Old radioactive mine tailings pose slow-motion threat

Forest Service seeks comment on still unfunded plan to clean up uranium tailings and seal off mine shafts near Young Ranger District

February 6, 2009

After decades of delay, the U.S. Forest Service is seeking public comments about a slow-motion contamination risk — the radioactive dirt piles left over from now-abandoned uranium mines in the Young Ranger District along popular Workman Creek in the Sierra Anchas.

During the boom years of uranium mining in the 1950s and 1970s, mining companies dug “dozens” of mine shafts following veins of the naturally occurring, radioactive mineral. Most of the once-sealed mine shafts are now open after vandals pried loose the timbers and tore down the warning signs. The mine shafts still have radiation levels that could cause cancer and other health problems.

Moreover, the mining companies left faintly radioactive tailings at the entrance to the mine shafts and in several sites along Workman Creek where they dumped the ore waste, including two public campsites, currently closed.

Many of these tailings dump sites lie along Workman Creek, which drains into Roosevelt Lake, which is a drinking water reservoir for Phoenix. Tests show sufficiently high radiation levels in the creek that the Forest Service advises people against eating fish caught in the creek. However, no dangerous levels of radiation have reached Roosevelt Lake, say Forest Service officials.

David Frew, recreation lands and minerals staff officer for the Young Ranger District, said the Forest Service has opened the public comment period on possible solutions to the problem and in the meantime is struggling to at least post signs at all the potentially hazardous sites and abandoned mines.

“The major message for people is — stay out, stay alive,” said Frew of the numerous open mine tunnels that would still light up a Geiger counter.

“Many of them were boarded up, but people have broken into them over the years. We tried a whole signage program, but people take them down.”

The shafts and the tailings piles contain arsenic, uranium and radium-266.

A Geiger counter taken into one of the mines would register an “evacuation level,” said Frew.

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