Life Underground Episode 10 - The Pumps
Life Underground Episode 10
“The Pumps”
Sometimes the fate of an entire city, or an entire watershed can be made with one decision, one moment in time.
These kinds of decisions might be made in a state capitol, or deep within the walls of a government agency, or in a corporate board room. Few decisions have affected a community as much as Atlantic Richfield’s decision in 1982 to turn off the underground water pumps in the Kelley Mine in Butte, Montana. The massive underground pumps, situated on the 3900 ft level below surface, had pumped 4000 gallons of water every minute for years. When they were turned off, the pump room quickly flooded with acidic mine water, and there was no going back.
The resulting flooding of the Butte mines sealed off forever nearly 10,000 miles of tunnels that had been dug over the course of a century. Countless tools, machines, motors, miles of track, and the mines themselves were now filling with water, never to be seen again. Since the tunnels were all connected to the Berkeley Pit, shutting off the pumps also started the flooding there, within the mile-wide open pit mine that looms on the east side of town. The pit acted like a giant sink, with acidic mine water rushing in constantly. Nearly 40 years later, the Berkeley is a giant poisonous lake. With 50 billions gallons and counting, it is now the deepest body of water in Montana.
[music]
So how did this happen? How was a decision like this allowed to be made, and who actually flipped the switch on the underground pumps at the Kelley Mine? That’s today on Life Underground.
First, let’s hear what these pumps at the Kelley mine were actually like. Sara Sparks says she was down there before they got turned off.
[Sara Sparks]
That’s Sara Sparks, the former Remedial Project Manager for the EPA. And of course ARCO couldn’t beat the Superfund rap and they did have to deal with the Berkeley Pit, as it turns out, in perpetuity.
But back to that question about who made the call. Throughout the course of our oral history project in Butte, we have spoken to only a handful of people who worked at ARCO, and certainly not any of the big wigs who might have made the call on shutting down Butte’s massive underground pumps from Denver. However, we did talk to a man who claims to have actually flipped the switch. The search for the elusive man who pulled the plug on the pumps at the Kelley might be over.
[Alan Brown]
This is Alan Brown. He worked for the Anaconda Company in one way or another for most of his life. Though he didn’t grow up in Butte, his grandparents were here, so he has childhood memories here.
[Alan Brown]
Alan had a regular Montana upbringing, plenty of time outdoors, high school in Great Falls, and eventually college in Missoula. It didn’t take him long to start working for an Anaconda Company subsidiary.
[Alan Brown]
1980 was a trying time in Butte. A short time after Alan Brown and his wife moved to Butte to take that labor relations job, the big shutdown came. After a century of intense mining and industrialization on the Butte hill and in Anaconda, it all closed. He says no one saw it coming.
[Alan Brown]
Despite the good ore and the colossal machinery used to hoist it to surface, ARCO shut it all down, but they did so gradually at first. Layoffs in January of 1980 had reduced the work force in Butte by 200 men and in Anaconda by 100. On September 29, 1980, at 9 A.M., the Atlantic Richfield Company held simultaneous meetings in Los Angeles, Washington and Helena to announce the permanent closing of the Anaconda smelter. The smelter's 1,000 employees heard the news over the radio. The next day, almost a quarter of Anaconda’s work force was unemployed.
[Alan Brown]
They also closed the refinery in Great Falls, which meant another 1,500 workers lost their jobs. In June of 1981, 400 employees in Butte were laid off, and then six months later, another 200. Then in April of ’82, ARCO laid off another 270 workers and effectively ended underground mining by shutting off the pumps that kept water out of the mines and the Berkeley Pit. This is where the fate of those underground pumps and Alan Brown collide.
[Alan Brown]
And there you have it, the dramatic and saddening end of underground mining in Butte, Montana. Alan Brown says he was just doing what he was told to do. He says that switch may not have even controlled the pumps after all.
[Alan Brown]
So the management tried to find a way to make turning off the pumps as dramatic as possible, to really drive the message home to the remaining men working underground on the Butte hill that their careers as they knew it were over.
[Alan Brown]
Alan Brown says that he was the guy who shut off the pumps at the Kelley mine, and he says he’s not sure if the switch he threw actually did turn them off. Is this a way for Alan to clear his conscience a little bit, or is there really a chance that his boss had him throw a meaningless switch just to be dramatic? And was there some other switch that was pulled in some other room that actually unleashed the flood waters of the underground mines? Either way, Alan was the guy who told the men they’d never go underground again. He was the guy who broke the news to the last of the underground Butte miners that it was over.
