Episode 23 - Sara Sparks
Welcome to Mining City Reflections. In this third part of our series, we shift to the oral histories of women currently living in Butte. I’m your host Marian Jensen.
Efforts to reclaim Butte’s landscape from the 20th century ravages of mining have continued in earnest in the 21st century. In this episode we’ll hear the story of a woman who witnessed the reclamation effort from a unique perspective, a Butte miner’s daughter who grew up to work for the Environmental Protection Agency. Privy to many behind-the-scene details, Sara Sparks tells her story with thoughtful reflection. Her oral history was taken by Aubrey Jaap, Assistant Director of the Butte Archives, and Community Radio station manager, Clark Grant, in 2020 at the Butte Archives.
Sara grew up on the hill in a house surrounded by mine waste dumps on three sides. She witnessed the devastation of the mining industry first hand. As an adult she embraced the mining culture and trained in occupational safety and health. She joined the Environmental Protection Agency to eventually oversee its efforts to reclaim over 300 toxic sites in her home town, a job which thirty years ago was viewed as overwhelming, if not impossible.
“Just starting. One dump at a time, one dump at a time and taking care of it.”
Sara was born June 6, 1956 to Butte native, Sara McLaughlin, and Fred Godbout, originally from Helmville, Montana.Her mother worked as a nurse, while her father was a boilermaker for the Anaconda Company. The fifth of six children, she grew up in Missoula Gulch near Walkerville, where evidence of mining contamination was as close as the nearby baseball field.
“We had mercury that we would play with and shine up dimes and I can remember one time we were rolling it around on my mother’s coffee table. She didn’t appreciate it too much.”
When she was twelve, her family purchased a small, vacation cabin on nearby Georgetown Lake, but the innocence of childhood came to an abrupt end on the 4th of July in 1968. She saw her older brother for the last time when he left the holiday celebration to go to work on the second shift at the mine.
“So they went back to work, I think the beginning of June, so they were just trying to get everything back up and running and stuff. My brother was a boilermaker also and he was welding on a crane and they had a truck… I don’t know if you’ve ever seen the drill bits, how big they are, they hang off of trucks and have racks on them. They moved the truck and had not tied off the drill bits. And one swung over and caught his head between the drill bit and, y’ know these drill bits are huge, and the crane, or the piece of equipment he was operating on, welding on.”
Sara went on to attend Catholic schools in Butte, and eventually Montana Tech where she graduated in 1981 with a degree in Occupational Safety and Health.
“My goal was to work underground. Fortunately I was able to be underground, I love being underground. I know some people don’t like it but I love the smell of it, I love the feel of it. Because of the the accident my brother was in at the Berkeley Pit I really did want to go into health and safety for mining. Unfortunately the mines closed the year I graduated I think and so I had to look at what was going to do.”
While Sara initially worked for the Montana state health department, a Superfund office opened in Helena in 1983. Her boss was certain she would be ideal for the new agency. Sara’s work would begin with traveling the state for five years looking at possible contaminated sites.
“I travelled throughout the state of Montana, I mean I went to every small town. It was very interesting I really got to see Montana and we sampled different sites to determine if there was hazardous waste associated with that site or not.”
Passed in 1980 the federal Superfund law provided funding to remediate contaminated soil and water throughout the country, and was administered by the Environmental Protection Agency. In 1987 when Butte was added to the Superfund list, it would become its oldest, largest, and most complex site. The job with EPA meant that Sara could return to work in her hometown.
“The concern that Butte had at becoming a Superfund site, they did not want it. They felt like if Butte became a superfund site it would kill Butte or certainly put a damper on the growth of Butte due to the Superfund listing.”
Being the first woman hired in her field in Montana had its challenges including male workers throwing fire crackers under her desk. The EPA environment, which included many returning Peace Corps volunteers, some of whom were women, was more welcoming.
“I think this is how I look at myself; it wasn’t that I wasn’t afraid sometimes or doubted myself, but I was determined not to show it. So people either liked working for me or with me or they didn’t like it all and didn’t stay around very much.”
