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

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.