Joe Griffin, DEQ Hydrogeologist

Photo Credit: Montana Public Radio

Oral History Transcript of Joe Griffin

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview August 28th, 2020
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed: November 2022 by Adrian Kien

[GENERAL SETUP & CHATTER PRIOR TO INTERVIEW]

[00:02:07]

Jaap: All right. It is August 28th, 2020. We're here with Joe Griffin. Joe, I would first just like you to start off, tell me a little bit about growing up your parents, some of your family background.

Griffin: Oh, alright. I'm an air force brat and I'm an only child. So, I was born in Washington, DC at Bowling Field Air Force Base. I lived in the Washington area for a while. And then my dad actually was paid by the air force to get a MBA from Harvard. So he went to Harvard.  And so we were living in Massachusetts for a while. Then we moved to Southern California. My wife likes to remind me I'm really just a California kid. So I lived there from the time I was four until I was 16. Then we got transferred back to, he got transferred back to Massachusetts. The time I was in California. I don't remember how many schools or places we lived in Southern California and lived in a bunch of different towns. So I got transferred around. And so I guess, you know, being an only child and then every two years having to make all new friends was kind of interesting. Anyways.  I was a crappy student in high school and my last two years, my parents sent me to a prep school in Northern Vermont, which is where I fell in love with cross country skiing. But I realized when I was there, I really love snowy country. And then we took a trip across Canada on the train to come out to California actually, and then drove back and visited some colleges. But on the way out there, there was one point where we ended up in the Canadian Rockies and I kind of just stepped out on the platform and went, Holy Christ, what is this? And it was like, God, what if I just stood here on the platform and watched the train disappear and lived here forever.

But I think part of that was the reason when I decided to go to college, I picked Missoula and I'd never been in Montana in my life. I just thought, wow, the Rockies look really cool. And I'm sure it's snowy there. So anyways, that's kind of what I did. So I ended the first time I was ever in Montana was I got off the plane in Missoula and I remember they put me up in some room, because my room wasn't ready. And I walked out the next morning and I was standing in the oval going, wow, this is nice. And then I started asking, some guy goes, you know, because I'd lived in  Massachusetts, not far out of Boston, I'm going well, what's over those mountains there and the guy's going, "What do you mean? What's over those mountains there?" There must be a town right over there. Right? What about that direction? So it took me a while to figure out that, yeah, it's pretty, pretty wild country here.

So never a problem with that. Went to school. I didn't know what I was doing. I came out here and I thought maybe I'd go into forestry. And really when I started school, I was in fine arts. I really got into drawing and printmaking.   And somewhere along the line, I started taking some geology classes and that kind of sucked me in and I ended up being a geologist. So you can see why  when I finally ended up in  Butte, it was a good place for me, but I also thought, you know, for a long time, I lived in Missoula for 17 years and I kind of thought, wow, this is kind of fun. After growing up on, you know, a million different towns was like, ah, I found my hometown. And to tell you the truth, it didn't really happen until I got a job as a consultant here in Butte. And then  yeah, you know, living in Missoula, I always kind of thought Butte was a great town. I spent a summer here working for the force service and as a geologist and I lived with my buddy, Bill Walker, who's the guy who founded the archives here.

[00:07:10]

Yeah. So, we had a great time. Bill was just somebody that loved to explore. He liked, he really loved, and its history, but, you know, that was in 1979. So there's still people going down in the Kelley, but obviously the pit was going crazy, but we used to go all over the hill and there were so many mine yards that were closed that we just, you know, climbed the fence and went in and climbed head frames. And I just thought, yeah, this place is great. So out of grad school, my wife finished grad school. Like I said, I'm kind of a slow student. But my wife finished grad school and got a job in Florida. So we moved to Florida. I hadn't finished my masters and looking around for a job in Florida in Gainesville, Florida.

