Remediation of Abandoned Mine Lands

Thursday, October 2, 2008 : 11:00 a.m.

Development of a Qualitative Reclamation Assessment Handbook for Abandoned Hardrock Mine Lands

Pamela S. Blicker1, Stuart R. Jennings2 and Dennis R. Neuman2, (1)Reclamation Research Group LLC, (2)Reclamation Resaerch Group LLC

ABSTRACT

 The Abandoned Mine Lands Inventory System (AMLIS) includes nearly 1100 abandoned mines in Montana. The Montana offices of the Bureau of Land Management and the U.S. Forest Service as well as the Montana Department of Environmental Quality AML Program have been working to clean up these abandoned mine lands since 1995. The agencies in general have given priority to sites with mill tailings and waste rock dumps situated in stream channels, and in Montana the clean up of impacted lands on a watershed basis through interagency cooperation has been emphasized. There is an emerging desire of the federal agencies to begin monitoring these reclaimed sites in a systematic way. The overall objective for developing the “Qualitative Reclamation Assessment Handbook for Abandoned Hardrock Mine Lands” is to provide a common platform to evaluate reclaimed mine sites so that federal agencies responsible for risk management and land management can easily communicate and work in partnership to accomplish their respective missions. The handbook contains assessment forms and protocol designed to evaluate pertinent attributes found at specific locations within a reclaimed mine site (repository, wetland, etc.). These attributes may include vegetation cover, status of a cap or liner, roads, evidence of AMD, and several others. The outcome envisioned by the agencies includes identifying maintenance needs, generating temporal information for trend analysis, and identifying remedial methods and technologies that have proven to be effective and those that have resulted in poor performance.  The data and information collected during a reclamation assessment can then be used to evaluate the status of the reclamation work and whether or not the conditions at the site remain protective of human health and the environment.

Pamela S. Blicker, Reclamation Research Group LLC Ms. Blicker’s work centers on identification, delineation and characterization of areas adversely impacted by past human activities, including studying and implementing revegetation techniques. Monitoring and reclamation evaluation protocols have been the focus of several recent projects including a reclamation evaluation process defining the effectiveness of reclamation at abandoned mines on in the Northern Rockies. She also participates in document review, field oversight, collection and monitoring of water, plant, and soil samples as well as data analysis and species selection. Ms. Blicker’s specific interests include plant community ecology, noxious weed issues and GIS.

Stuart R. Jennings, Reclamation Resaerch Group LLC Stuart Jennings (Environmental Geologist) received his B.S. degree in Geology and M.S. degree in Land Rehabilitation. He has 19 years of work experience in disturbed land rehabilitation at mine, Superfund, transportation and recreation sites. His recent research focus has been the development of revegetation strategies for metal and arsenic contaminated land associated with historic releases of mine waste into riparian systems currently used for recreation and agriculture.

Dennis R. Neuman, Reclamation Resaerch Group LLC Dennis R. Neuman is recently retired as Director and Research Scientist in the Reclamation Research Unit, and Assistant Research Professor in the Land Resources & Environmental Sciences Department at Montana State University. For the past 30 years, he has been involved in land reclamation/restoration research and policy issues on drastically disturbed sites in the West. These lands include semi-arid areas strip mined for coal, historic hard rock mines, abandoned mineral mines, and some of the nation’s largest Superfund sites. Emphasis has been of ameliorating plant limiting conditions (acidity, phytotoxicity, and fertility), species selection, and monitoring vegetation and soil response variables.


Remediation of Abandoned Mine Lands