BUTTE - The toxic water of the Berkeley Pit is finally being pumped again after an emergency forced officials at Montana Resources to shut down pumping for seven months while they relocated this important infrastructure.
WATCH: Montana Resources is pumping again at Butte's Berkeley Pit after a 7-month emergency shutdown
“It was a concern in early this that we could have been in a worse spot than we were. We have very skilled people here at MR that we count on to do this type of activity. We knew we could do it, and now we’re back online,” Montana Resources VP of Environmental Affairs Mark Thompson said.
In late January, officials monitoring the pit noticed instability in the pit wall where the ramp leads down to the pit’s original pump station. Fearing a wall collapse would cut off access to the pump station, officials shut down the pump and moved it to a location on the opposite side of the pit.
“So, we decided just to be very cautious to bring that pumping station over here. We had to run about three miles of pipe to get from here all the way over to the water treatment plant over there,” Thompson said.
Since 2019, MR has been pumping water out of the pit to prevent the water level from rising and treats the pumped water to be used in the plant, and some of it is put into Blacktail Creek.
“MR and the Atlantic-Richfield Company intentionally started pumping the pit long before we had to so that we had the ability to do what we did here,” he said.
The Berkeley Pit holds just under 50 billion gallons of water; the pump normally pumps three million gallons of water a day from the pit, but right now they’re pumping 6 million gallons of water per day so they can bring the pit back down another 5 feet.
“We have safer access here; we don’t have to worry about that instability to have our people come down and work on this,” Thompson said.
