Reclamation at one of our historic mining sites generally involves smoothing out the surface to gentler slopes (3 horizontal: 1 vertical or less) placing two inches of limestone gravel on top of the acidic wastes at the surface and then, covering that rock layer with up to two feet of clean cover soil. This reclaimed area total will increase by more than 100 acres once the final cleanup plan for Butte is approved, likely to be later this summer. That’s a lot of ground to cover, both figuratively and literally. That means roughly 600 Naranche Stadiums worth of historic mine waste has been capped in Butte.
To put that number into a more common perspective, a football field is 1.32 acres. Over 600 acres of contaminated land left behind by historic mining and smelting practices has been reclaimed within Butte’s urban Superfund area since the 1980s.
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