Twenty-one long-abandoned gold mines clustered around a remote ghost town make for one of the most polluted sites in the state, Department of Ecology officials said Thursday.
The Monte Cristo area in the mountains 60 miles east of Everett, is contaminated with such high levels of arsenic and other toxic heavy metals that the Ecology Department gave the site its highest ranking — a one on a scale of one to five.
The state also announced that a former fuel site in Arlington has officially been cleaned up. The old Arlington Fuel Stop at Highway 530 and I-5 was listed on the state’s hazardous sites list in 2001 and has been removed because the owner has removed all contaminated soils.
Soil and water tests taken at several locations around Monte Cristo show unsafe levels of arsenic, lead, mercury, cadmium and antimony, all heavy metals that are dangerous when ingested, said Geoffrey Crofoot, environmental health specialist with the Snohomish Health District.
Although arsenic occurs naturally in the region’s mountains, it normally takes some external force such as mining to introduce it into the environment where it can possibly be consumed by people.
Crofoot sampled the most likely polluted locations, the places where mine tailings had been left behind. Those include sites where ore was crushed and loaded onto trains, and places where tailings were dumped.
Although the toxic metals found at Monte Cristo far exceed state standards, the danger to hikers and others remains low because so few visit the remote location, Crofoot said. The only way to get there is to hike more than four miles down an old road.
The pollutants are in the soil.
"Unless you’re eating large handfuls of the stuff, you’re not going to have any problems," said Crofoot, who did an assessment of the site for the Ecology Department.
The risk of contamination would be much higher if the site were in a highly populated area, but "the fact of the matter is, you have these piles of polluted ore 60 miles away from anywhere," he said.
Still, it’s important for those who visit the site to be careful.
"It comes back to the common sense of washing your hands and cleaning the material (dust) off before you leave," he said.
There is a danger that the pollutants could work their way into the public water supply system, said Caitlin Cormier, an Ecology Department spokeswoman.
"When you have contamination on your site above certain levels, then it must be cleaned up," she said, adding that the site had never been tested before because of budget constraints.
The mines closed in the early 1900s, and it may be difficult to hold a private company responsible. The U.S. Forest Service, the state Department of Natural Resources and private citizens now own much of the land.
Now that the site has been listed, the Ecology Department will figure out how to clean it up. If a responsible party cannot be located, the state may have to pay for it. The state has not yet come up with a cost estimate.
Arsenic is the biggest problem, Crofoot said. About 25 percent of every ton of ore left behind at the mines is arsenic — a level so high that some companies switched to mining arsenic when their dreams of finding gold didn’t pan out.
For perspective, that same ton of ore contains 1 percent to 3 percent lead, mercury, cadmium and antimony, all levels that violate state standards.
Miners flocked to Monte Cristo after prospector Joseph Persall in 1989 found an outcrop of rock high in heavy metals — including arsenic — that made him think there might be gold.
After he made his discovery, a railroad spur was put in, a smelter was built in Everett and mining began in earnest, Crofoot said.
Little gold was found, and the rail line and Monte Cristo itself were hit with a constant barrage of avalanches, floods and other natural disasters. Mining activities largely ceased in 1912, when the rail line shut down.
The Arlington fuel stop was listed as a level 5 site, the lowest in the state’s ranking system for polluted sites. The owners had to clean up petroleum-contaminated soil.
It was operated as a Gull station in the late 1970s, then Texaco took over in 1989 and found contaminated soil. Texaco removed the soil, but the groundwater was still polluted.
The current owner, Balbir Singh, entered the Ecology Department’s Volunteer Cleanup Program after the state listed the site as contaminated in 2001. Groundwater tests now show the site is clean.
Reporter Lukas Velush:
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