I started in consulting and environmental consulting and it worked well for me. I'd worked in the oil fields for a while, but the woman that hired me sent me out in the field. It's kind of funny. I show up for the first day of work, right. And working in the office, everybody had on slacks and a nice shirt and a tie. So I show up first day dressed that way. And she sends me out in the field to put in monitoring wells. I'm like, well, you could have told me, but I went out there and, you know, I'd logged, I don't know how many miles of wells in the oil field. So I was like, oh yeah, I can do this. And I really didn't have any background in say groundwater and the stuff I ended up working on, but I was okay. I just kind of learned as you go along. Then made a trip back after four years, made a trip back, my wife and I came back to Montana just for a summer visit. And when I went back to Gainesville, my good buddy there at the company said, "Hey, they're opening an office in Butte, Montana. And here's the people that are kind of setting that up, that you need to talk to." And I was like, oh yeah. Both Sherry and I were like, "Yeah, we gotta get back to Montana." Florida was an adventure, but it didn't suit us.

So I ended up getting the job. I came out here and put in monitoring wells at the old works in Anaconda. And it was sort of a working interview. I guess I got the job. I worked here for, I don't know how long, I ended up being office manager for Environmental Science and Engineering and I got a lot of great experience. A lot of it was in Anaconda working on the smelter site. We did streams in groundwater, so I did streams in groundwater over there for a long time. And then in 94, I got the contract to do the monitoring for Butte, mine flooding. So then I started working on Butte stuff. That's when I started. Part of it was sampling Silver Bow Creek and Black Tail Creek, because they have to understand the Creek. They, you know, eventually they know they're going to discharge water. Which interestingly enough, now they finally got around to discharging water from the mine. So that was pretty fun. Got to run all over the mine, drive all over the mine, learned how to dodge haul trucks or be real careful around all the trucks. And learn that part too. So all of that was working for Atlantic Richfield as a consultant. I ended up as office manager for the company. We kind of ended up running off the guy that was the office manager. He was pretty horrible to work for and then everybody in the office said, "Well, Joe's got the most experience." I'm like, "Oh, okay." So it was kind of . . .

Jaap: Do you remember the point in time?

Griffin: I don't remember exactly when that was, but British Petroleum bought   Atlantic Richfield. And so we had been working directly for Atlantic Richfield. Well, Sandy Stash and Robin Bullock were kind of like worried that they had too many small contractors and a lot of times what happens when a big company buys you? They say, you know, we have this, we have a consultant that does everything for us. And they were afraid that, wow, we would lose all the institutional knowledge we have in some of these. So they said, "You're going to be subcontracted to Pioneer." And I went. Well, I could kind of see the writing on the wall there, because we were just mostly doing monitoring work and you could see that Pioneer would say, "Hey, we do monitoring work. We don't really need you."

And I knew Bill Bullock really well at the time and had worked, I worked, we worked fine with them, but it did go that way. And Bill said, so I went out and met with Bill and I said, "Well, I'd appreciate it, you know, if you'd hire some of my folks. They're good folks." And he said, "Well, I'll give you a job, but I don't see that I will use you on Superfund, but you're a decent hydrogeologist. We will have work for you." And I actually told him, I said, "Nah, I really like the super fun work." And I know Anaconda is, so I didn't accept the job. And I was out of work for about a year. And then I got the job at DEQ doing the same thing. And when I went to DEQ, God, what was her name? Trying to think of who the director was, you know, so you get taken around and you meet heads of departments. And I met the director and I told her. I said, "I didn't take this job because I wanted a job with DEQ, I took it because I wanted Butte." And she kind of looked at me like, wow, you must be weird. Because most people are like, "Just don't give me Butte." It's been tough.

Jaap: Really?

[00:14:46]

Griffin: But it was good. It was the best job I ever had, honestly, working for DEQ but it was also difficult because, you know, there is a weird bias. You guys, you won't be surprised at this. In Helena there's a weird bias against Butte that I ran up against immediately. I was just kind of like, oh God. So anyways, that was all right. I was still trying to figure out what to do here. And, boy, so my role there was, I was the project manager. We call them State Project Officer. I was the manager for Butte Priority Soils. Darrell Reed was already doing mine flooding, but I'd already established a good relationship with Darrell, when I was the consultant doing all the monitoring up there. So I knew Darrell really well. And the fun thing was, is that somebody else was already the project officer for Anaconda Regional Water, Waste and Soils. So I just filled the role of being their technical consultant because I had the background for it.

