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Mercury rising: Dealing with the dark legacy of the Gold Rush

Posted by: Aqua Blog Maven on May 23, 2008 at 1:47 pm

From YubaNet:

When gold recently touched $1000 an ounce, the mainstream media ran stories about Sierra gold panning concessions that were experiencing a business boom. The glitter is still glamorous, but behind the shine lies the Gold Rush legacy of darker chemical remnants: mercury, lead, arsenic, and asbestos.

More than 150 years after James Marshall saw a sparkle in the American River that started a worldwide rush to California, the cleanup of those potentially harmful byproducts is just now being addressed. “Stepping back and thinking about how much work there is to be done on this issue, it’s huge,” Dr. Carrie Monohan said. Monohan is a hydrologist consulting on several mercury contamination projects in the Sierra. “It’s mind boggling!”

There are an estimated 47,000 abandoned mine sites on public lands in the Sierra, according to Monohan. “There are years of field work to be done just locating those and assessing what type of hazards they represent.”

One of the more useful elements for collecting gold in the 1800s was mercury. Today it is one of the most prominent mining toxins in the Sierra Nevada. The silvery metal commonly was dumped into Gold Rush creekside sluice boxes where it bound with finer-grained gold into an amalgam more easily removed from the box’s sediments. When hydraulic mining created a great deal more slurry, more mercury was added. Some of the mercury got suspended in the water and transported downstream. Much of it is still with us.

Since we are all hydrologically connected, cleaning up the mercury is a statewide issue:

“The Sierra is California’s watershed, and it affects everybody in the state,” Martin continues. “We want to document the problem. We want people to understand there’s a big problem. We want to move people forward toward solutions. We’re interested in having people understand that we can actually solve this one. We can clean this one up.”

Find out more about left-over Gold Rush toxins in this comprehensive report from YubaNet by clicking here.

May 23, 2008 · Filed Under Environment & Water

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