Prison workers to help clean up
By Suzanne Core, Pikes Pear Courier View staff writer
This story appeared in the Pikes Peak Courier View on June 7, 2007. It is reprinted with permission from the newspaper.
It's being called "an unusual coalition of partners, using prison labor, on private land."
The Colorado Division of Reclamation, Mining and Safety, through Colorado's Inactive Mine Reclamation Program, with the help of the Colorado Department of Corrections, will soon clean up the 100-year-old, 40-acre, Millsap Creek tailings site just south of Victor, the City of Mines, in the Gold Camp Mining District at the headwaters of Millsap Creek.
"There is a diversity of organizations and individuals, both public and private, helping," said project coordinator Julie Annear. "This is a labor of love for a lot of people."
Some work began the Tuesday after Memorial Day and the project should be completed by the end of summer, according to project engineer Al Amundson.
Teller County commissioner Jim Ignatius said the county had been working on getting this project going and the site cleaned up for a number of years.
"There are over 1 million cubic yards of fine, sandy tailings being eroded [in the creek] by wind and storm water," Annear said. "They contain very little sulfides or acid-forming materials and would support vegetation except for their unstable surface, high permeability and lack of organic material.
"They are creating a sedimentation problem and depositing dust on ranch lands downwind from the site and eroding into Four Mile Creek, a tributary to the Arkansas River."
Tailings are the residue left from the processing of ore, in this case Telluride gold ore, processed at the turn of the last century.
Similar tailings are found at the Independence Mill site, a 6-acre site in the drainage just below the heliport outside of Victor. The Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Company will be undertaking reclamation at the Independence site during the same timeframe.
According to the Division of Reclamation, the Millsap site will be reclaimed by careful grading and revegetation. Tailings will be graded back to form stable, low-angle slopes. Geosynthetic and other sediment control materials will be installed on the new slopes adjacent to drainages. Surfaces will be covered with native rock and soil to prevent erosion. Native grasses and shrubs will be encouraged.
The project is a cooperative effort primarily with private landowners, the Cripple Creek & Victor Mine, Teller County commissioners, the Teller County Soil Conservation District, Trout Unlimited, the city of Victor and its fire department, Bielz Trucking and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management, among others.
Commissioner Bob Campbell said "The Department of Corrections was the final piece; they made the project affordable and therefore possible."
The Buena Vista DOC facility will provide the actual labor for the cleanup and reclamation work, using inmates in its vocational heavy equipment program, who will complete the earthmoving and revegetation.
The brainchild of program director, corrections officer Tom Bowen, the program has been in effect for more than a decade, the first of its kind. It trains handpicked inmates and puts them to work outside the prison, giving them marketable skills they can use on release to obtain decent jobs in a rehabilitation effort.
In return, there are huge cost savings to the government agencies partnering with them.
"When we began the program, the recidivism rate at the prison was 88 percent," Bowen said. "Now it is down to 67 percent in the department as a whole. But for this program, the recidivism rate is just 10 percent."
"We have 100 percent placement rate with program inmates," Bowen said. "They go from Buena Vista to a halfway house and contractors hire every one of them.
"We change the way inmates think, help them grow up," he said. "We caution them on language, attitude and behavior issues. It helps to keep them away from the gangs, too, and gives them responsibility.
"Inmates are clamoring to get into this program," he said. "But our selection process is tough."
Bowen said there have never been any security issues. To participate in the program, inmates have to reach a certain level of trust. In addition, there are two foremen with every 10 inmates. Twenty inmates will be working days at Millsap Creek, returning to Buena Vista each night. They will wear green department of corrections uniforms with nametags and they earn 15 cents an hour or 60 cents a day for their work.
In addition to the cost savings provided by the department of corrections labor, funding will come from the Bureau of Land Management, the Department of Interior Office of Surface Mining, state severance taxes and partnerships with the Cripple Creek & Victor V Mine, Woodland Park Sanitation and Trout Unlimited.
For more information on the project, call Annear at 303-866-3687.
Do you have a
story idea?
Click Here