed science that has raised alarms over current mining practices.
In one email, EPA toxicologists directly urged Montana Resources to fashion a response meant to pressure scientists into retracting their findings. In another, the mining company asked if the EPA could dig into the funding sources of McDermott and another researcher. In a third correspondence, the EPA deferred to a mining company official for guidance on public messaging.