shaginator
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http://www.pinnaclenews.com/cont04_25_02/sb1_1.html
New Idria seems to be a place that's known among the hog hunters here at JHP. Here's an article written by a resident (or is it the resident?) of New Idria who also happens to be a journalist for the county news publication.
------------------------------
Living in New Idria
By KATE WOODS
Pinnacle Staff Writer
Editor’s note: Because reporter Kate Woods is affected by the supervisor’s decision to force cleanup of San Carlos Creek, she cannot report on the board’s actions. She instead filed this report on life in a toxic watershed.
Every day when I walk out my front door, I take a good look at my breathtaking surroundings: the benitoite-blue skies, the sandstone mountains covered in shrub oak and manzanita, the “snow” drifting from the dozens of ancient cottonwood trees that line the banks of the San Carlos Creek – and the filthy, mercury toxic, bright orange waterway that runs through my family’s property, then on to many others’.
The creek never changes, except in times of flooding, when it gets wider and muddier. For the rest of the 360 days of the year, it flows, gurgles, and slithers like a snake past my cabin, down the road toward the Ashurst Ranch and into the great beyond of the Central Valley. I can sit on the footbridge that spans the creek and become hypnotized for hours as I stare down into that hellish oblivion, wondering what it must be like to be a tadpole spawned in an opaque liquid world of rusty iron sulfide, boron, alum, and mercury. If a tadpole could spawn there.
I usually have a curt comment for the San Carlos when I cross the bridge, something like, “Hello, slow death.”
My brother bought the 260-acre family “sanctuary” back in 1981 because it was the cheapest California land he had ever seen advertised in the Mercury News. At the time, my three siblings, my mother and myself were doing our 10th year in the pit of noisy downtown San Jose. We were ready for the country and wanted to get far, far away. Little did we realize that we were about to embark on an intense 21-year-long education on acid mine drainage.
We knew about the abandoned New Idria Mercury Mine, less than a mile up the road from our new property, a ghost town in the remotest reaches of what, to us, was a foreign place called San Benito County. For more than a century the mine was a major source of mercury for the world. It was guarded by soldiers in the two world wars as the government counted on its ores to create munitions.
We also knew about the pollution that has poured forth from the mine for the past century, especially since it was abandoned in 1972.
What we didn’t know was just how toxic the polluted water was. Nor did we ever imagine that 20 years later, we’d be missing teeth – a symptom of mercury poisoning – and still be trying to convince bureaucrats and politicians that the New Idria watershed is one of California’s biggest toxic nightmares.
Since then he has received an intense two-decades-long education on acid mine drainage.
The bad water was such a hardship, the family scattered to the winds. Some went south to Atascadero, some of us stayed in San Jose or went to San Francisco. My brother remained in New Idria in a trailer, and staked out a benitoite placer claim further up the mountain.
Though he works the claim when he can, much of my brother’s time is spent on plumbing and improving an elaborate water filtration system he created 15 years ago to convert the polluted creek water – our only water source besides rain – to household use. It involves two huge ocean buoys filled with sand, gravel and charcoal, and three settling tanks placed at various spots along the creek.
Once a year he drains the settling tanks – and the obscene orange muck that oozes out of the bottom valves of the containers. Last year when he did it, he had to crawl inside the tanks to shovel out the sediments and pile it all away from the streambed, and when he emerged he was covered head to toe in bright orange mud.
In 1992 I moved to the family property and became the “marketing director” for our small family endeavor, the Whimsy Mining Company. We started a mail order business for benitoite gems and rock display specimens. We even opened a “rock shop” on weekends for wandering tourists and Sunday drivers who made their way up here, and hoped they would stop to buy some rocks.
They did. But the creek became too much of a liability to have visitors. The rock shop next to the creek bank drew people who wanted to get a closer look at the foul orange water.
New Idria is a run-down and now abandoned town that was once a bustling mercury-mining operation with a population of 600 at the turn of the century. It closed in 1972 when the dangers of mercury became known, and it’s now a quiet, eerie place steeped in history. It was taken over by a San Jose drug rehabilitation program called Futures Foundation in the mid-1980s, not long after we bought the property below. We supported their move to the town because the director, Sylvester Herring, vowed that he would share fresh water from the reservoir and clean up the creek. The pollution that flows into the waterway can only be diverted in the town itself, and from the mining portals above it.
