It Takes a Village??

Norm Vance

It must have been a curious sight as Madam Marie Curie and Pierre Curie rode into Telluride in the late 1800’s. They traveled by ship from France, crossed most of America by train and arrived in Telluride, two dandies from Paris looking to buy dirt!

The San Juan Mountains, at that time, was caught in the fury of Colorado’s Western Slope gold rush. The joke at the time was that Telluride got its name when a miner asked another where he was going and was given the location. The miner said, “To hell you ride.” The Curies were certainly out of place and their desire to buy mined waste dirt made them the laughing stock of the town.

The miners were a filthy lot as they unearthed huge amounts of dirt to get at relatively small amounts of gold and silver. This dirt was called tailing and was cast down the mountainside or piled in high mounds. There are many old tin type photographs of the miners lounging and having meals sitting on these mounds. The Curies bought a few piles and did, indeed, have them hauled and shipped to Paris.

The Curies were brilliant people who came together in careers and marriage. Together they began a lifelong study on the leading edge of scientific discovery. Certain strange effects had been noticed by chemist dealing in newly discovered elements and compounds. Most of these on the earth’s surface had been cataloged; it was new substances from deep within the earth that were sought after for study. Telluride was a place where large amounts of fresh material were being brought to the surface.

Back in Paris the Curies processed and refined the ore, discovering radium. Radium produced the strange effects noted previously: this effect was named “radiation” by the Curies. A great part of the modern world, including nuclear power, atomic bombs, medical x-rays etc. developed directly from Telluride dirt.  

Unfortunately there were effects of radiation more mysterious than others. It took a decade for scientists to discover that radiation damaged humans on a cellular level. By that time the Curies and many of their fellow scientists along with the Telluride miners were on their way to premature and tortuous deaths from leukemia and other assorted maladies caused by overdoses of radiation.  We can look back, with sympathy, and agree that they just did not know what they were dealing with.

Right about a century later, we were much more aware of the properties of rare elements, compounds, chemistry, physics, and such; but that did not stop government entities from allowing a private company, Galactic Resources, to reopen the mining operation at Summitville. They were allowed to use a cyanide heap-leach field technique to extract 294,465 ounces of silver and 319,814 ounces of gold before the containment system broke. The various government entities and Galactic Resources murdered the Alamosa River.

The Galactic CEO settled on paying $27 million of the $232 million clean-up cost.

Now, just ten years later, we are looking at the prospect of having a village/city built at the top of Wolf Creek Pass, at the head waters of the South Fork of the Rio Grande River. This would be the same Rio Grande River that the Alamosa River flows into just a few miles south. The impact of building the facility along with locating the planned number people there would, without doubt, be negative.

Oh sure, the developers say they can control any pollution their city puts out, that is exactly what Galactic said and what the government blindly accepted at Summitville. Extreme high-end developers seem to think their money can fix or overcome any problem and government too often believes them. That is not always the case and saying “oops” after the fact is not good enough.