[Alan Brown]
This is Life Underground. That was Alan Brown, a longtime labor relations manager with the Anaconda Company and later ARCO. When we come back, we take a look at the aftermath of that decision to turn the pumps off. What impact did it have on the Butte community, and how did the town get through it? That’s next, on Life Underground.
After the shutdown, unemployment surged in Butte and Anaconda. The mines were flooding, the unions were decimated, and out-of-work miners struggled to adapt to a changing workforce that was already beginning to rely more and more on computers. Either that, or they could take service industry jobs at fast food restaurants and retail stores.
Teresa Jordan was in Butte then, and throughout the early-to-mid 1980s, she interviewed dozens of men and women who had been affected by the closure of the mines. It was an oral history project called Is There Life After Copper?, and she recorded the stories of men who were facing a pretty bleak situation in Butte.
In April of 1986, almost exactly four years after Alan Brown threw that switch at the Kelley mine, Teresa Jordan spoke with Barry Brophy. Formerly a steelworker, he was teaching a literacy program at the Vo-Tech when Teresa spoke with him. He had several old miners as students who couldn’t read or write, and they needed help to get their GED just to get menial work and survive. But times weren’t always so tough, of course, and Barry says things were great when he started out at the Anaconda Company in 1974.
[Barry Brophy]
Barry Brophy says he was able to make it through those first days of the shutdown because his wife was employed. He went to college but then there were no jobs in Butte.
[Barry Brophy]
Some guys were able to adapt to the harsh job market in Butte after the closure of the mines in 1982, but many weren’t.
[Barry Brophy]
Barry Brophy was one of thousands of men out of work when ARCO shut down their Butte operations in the early 1980s. Ed Chouinard (SHA-NARD) was a driller who started working for the Anaconda Company when he was 20 years old. He had 20 years in with the Company when he was finally laid off in 1982. He was one of those guys who had a really hard time after losing his job, and he went through a divorce. Teresa Jordan interviewed him in April of 1985.
[Ed Chouinard]
That was Ed Chouinard. Now back to Barry Brophy. Teresa Jordan had asked him how the strike of 1980 might have affected ARCO’s decision to start closing down the whole operation. Barry didn’t seem to think it had much of an effect, because really the writing was on the wall for the closure long before the strike of 1980. He says the unions do bear some responsibility, but not for the closure. They failed to take care of their members after the closure took place.
[Barry Brophy]
That was Barry Brophy, interviewed by Teresa Jordan in 1986.
So now we know who turned those pumps off at the Kelley mine on that fateful day in 1982, and we got a glimpse of the devastation that decision brought to the city of Butte when thousands of men were out of work after the mine closure. As we learned in previous episodes, that didn’t necessarily mark the beginning of the decline for Butte, which by 1982 had already been experiencing a drop in population for over 60 years. Butte has been on a century-long decline, and only recently has its relatively stable population of 35,000 begun to climb slightly.
While the Berkeley Pit continued to fill up with acidic mine water, the Continental pit on the east edge found a new owner in 1986 and still today employs 300 people. The operation is non-union, and old time miners will tell you it’s more of a manufacturing operation than the sort of mining they used to do. Nevertheless, it’s a quarter of the tax base in Butte-Silver Bow to this day.
Butte still faces economic development barriers that other cities in Montana don’t have to deal with. While Missoula and Bozeman have seen recent meteoric growth, Butte still lags behind in income levels, employment, and amenities. Aside from the huge economic hit that Butte took when ARCO closed down operations, the city has been locked in a decades-long legal battle over Superfund cleanup, a deal that was only recently settled.
On top of it all, there’s the Berkeley Pit. At one mile long by half a mile wide, and over 1,780 feet deep, it stands as a testament to ARCO’s shrewd calculations that left Butte on the wrong side of the balance sheet. With a recent cleanup deal of around $150M, ARCO will be making some amends for all the financial hardship their actions brought on the people of Butte 40 years ago. Will their cleanup work meet EPA standards and finally put a stop to major sources of pollution in the Clark Fork watershed? It would seem so. Will it be enough to turn this town around after it’s been down for so long? I have to say I doubt it.
This is Life Underground and I’m Clark Grant. Thanks for listening.
[credits]