And so I didn't have the administrative headaches. I just got to keep working with the technical people over there and going to technical meetings and trying to figure out various parts of that project. So that was really good. And, you know, one of the things I'd worked on, when I was a consultant for Arco in Anaconda, is something called Technical Impracticability. And it's a pretty interesting thing that you have to face up to no matter what. And that just says  you know, is what you have to do under Superfund is set the laws that you're going to try and meet. And most importantly, for water, that means you're going to meet groundwater and surface water standards. So in both Butte and Anaconda there's both federal standards and there's state standards. And what EPA has to do when they first start into these Superfund sites is decide what laws apply. They don't have to, they don't have to say, apply for permits.

So they don't have to live exactly within that law, but they have to comply with the substantive requirements, because they're in this Superfund set of laws, right. And those are called Applicable and Relevant or Appropriate Requirements. And so they go out and say, "Yeah, what are all the laws out there?" Here's the federal laws and here's the state laws and there's a bunch of them. And so that gets written into their recorded of decision. Anyways, it comes down to it and EPAs, you know, EPA was established in 1970 under our wonderful president, Richard Nixon. And, anyways, interesting fact about Richard. So they started in on this whole environmental endeavor and trying to clean up these waste sites. And it wasn't until 1980 that they established Superfund. And what they started realizing is no matter what you do, in some cases, you can't meet standards. And that's getting back to this idea about technical impracticability. So it matters how you do technical impracticability.

So you could do it sort of in a cavalier manner, which I think happened on the Clark Fork. They didn't really do a long investigation, but the only thing that was waved under technical impracticability on the Clark Fork was total recoverable copper, and they went to dissolve copper. So I started looking at groundwater TI's for Arco in Anaconda and it's mostly about arsenic over there.

[00:19:42]

And then when I started working for DEQ, we did technical impracticability for arsenic in surface water. And I didn't really do it. It was done by CDM's consultant, but I got to work really closely with them. And I did some of the analysis there. I was once told here by an EPA project manager and I had a hell of a time with the project manager here in Butte, for Butte, that I needed to decide whether I was a manager or whether I was a technical person. I thought, that's a curious way to look at this job, because I'm like going, really the best project managers are obviously technically very competent. Yeah, it was hard. I, I never did give up my technical side. I mean, I always have played with data and tried to figure out what was going on. And so anyways, we did end up writing off arsenic in three of the four streams in Anaconda.

So that would be Willow, Mill and Lost Creek. Warm Springs Creek, for some reason really didn't have an arsenic problem. That's sort of something I really have learned is that this difficulty of making sure you're doing all that you can do. But also seeing that you're not gonna get there some days and some ways. But hopefully always pushing to see that the best that can be done gets done. So when it comes to where we're at right now, and I worked on, obviously, trying to push to where we're at right now in this consent decree and the record of decision amendment for Butte and kind of the final parts of the remedy here.

[00:22:25]

Well, that's a whole separate story. And it was really a battle here with the EPA and it was really over storm water, but I guess I should back up a little bit and just talk about what happened with Butte here.

You know, first of all I've given a lot of talks and a lot of it starts out, and I like to say that Superfund is really about science and law and history. So part of it is  working on either Butte or Anaconda, you have to start understanding the history too. And you have to know why things are screwed up as they are, environmentally anyways. And so that's kind of been fun too. So, you know, here I am a technical person, I'm a hydrogeologist. I've learned a lot about how groundwater works and how streams work and the interaction between the two. But, you know, I also worked with a lot of different lawyers and started seeing how the law side of this works and realizing that lawyers see the world very, very differently than geologists. And sometimes it's brutal. It's brutal sometimes, you know, there were times when I wanted to say, "Quit trying to practice hydrology and I won't practice law, please."

But I still keep learning things. I'm going, you know, you'll talk to somebody else and you'll go, "Oh my God, that's why that was done that way." It was the lawyers. Oh no. So  anyways, the other part has been looking back at history. And if you look at most of these documents, like the RIF's, that's the first place you start to see that they kind of put together this history. And so, you know, there's a well understood history here of early mining in Butte, including early smelting in Butte. And I've always wondered how much lasting effect the smelters in Butte had, because they were done by the early 19 hundreds, really. It's all gone over to Anaconda, but I think you see, I think you see a background level of say copper in the streams and groundwater. That's probably, my guess, it's residual.

