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After more than 30 years in limbo, without a final cleanup agreement, the ink is drying on Butte’s big Superfund deal as we speak. What it means and why it matters has everything to do with what played out when Superfund came to Montana’s Mining City. So today we’re asking: back in those early days of Superfund, who were the players, and what was the game?
This is episode 06: Our Most Cherished Beliefs.
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From Evel Knievel to a ‘Great Flood’ and on to the dawning of the Superfund era, Episode 5 looks at the origins of the government program designed to force whoever made the mess to clean it up.
Did you know that when Superfund arrived in Montana, it didn’t start on the Butte Hill, blanketed in raw mine dumps? Or even at the giant Berkeley Pit, left for dead and flooding with acid mine drainage. It started 120 miles downstream of Butte with tainted tap water at an old hydroelectric dam just outside the liberal stronghold college town of Missoula.
Learn more now with Episode 5: Out of the Frying Pan, Into The Fire.
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I live a mile away from the Berkeley Pit, the mile by mile and a half wide former open-pit mine, which is now filled with a 50 billion gallon toxic lake. Every time I visit, I leave hyper aware of the contradictions and compromises that go hand in glove with industrialization. I find myself wondering: who thought chiseling a colossal hole in the Earth was a good idea, and why? So today, let’s take a dive, figuratively, into open pit mining and some controversial decisions made late last century that changed Butte’s land, people, and environmental legacy forever. This is Episode 4: We Gave it to the Pit.
We’re hard at work on episode 4, and still covering lots of Superfund news in Butte right now. In the mean time, meet one of the artists who’s contributed to this project behind the scenes.
BT Livermore,”maker of things and provider of services,” designed the Richest Hill logo, and does lots of other creative work in the Mining City. He explains the thinking behind the logo, and why he feels a sense of hope in Butte.
Learn more about BT’s work, the goings-on at the Imagine Butte Resource Center, and see the John Powers safety posters collection mentioned in this interview.
Stay tuned for episode 4, coming your way soon. You’ll learn how the Berkeley Pit took the lid off mining and changed the economy and ecology of Butte forever.
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In August 1917, Frank Little was the victim of a grisly murder in Butte. Little was a labor organizer who came to Butte to unify and radicalize Butte’s miners in their fight against the Anaconda Mining Company for higher wages and safer working conditions. Most historians believe that the Anaconda Company was behind Little’s killing, but no one knows for sure. A note pinned to his underwear threatened, “Others take notice: first and last warning,” along with the numbers 3-7-77, the calling card of frontier vigilantes.
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Who was Frank Little? And what could his grisly murder more than a century ago possibly have to do with Butte’s Superfund cleanup? That’s one of the questions we’ll be asking in Episode 3, which is coming at you in 3 short weeks. Stay with us for more about Butte’s past, present and future!
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At first glance, Butte, Montana’s mutilated industrial landscape is often written-off as an ecological sacrifice-zone. Dirty, ugly as sin and regrettable, but necessary to supply the country with perhaps the most basic necessity of the Electrical Age: Copper. But if you take the time to really look carefully, what you find here will challenge, surprise and even change you.
Take a closer look at the copper that put the Richest Hill on the map; the city’s storied past; and the nostalgia and sense of purpose that pervades the Mining City, right now on Richest Hill episode two.
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Richest Hill episode 01: Get to know Butte, Montana, one of America’s biggest Superfund sites and one of Montana’s most compelling places. Richest Hill is a new podcast about the past, present and future of Butte, America, “the Richest Hill on Earth.”
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If you don’t know Butte Montana, you might have heard it’s one of the biggest toxic messes in the country. But now the “mining city” is on the verge of sealing a deal that could clean it up once and for all. So how did we get here? What comes after Superfund? And who gets to decide?
Find out on Richest Hill, a new podcast from Montana Public Radio coming in early 2019
We want to say a huge thank you to everyone who came out to the Covellite Theatre to help us launch and celebrate Richest Hill!