Since then, however, their unfriendly antics have been well documented, so I’ll only add that they never came through on their promise to share water from their reservoir, nor did they ever cooperate with us or anyone else to try to clean up the creek.
The town eventually dwindled down to three. Along the way, we offered to take our back hoe up to divert the orange acid mine drainage coming out of one of the mine’s portals into a settling pond, which would have drastically cleaned up the runoff in San Carlos Creek. The director of Futures Foundation would not allow it. We never understood why.
Despite the struggles with Futures, we plodded on. My brother got another water storage tank, a rainwater cistern, and created another system to catch rain from gutters on our roofs. The rain is diverted into another filter, then pumped into the cistern. It works well during the rainy season. But the water becomes brackish and stale by mid-summer. So we still haul bottled water up from Hollister in 5-gallon jugs, twice a week.
We tried to drill a well about 10 years ago, but countless bits broke up when we hit rock-solid sandstone. If we ever do get down to water, we have our doubts that the underground aquifers will be untainted by the toxic watershed.
In 1997, after 16 years of our sending a million letters to every water and governmental agency in the world, the federal EPA finally came to New Idria to assess the extent of the acid mine drainage. We welcomed the experts with open arms. I painted a big sign that said “Welcome EPA,” and we let them have a staging area on our property. My mom greeted them with homemade pound cake and cappuccinos.
The reception was a little different when they got to New Idria. Futures Foundation tried to stop the scientists from taking water samples on their property, and the residents followed the EPA staff around with tightly-leashed snarling rottweilers in tow and videotaped their every move. We never understood that one either.
The EPA persevered and produced a 100-page report that confirmed the continued existence of gross water pollution in the downstream watershed caused by the New Idria mercury mining operation of yore. New Idria was placed on the federal EPA’s “superfund” clean-up list – but it was at the bottom of the pile, mostly because nobody in San Benito County pushed to move it up.
A flaw in the EPA report was that it stopped short of assessing the affects of the polluted creek water on the wildlife and cattle that drink from it. Or that the water eventually makes its way into the Mendota Wildlife refuge, the Fresno aquifers and other watersheds of the San Joaquin Valley, and eventually into the San Francisco Bay.
The scientific community that is familiar with New Idria regards my family as “the poster children” of acid mine drainage.
I remember well when we once tried to grow a vegetable garden. We watered the plants regularly, but the water is so acidic and full of salt that after a month, the pathetic veggies literally died of thirst and “burned up.”
We’ve lost several dogs over the years to mercury poisoning, even though we keep several fresh water stations on the property for them. Sometimes they still lap out of the creek.
The effects of mercury poisoning in humans are scary. Some graduate students from UC Santa Cruz, who have become good friends of ours, have spent several summers with us studying the New Idria watershed. The last time they came in 1997, they told us about a scientist in Maryland who had recently done groundbreaking research on methyl-mercury. But in her studies, she spilled a drop of the clear, colorless, odorless liquid on her industrial rubber glove. Weeks later she was bumping into walls, and had tremors like the DTs. She died within a few months.
We were all pretty glum when we heard about that one.
Every now and then, despite warning signs on our faucets, someone will visit us for the first time and inevitably drink the slightly off-colored water that comes out of the tap. They immediately spit it out. Sipping bitter San Carlos Creek water, even filtered, is like biting into a raw persimmon, but not nearly as tasty.
I have a sign up in my bathroom that says, “Remember! Please don’t drink the water from the tap. Use fresh water in plastic jug for drinking or brushing teeth. Tap water is OK for bathing. Just keep spitting!”
Besides losing teeth, we have noticed that we are more anti-social now than we were when we first arrived in New Idria. Acute shyness is also a symptom of mercury poisoning. Perhaps we’re just getting old and crotchety.
We do worry about our health. We had hair samples taken by the UCSC team, but we found out much later that the results were inadvertently botched. Just last week we discovered that to find out how much mercury we have in us, we have to get our blood tested.
Now, for the first time in 21 years we have a real hope that something might be done about New Idria. The county supervisors are rallying behind the cleanup, and we will do anything in our power to help them. But if this attempt doesn’t pan out, it won’t deter us. As my brother says: “It seems like every two years we do another push for the clean-up of the creek.”
And despite the harshness of living in a wilderness that doesn’t produce potable water, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else on earth. New Idria is what the Irish would call a “terrible beauty.”