But, of course, what I've learned is the big story was Silver Bow Creek. The Anaconda Company ended up looking at Silver Bow Creek, not as a creek. It was simply part of their mine operation. And they discharged highly, very acidic, copper-laden water directly to the creek. They realized actually, I've seen a couple of dates, but Fred Quivic, who I think is probably, EPA has some information, and Fred Quivic has some information. And it is this that in either 1911 or 1918, the Anaconda Company built the first of the Warm Springs ponds to make sure that their mining impact was not continuing down the Clark Fork.

[00:27:00]

So they looked at all the Silver Bow Creek as just part of their mining operation, but they said it ends there. So you have pH, well, you have mine discharge. They would, of course, try and precipitate copper out of that and gain copper, but they're still discharging water with really high levels, probably hundreds of parts per million copper still and pH of three and a half or four and a half. It goes down over by the smelter and they built a ditch that would take some of the water out of the Silver Bow Creek. It was called the Silver Bow Creek ditch. Then under Superfund, I knew it as the name, the yellow ditch. And it took water and put it up to the top of the first of the Opportunity ponds.

You have to understand those Opportunity ponds are tailings ponds, and tailings are what's left over once you have milled and then concentrated ore. And if you are grinding up this ore, and then milling it to say fine sand ore, or silt size, and you're trying to extract a concentrate, you do not want any of that dissolving. So you raised the pH. You add lime to all of that. It's been part of the process. So the tailings, the mine water has a pH of four and a half. And I don't know what it was when it mixed with Black Tail Creek. But then you have them sending this water over to mix with tailings, and then there are places there where if they needed to, they would add some additional lime into that. Then there was the direct decant off of the tailings ponds themselves. So you have these tailings, which are a slurry of, you know, fine sand and silt size, mostly quartz and feldspar, there's, you know, residual metals in there.

There's certainly a lot of pyrite which has the ability to create acid. It's now kind of mixed in with this high pH water. So they send this slurry out into these ponds, the fines settle out in the bottom, and then you have clearer water that decants off. And that water is still high pH at like 11. And so that's all mixing then back in with Silver Bow Creek and then it goes to the ponds and then they would actually mix in extra lime and they would try and correct it to a pH of seven before they discharge it downstream. Interesting that that started to take place back at the early part of the 19 hundreds. It might not be clear that the Opportunity tailings ponds were the same thing. And I think those were started about 1914, but instead of just allowing their tailings to go to the creek, they started saying, "Well, we'll build berms and just capture them."

[00:30:36]

So, you know, the company was getting locked up in lawsuits because of the water they were sending downstream. But from an environmental standpoint, it's still interesting that there was that early, early part to that. So then actually we get to 1970 and the whole nation is going, you know, maybe rivers aren't supposed to catch fire and maybe streams are supposed to have fish living in them. So, you know, like I said, Nixon starts the EPA and we started on this whole thing. Well, the Anaconda Company hired their first environmental manager, John, oh God, Spindler. And he was actually working for the state. He was a biologist and he was working for the state. And so he started on making some corrections here to the mine. So by 1970, of course, they're dealing with the Berkeley pit and all of the milling and concentrating is here, right here in Butte. It had moved from Anaconda and was here and all they were sending to Anaconda for smelting was a concentrate. So he started looking at ways to adjust what was going on in the mine.

And part of it was, you know, just not flagrantly releasing all the water, but it was sometimes recycling the water and figuring how to reuse their water. So there was less discharge. Of course, you know, it was at the time that the milling operation moved over here, that they  extended the Silver Lake waterline all the way to Butte because they needed water here to mill. So I don't know exactly what all he was doing with his water balance, but he also had Warm Springs Creek water to play with. And I think maybe they were starting to lime, but I can show, he wrote a paper, it was in a mining journal, and pretty interesting, but it's a couple of points in time that I really appreciated where he was actually measuring metal concentrations and pH in Silver Bow Creek at several places.

