CARTHAGE (AP) - After seven years and more than $100 million, a federal cleanup of contaminated mining wastes in a southwest Missouri county is now targeting several smaller sites with about 6,000 to 7,000 acres combined, the project manager says.
In 2007, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency began removing mining byproduct and contaminated soil left from years of mining from about 2,000 acres in eastern Jasper County. The land is contaminated with varying levels of zinc, cadmium and lead, heavy metals that can be harmful if ingested.
"We have completed about one-third of the acreage but more than half of the volume," EPA cleanup manager Mark Doolan said. "We have a lot of small sites left. It will take another 10 years at least, but because the sites are smaller, it will go a lot faster."
The cleanup began in Carterville. Most of Duenweg has been cleaned up, sites in Webb City and Oronogo are nearly completed and the EPA is working on a large cleanup in Neck City.
The Doe Run Co., under the EPA's supervision, has begun cleaning up the 90-acre Jasper Mine site near Joplin. Once the $3.5 million project is complete, Doe Run will have no other sites to clean up in the county. Two other companies that have been linked to mining sites in the county, Blue Tee and Gold Fields, have projects underway between Webb City and Oronogo.
Doolan said thousands of tons of contaminated soil from the Jasper mining site are being used to cover a large pile of gypsum, which is known to produce radon, a gas that has been linked to lung cancer. The pile was being used by people riding off-road motorcycles and all-terrain vehicles.
"We have brought an end to that," Doolan said. "The pile has been covered, and it is now the repository for all of the wastes we will clean up from the western side of the county."
About 100 truckloads of mining waste are hauled every day from the Jasper Mine site, which has high levels of cadmium and zinc contamination and a low level of lead contamination, to the gypsum pile.