Mining legacy hasn't stunted Herriman

HERRIMAN — Almon Butterfield was raised on the farmlands of Herriman in the Great Depression, scrapping with his seven brothers, playing in the dirt — and when no one was looking and he was thirsty — taking a drink from the ditch.

His family would raise cattle, pigs and grow rows of corn and potatoes in that soil, where he often emerged wet and muddied from his shenanigans before tackling his chores.

"We weren't even aware we were contaminated," he says now, waving a hand toward the ground outside his home.

"The mining brought in all this lead and arsenic and all those other nasty things," he pauses, winking, "that will do us all in."

Butterfield, going on 75 in the spring, shrugs.

"How many kids you know who play in the dirt anymore?"

Once nominated for proposed listing as a Superfund site by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, the so-called Kennecott "South Zone" cleanup was just recently detailed in a five-year review released by the Utah Department of Environmental Quality. In addition to Herriman, the zone includes multiple mining and mill sites in parts of Salt Lake and Tooele counties. The report, required by law every five years, details what cleanup has been done so far, what areas of concern remain and what additional steps need to be taken to assure community and environmental protection. Another report slated to be released five years from now will measure those milestones again.

Spanning 14 years at a cost of more than $400 million, the remediation of mining-contaminated properties — or nonremediation — has entangled and exasperated federal and state bureaucracies, a fledgling city and residents who've had to live through it all.

"When you look back at the time, there were periods of challenge, periods of questions, periods of frustration," said Mayor Lynn Crane. "There was a lot of apprehension."

Those feelings settled over a newly incorporated community of just 800 residents as it grappled with the worry and stigma of being included in a "Superfund" site — or among the country's worst polluted areas.

In 1999, Crane was the city's first mayor, a political rookie admittedly overwhelmed at the taint that comes with the word "contamination."

With it would come plummeting property values, posterity placed in peril and a community crippled of its potential to grow.

"There was a lot of resentment and there was probably no one who resented it more than me," Crane said. "I was angry and had a chip on my shoulder."

Eventually, mine owners, city and county officials within the South Zone and the community in general entered into the long-term promise of a consent decree to stave off the designation and ensure "remedies" are protective of health and the environment.