So I have these historic numbers, but he would do both an annual average and then an annual max and he did it, there were like three years’ worth of those data. And he improved water quality by two or three orders of magnitude. So we're going from a hundred thousand down to the thousands. So anyways, that that was early on and then along comes, finally, Superfund. And I always find it interesting that they said, "Wow, the stream is really screwed up, Silver Bow Creek." And so they named it a Superfund site in 1983 and pretty interesting. Yeah, it was pretty screwed up. And they named the Anaconda smelter site in 83, I think as well. Well, it wasn't until 1987 that they went, well, boy, maybe we should take a look at the town of Butte. Yeah. You know, and it's funny because now if EPA doesn't, if it's not a, they don't have a PRP like an Arco. If you look at a site, if it's got human health involved, they'll spend the money, it comes out of the general fund, federal government. If it's environmental, it won't go anywhere.

[00:35:19]

So it was curious that back then they looked at this creek and when it screwed up and kind of forgot about, well, I wonder if it's a health problem for the people in Butte, but 87 they made it Butte area. Silver Bow Creek, Butte area, national priorities list site. So, of course, they started looking at all of those things now, including human health. And a lot of what's been done in Butte  really went back to human health. So although it helped with storm water, all of the capping on the hill was based on levels of arsenic or lead. And it was the human health action level.

So that's another, you know, funky thing that you get thrown into as a hydrogeologist is trying to understand risk analysis and how it applies to human health. And some of that stuff kind of goes over my head, but I understood that the whole process and they look for routes of exposure. So, you know, are people exposed through their drinking water, through dust in the air, through  getting it on their hands and licking their fingers like maybe children do. And so they take those routes of exposure and they look at concentrations in all sorts of, you know, in the dust. And it turned out dust in attics, dust in houses, soils, mine waste dumps, and they established those two action levels. And it was 250 parts per million for arsenic in a residence. And 1,200 parts per million lead. And so they would do these cleanups and that program evolved over time. But when they would go out to these waste dumps, that's what they would sample for. So later on, they'd done all this capping and there were still these questions about when we have storm water runoff.  You haven't done certain, you haven't capped certain sites because they weren't high in arsenic or lead. What about copper and zinc? And is that going to the creek? And actually that was just recently resolved finally, but like I said, kind of interesting how this has gone.

And EPA, I guess this has been something that continues to blow my mind that I got this job and got to work on this stuff. I'm like, well, where the hell do you get to work on, you know, a huge project. You know, I haven't gotten to do a little bit on Clark Fork, but I did a lot on Anaconda. Didn't have anything to do with Milltown, but I watched it, but it's like, where do you, where do you get a project that they're gonna end up spending, you know, so far 1.6 billion? I mean, this is like just so big, whole thing, so damn big.

So I guess  kind of getting to where we're at. Well, I guess part of the story is, a good part of the story was here in Butte, too. I started working for DEQ and I started trying to come up to speed on this site and the first thing that came up really, well, they were going to write the record of decision. So EPA had done a lot of work and they had just written something called a Focused Feasibility Study for the Metro storm drain area and the Parrot and all of that ground water. So that was going on. So the first thing, I get this job, and somebody that my 0] predecessor there, they were just kind of filling in on Butte for the time being I get this job. And Catherine Laurie goes, "Well, here, this is pretty important. You better read this focus feasibility study." And I was like, oh yeah, good. This is all about groundwater. I know a lot about groundwater. So I started learning about that particular set of groundwater and started asking a lot of questions. Well, at the time, our sort of sister, at the state, sister program, the damage program, in our natural resource damage program.

So I guess just quickly explaining Superfund has two parts. There's a part where EPA says, we gotta make sure that we're making the environments safe for human health and bugs and bunnies and fishes and everything. The other side of it is, you can't fix things necessarily the best case. We will never be able to use our groundwater right here in Butte ever again. So that's a damage. And so they could come in, the state, came in and said, we're gonna sue for damages. And they got a lot of money, so there, and so they stay over there. The damage program is under the attorney general and it's in the Department of Justice for Montana. So they're kind of a different program.