(Edited by shaginator at 10:02 pm on April 25, 2002)
New Idria seems to be a place that's known among the hog hunters here at JHP. Here's an article written by a resident (or is it the resident?) of New Idria who also happens to be a journalist for the county news publication.
------------------------------
Living in New Idria
By KATE WOODS
Pinnacle Staff Writer
Editor’s note: Because reporter Kate Woods is affected by the supervisor’s decision to force cleanup of San Carlos Creek, she cannot report on the board’s actions. She instead filed this report on life in a toxic watershed.
Every day when I walk out my front door, I take a good look at my breathtaking surroundings: the benitoite-blue skies, the sandstone mountains covered in shrub oak and manzanita, the “snow” drifting from the dozens of ancient cottonwood trees that line the banks of the San Carlos Creek – and the filthy, mercury toxic, bright orange waterway that runs through my family’s property, then on to many others’.
The creek never changes, except in times of flooding, when it gets wider and muddier. For the rest of the 360 days of the year, it flows, gurgles, and slithers like a snake past my cabin, down the road toward the Ashurst Ranch and into the great beyond of the Central Valley. I can sit on the footbridge that spans the creek and become hypnotized for hours as I stare down into that hellish oblivion, wondering what it must be like to be a tadpole spawned in an opaque liquid world of rusty iron sulfide, boron, alum, and mercury. If a tadpole could spawn there.
I usually have a curt comment for the San Carlos when I cross the bridge, something like, “Hello, slow death.”
My brother bought the 260-acre family “sanctuary” back in 1981 because it was the cheapest California land he had ever seen advertised in the Mercury News. At the time, my three siblings, my mother and myself were doing our 10th year in the pit of noisy downtown San Jose. We were ready for the country and wanted to get far, far away. Little did we realize that we were about to embark on an intense 21-year-long education on acid mine drainage.
We knew about the abandoned New Idria Mercury Mine, less than a mile up the road from our new property, a ghost town in the remotest reaches of what, to us, was a foreign place called San Benito County. For more than a century the mine was a major source of mercury for the world. It was guarded by soldiers in the two world wars as the government counted on its ores to create munitions.
We also knew about the pollution that has poured forth from the mine for the past century, especially since it was abandoned in 1972.
What we didn’t know was just how toxic the polluted water was. Nor did we ever imagine that 20 years later, we’d be missing teeth – a symptom of mercury poisoning – and still be trying to convince bureaucrats and politicians that the New Idria watershed is one of California’s biggest toxic nightmares.
Since then he has received an intense two-decades-long education on acid mine drainage.
The bad water was such a hardship, the family scattered to the winds. Some went south to Atascadero, some of us stayed in San Jose or went to San Francisco. My brother remained in New Idria in a trailer, and staked out a benitoite placer claim further up the mountain.
Though he works the claim when he can, much of my brother’s time is spent on plumbing and improving an elaborate water filtration system he created 15 years ago to convert the polluted creek water – our only water source besides rain – to household use. It involves two huge ocean buoys filled with sand, gravel and charcoal, and three settling tanks placed at various spots along the creek.
Once a year he drains the settling tanks – and the obscene orange muck that oozes out of the bottom valves of the containers. Last year when he did it, he had to crawl inside the tanks to shovel out the sediments and pile it all away from the streambed, and when he emerged he was covered head to toe in bright orange mud.
In 1992 I moved to the family property and became the “marketing director” for our small family endeavor, the Whimsy Mining Company. We started a mail order business for benitoite gems and rock display specimens. We even opened a “rock shop” on weekends for wandering tourists and Sunday drivers who made their way up here, and hoped they would stop to buy some rocks.
They did. But the creek became too much of a liability to have visitors. The rock shop next to the creek bank drew people who wanted to get a closer look at the foul orange water.
New Idria is a run-down and now abandoned town that was once a bustling mercury-mining operation with a population of 600 at the turn of the century. It closed in 1972 when the dangers of mercury became known, and it’s now a quiet, eerie place steeped in history. It was taken over by a San Jose drug rehabilitation program called Futures Foundation in the mid-1980s, not long after we bought the property below. We supported their move to the town because the director, Sylvester Herring, vowed that he would share fresh water from the reservoir and clean up the creek. The pollution that flows into the waterway can only be diverted in the town itself, and from the mining portals above it.
