Mine may make Superfund list.

Byline: Christian Wihtol The Register-Guard

The federal government has formally proposed adding the polluted and abandoned Formosa mine in Douglas County to the Superfund list of the nation's worst toxic waste sites.

The move eventually could lead to a federal cleanup of the shuttered copper mine about 25 miles south of Roseburg, said Ken Marcy, U.S. Environmental Protection Agency coordinator for the Superfund list in the region. A listing also could spark an intensified federal effort to get those responsible to pay for the cleanup, Marcy said.

The Formosa mine, perhaps the most polluted mining site in the state, was actively worked by a Canadian venture, Formosa Exploration Inc., from 1990 to 1993. Formosa was partly funded by two Japanese firms.

The state shut down the operation after Formosa repeatedly violated its state permit by excavating more than allowed and spreading waste rock over the 76-acre site atop Silver Butte. Within the honeycomb of mine shafts in the mountain, sulfide-bearing rock is exposed to air and water, creating an acidic, metals-contaminated brew that pours out of the mine entrance and from fissures in the mountainside. The mine spews about 5 million gallons a year of the acidic water into nearby streams. The effluent has killed about 18 miles of salmon-rearing tributaries to the South Umpqua River, including part of Cow Creek.

The mine poses a "serious, ongoing threat" to people and the environment, the EPA said.

The site has contaminated fish in Cow Creek, which is fished by members of an Indian tribe and by recreational fishermen, the agency said.

In Wednesday's announcement in Washington, D.C., the EPA said it was proposing Formosa and four others for the list. The list already has 1,245 sites nationwide.

The Superfund program is chronically short of money, and toxic sites are expensive to fix. For more than a decade the Superfund program was funded by a federal tax on chemicals and oil, but Congress killed that in 1995. The program is now funded through regular allocations in the federal budget.

"It's very hard to say just exactly when (the EPA) would be in the field doing cleanup work" at Formosa, Marcy said.

The EPA has set a 60-day comment period, ending May 7, on the proposed listing. After that, the agency will evaluate comments and decide whether to make the listing.

"We might have final listing in six months," Marcy said. "That kicks off the whole remedial process. The first step is to go back to the site and look at it, sample areas that may need additional sampling, and start considering remedial steps."

The state already has spent $1.5 million trying to address the pollution, but stopped before it found a fix. Some experts put the price tag at $15 million.

The EPA also would conduct a search for companies or people who are responsible for the mess, Marcy said. "If it appears as though there are viable parties out there that were responsible, then we would pursue that," he said.

Formosa Exploration is now defunct. It was a wholly owned subsidiary of Formosa Resources, also now defunct, a Vancouver, B.C., mining firm. Vancouver resident Kuang Ine Lu was president of Formosa Resources and the main organizer of the Formosa mine. Japanese companies Washi Koshan Co. and Marubeni Corp. helped finance mine operations.

In an interview with The Register-Guard last year, Kuang said he's not to blame for the pollution and cannot afford to clean it up. He said he destroyed all of Formosa's records in 2004.

FORMOSA CLEANUP

For documents supporting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's proposed Superfund listing of the Formosa mine go to: yosemite.epa.gov/R10/ CLEANUP.NSF/sites/ formosa

To read articles The Register-Guard published last year on the Formosa mine go to: www.registerguard.com/ toxicmine