Butte’s massive reclamation effort began at the top of the hill in Walkerville with a Time Critical Removal Action to address contaminated soils. The public’s reaction was not necessarily positive, and Sara felt the brunt of those feelings.
“When you go in and you tell a community, or you tell parents that their child’s health is being threatened, they’re not really excited about you coming in and telling them that. Their first reaction is being very angry because their child’s health is in danger. So we had a couple of meetings up in Walkerville, and you have to remember that I knew a lot of people in Walkerville because I grew up right on the edge of Walkerville. I ran around with those kids, they knew who I was. I wasn’t someone from Denver or Helena, I’m from butte and I’m in there telling them that it’s unsafe and we have to do this work. They were not happy about it at all. What we did do was we found a couple of nurses that lived up there that had credibility with the public and had them help us with the communications as we moved forward. And people believed them. So some of that fear went away, some of that anger went away. People started to see what the reclamation looked like, they like the reclamation and they liked what it was doing for their neighborhood.”
Community involvement in the Superfund effort has grown over the years. Opportunities for public comment were required before work could go forward, but initially attendance was sparse.
“We could not get people to come to meetings. My son used to come to meetings because I made him. So there’d be someone from the public at a public meeting. So we had poor participation and part of that was how long Superfund spread out, the timeframe. But the one thing I can tell you is that we did a considerable amount of work each year in Butte. Millions of dollars and many people worked for and with Superfund each year in Butte, for thirty years. With those Time Critical Removal Actions, not being able to get a Consent Decree. Just imagine if we had waited for a Consent Decree, and we had gotten the Consent Decree this summer and we hadn’t done any work. So, much of Butte, much of the reclamation is completed.”
Controversy around the EPA’s work in Butte might have been inevitable no matter who was at the helm. But Sara believes that being from Butte rather than Seattle or Washington D.C. did help.
“I always had my telephone number in the phone book. People would call me all the time, people still call me. And I tell them that I’m retired, I don’t know… “You knew how to get things done Sara, you knew what the answer was.” One of the biggest questions I still get is, “Is it safe to live in Butte?” Isn’t that sad? That we have not put together a good program in Butte to show that it’s safe to live in Butte. And it is safe to live in Butte, and that’s what I tell people. I live in Butte, my son lives in Butte, my grandchildren live in Butte. Do you think I would live here or let my grandchildren live here if it wan’t safe? That bothers me. That really really… and it always has bothered me.”
Superfund negotiations stretched over decades while actual work on contamination sites continued. Being a technical person in negotiations with dozens of lawyers arguing about wording in a document tried everyone’s patience. Eventually Sara did see some progress, especially when women were the decision-makers.
“The lead abatement program came about because women were making that decision. They have children, they understand, lead is lead. It’s the only place in the country, now Anaconda has it, but you have to remember that in 1994 when we put together the lead abatement program it was the only site in the country that had that. Up until I retired Butte was the only place in the country that had a lead abatement program that looked at all types of lead.”
Working on the same project over so many years was rewarding but the results were also hard to explain to many people. The scale of work of Superfund, with millions and millions of dollars of work over 30 years, still feels remarkable by any standard.
“The first time awe had ever put together before and after slides I had forgotten that we had even done that kind of work. I’m like, o yeah that’s what tat looked like. So I think that even for me that that was lost on me for the fact that it took so long to do it. I understand why people can’t grasp it because I couldn’t either.”
Sara retired from the EPA in 2015 and now devotes her time volunteering for Safe Space and the Butte Archives. Her volunteer work also included work on the grant that provided initial funding for the Granite Mountain Memorial, which remembers the lives of miners lost to the single, biggest mining accident in US history.
Sara still lives in the house in Missoula Gulch where she grew up, only now the landscape is different in a way perhaps only she can truly appreciate.
“My father was part of the mining and my grandparents, so I got to go full circle. Full circle. So that makes it nice. And it’s not perfect by any means, sure is beautiful if you sit down in the flats and you look up on the hill, it is the way it should be. It;’s unfortunate that the mining is eating away as much as it is, when you think of fifty thousand cubic yards a day…Wow.”