Since then, however, their unfriendly antics have been well documented, so I’ll only add that they never came through on their promise to share water from their reservoir, nor did they ever cooperate with us or anyone else to try to clean up the creek.
The town eventually dwindled down to three. Along the way, we offered to take our back hoe up to divert the orange acid mine drainage coming out of one of the mine’s portals into a settling pond, which would have drastically cleaned up the runoff in San Carlos Creek. The director of Futures Foundation would not allow it. We never understood why.
Despite the struggles with Futures, we plodded on. My brother got another water storage tank, a rainwater cistern, and created another system to catch rain from gutters on our roofs. The rain is diverted into another filter, then pumped into the cistern. It works well during the rainy season. But the water becomes brackish and stale by mid-summer. So we still haul bottled water up from Hollister in 5-gallon jugs, twice a week.
We tried to drill a well about 10 years ago, but countless bits broke up when we hit rock-solid sandstone. If we ever do get down to water, we have our doubts that the underground aquifers will be untainted by the toxic watershed.
In 1997, after 16 years of our sending a million letters to every water and governmental agency in the world, the federal EPA finally came to New Idria to assess the extent of the acid mine drainage. We welcomed the experts with open arms. I painted a big sign that said “Welcome EPA,” and we let them have a staging area on our property. My mom greeted them with homemade pound cake and cappuccinos.
The reception was a little different when they got to New Idria. Futures Foundation tried to stop the scientists from taking water samples on their property, and the residents followed the EPA staff around with tightly-leashed snarling rottweilers in tow and videotaped their every move. We never understood that one either.
The EPA persevered and produced a 100-page report that confirmed the continued existence of gross water pollution in the downstream watershed caused by the New Idria mercury mining operation of yore. New Idria was placed on the federal EPA’s “superfund” clean-up list – but it was at the bottom of the pile, mostly because nobody in San Benito County pushed to move it up.
A flaw in the EPA report was that it stopped short of assessing the affects of the polluted creek water on the wildlife and cattle that drink from it. Or that the water eventually makes its way into the Mendota Wildlife refuge, the Fresno aquifers and other watersheds of the San Joaquin Valley, and eventually into the San Francisco Bay.
The scientific community that is familiar with New Idria regards my family as “the poster children” of acid mine drainage.
I remember well when we once tried to grow a vegetable garden. We watered the plants regularly, but the water is so acidic and full of salt that after a month, the pathetic veggies literally died of thirst and “burned up.”
We’ve lost several dogs over the years to mercury poisoning, even though we keep several fresh water stations on the property for them. Sometimes they still lap out of the creek.
The effects of mercury poisoning in humans are scary. Some graduate students from UC Santa Cruz, who have become good friends of ours, have spent several summers with us studying the New Idria watershed. The last time they came in 1997, they told us about a scientist in Maryland who had recently done groundbreaking research on methyl-mercury. But in her studies, she spilled a drop of the clear, colorless, odorless liquid on her industrial rubber glove. Weeks later she was bumping into walls, and had tremors like the DTs. She died within a few months.
We were all pretty glum when we heard about that one.
Every now and then, despite warning signs on our faucets, someone will visit us for the first time and inevitably drink the slightly off-colored water that comes out of the tap. They immediately spit it out. Sipping bitter San Carlos Creek water, even filtered, is like biting into a raw persimmon, but not nearly as tasty.
I have a sign up in my bathroom that says, “Remember! Please don’t drink the water from the tap. Use fresh water in plastic jug for drinking or brushing teeth. Tap water is OK for bathing. Just keep spitting!”
Besides losing teeth, we have noticed that we are more anti-social now than we were when we first arrived in New Idria. Acute shyness is also a symptom of mercury poisoning. Perhaps we’re just getting old and crotchety.
We do worry about our health. We had hair samples taken by the UCSC team, but we found out much later that the results were inadvertently botched. Just last week we discovered that to find out how much mercury we have in us, we have to get our blood tested.
Now, for the first time in 21 years we have a real hope that something might be done about New Idria. The county supervisors are rallying behind the cleanup, and we will do anything in our power to help them. But if this attempt doesn’t pan out, it won’t deter us. As my brother says: “It seems like every two years we do another push for the clean-up of the creek.”
And despite the harshness of living in a wilderness that doesn’t produce potable water, I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else on earth. New Idria is what the Irish would call a “terrible beauty.”
(Edited by shaginator at 10:02 pm on April 25, 2002)
