East of Park City and U.S. Highway 40, Richardson Flat is actually quite hilly. It’s been the storehouse for toxic soils and heavy metals left over from the town’s mining days.
And while the hills are the most visible evidence of Park City’s mine tailings, they’re far from all of it. The Environmental Protection Agency says there’s arsenic, cadmium, lead and zinc deposited up and downstream of the site along Silver Creek and the Historic Union Pacific Rail Trail.
Altogether, it’s an estimated 1 million cubic yards of contaminated dirt.
“And the result is that we have metals getting into the water and impacting, you know, ecological receptors across this entire stretch, as well as being present at surface in some locations,” EPA Remedial Project Manager James Hou told the Summit County Council in June.
Hou said the EPA is preparing a new round of remedial work, having raised millions of dollars through court settlements. It’s going to spend it on areas near the rail trail that haven’t been cleaned up before.
Its action plan is mostly ready — the agency is only waiting to make sure the place it wants to send the soils is prepared to receive them.
Those details won’t be available until the plan is made public, likely later this year.
After that the EPA will start the clock on a 45-day public comment period. It may revise plans based on residents’ feedback.
Residents can expect an open house where they can engage with the EPA in person. Hou said they’ll also bring risk experts to speak with locals about safety, which he has said exists on a spectrum.
“Risk is a very tricky thing to talk about with folks, because what's safe to one person is not safe to another,” he said at the county council.
Hou told KPCW in September one of the possibilities EPA is evaluating is bringing tailings from the rail trail corridor to Richardson Flat, which has already been the site of remedial work.
According to the agency’s most recent 5-year report, United Park City Mines performed voluntary remedial work there during the 1990s and additional work as directed by the EPA in the early 2000s.
That included gathering tailings together on-site and ensuring they were adequately covered above and below.
The report states that Richardson Flat “is performing as intended” to keep contamination contained.
Now the EPA wants to address contamination upstream and downstream of Richardson Flat. Excavating all those tailings could cost more than $30 million, according to a judge in the U.S. District Court for Utah.
But the feds only have about $17 million in the bank.
The EPA can’t dip into its usual pot of money for hazardous material cleanup, called the Superfund.
The EPA shortlisted the Richardson Flat area for the Superfund in 1988, but took back the proposal in 1991 after what Hou called “adverse comment” from residents. The agency reproposed it for the Superfund a year later.
While that request is still pending, Hou said the EPA can only raise money from enforcement, often through lawsuits against mining companies.
“We've gone through a couple of cash outs with what we call ‘responsible parties,’ and have built what we call a special account, which is kind of like a checking account dedicated solely to the site,” Hou said.
He said an estimated two thirds of the special account is from settlements with United Park City Mines, including a $6.5 million decision in 2022. Much of the rest is from the bankruptcy of the Arizona-based mining, smelting and refining company ASARCO.
During the county council’s June discussion, Councilmember Roger Armstrong was doubtful Richardson Flat would ever make it on the Superfund. He imagined that landowners would push back more now than they did in the late 20th century.
“If you are one of the prime ski resorts in the country and a great tourist destination, and your property values are extremely high, you probably don't want to be listed on the Superfund list,” Armstrong said. “It tends to have a negative connotation.”
The Park City area has generally shunned Superfund status.
The law that reauthorized Superfund in 1986 was amended by then-U.S. Senator Jake Garn (R-UT) to prevent the Prospector neighborhood from becoming a Superfund site.
In 2006, Garn told The Salt Lake Tribune that locals had sought him out because they said concerns the EPA was raising about the neighborhood were based on bad science.
The EPA gave up on remedial action in Prospector that year. In the meantime, Park City staff had drafted their own soils ordinance which to this day requires a 6-inch cap of clean soil in the area.
The Montage Deer Valley also sits on a site where the EPA oversaw mine tailings cleanup but which was never added to the Superfund. It was once the Daly West Mine, and its tailings were sent to Richardson Flat.
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