And so they were interested in the Parrot, very interested in the Parrot and had sued for groundwater damage here. And so they had hired, me being DEQ, I don't really have any consultants of my own. I'm supposed to rely on EPAs consultants. But NRD has all of this money and they can do what they please. And one of the consultants that they hired was actually the Montana Bureau of  Mines and Geology, and it was a good step. And so they also hired this independent geochemist, Anne Morse. And I don't know what happened to her, but I got to, you know, so I'm able to talk to those folks, right? I mean, I looked at them as my consultants really. So it was kind of interesting because we didn't really see eye to eye with  EPA. So that became a real interesting story, honestly, and as I looked into this and talking to a couple of the hydrogeologists at the Bureau, I started realizing, yeah, I don't believe this Focus Feasibility Study was that well done.

One of the things is the way they had tried to characterize groundwater flow. They had used these aquifer tests. Actually James Madison pointed out, he goes, you know, this one that really hanging their hat on was a failed test. James Madison was somebody that loves Butte history and loves mining history. And so it was really fun getting to know him and he was somebody that was really good at digging into documents and history and pulling up stuff. We still have a great relationship and we're still on this whole kick about trying to figure out the Parrot and what should really be done with it independent of DEQ or EPA or anybody else.

[00:44:16]

But anyways, he pointed out a lot of flaws to me and I'm going, wow. Yeah. So we started questioning EPA and they finally said, "Alright, we will give you guys some money to hire the Bureau to put in some extra wells." And so we put in, that was a blast actually. And James was working as, basically, the driller's assistant, kind of, on some of these. And I would be out there logging the well, and then sometimes James was doing the logging, but we put in these additional wells and went, "Yeah, the EPA consultant really missed the boat on this characterization." And one of the wells he put in was set up to be a pumping well, up right by the Civic Center. So just down gradient of the Parrot. And so this was, I got hired in 2004 and started in all this. And we were putting in these wells and figuring out a whole different story. We were also building up to the Record of Decisions.

So that's where that is. It's a decision document, obviously, but it is where EPA says, "This is what will be done at this site." So they lay down the law and they  can do one of two things. They can get the responsible party on board and have a consent decree, or they can just order the work to be done. If they order the work to be done, they tell the responsible party, you can do the work with our oversight or we'll do the work and we'll charge you three times the amount it costs. So there's an interesting part of Superfund, isn't it? And it basically recognizes that it's probably in the company's best interest anyways, is to do a lot of the work with EPA and state oversight. And I really believe that's an excellent process.

[00:46:56]

Having worked extensively with Atlantic Richfield or BP, however you wanna call them, it's been a good process and the company has been fairly responsible and if things are uncertain how they would go or they have doubts that it's the right way to go, they'll drag their feet. But I'll tell you, if they think this is gonna do it, it's spare no expenses. Let's get it done right. They do great work when they think it's the right thing to do. So that's why I think that process works well.

Anyways, back to this story about the Parrot. We're building up to this Record of Decision. EPA had their consultant write the Technical Impracticability Evaluation that said this groundwater really from the mine all the way down to where Silver Bow Creek leaves Butte that groundwater can never be fixed. And  we got to review the Technical Impracticability Evaluation and put in our comments, but anyways, it was waived by the time it got to the Record of Decision. So we have this case where these Parrot tailings are causing this incredibly concentrated plume of copper and zinc and groundwater. And we have the EPA saying they will not ever have to clean up the groundwater. That is what they eventually said in the Record of Decision, is if that groundwater is affecting the stream, then you have to do something about that groundwater.

You have to manage that groundwater so it does not affect the stream. So at the time we were building up to the Record of Decision, the state's not happy with this Parrot decision. So we ended up agreeing with a large part of the remedy in the Recorded Decision, but we didn't agree with that single piece. And there was a letter which I wrote largely, or I wrote the draft and Richard Opper, the director of DEQ at the time, of course, edited it and finished it. And Richard was actually, he was an amazing director for DEQ or at least my experience with him in Superfund. He was also an author and had written a couple of novels and stuff. He was a great writer. I didn't mind the way he edited. He made my draft really clear, but the thing we said in there is, "We're concerned about leaving these major sources of ground water contamination in place, because we think they will be a permanent threat to Silver Bow Creek." I need to make a real distinction here. We didn't say ‘we think the aquifer would clean up if you dig all of this up.’ What we were saying is, if there's still a source for this plume in place, the plume may continue to expand. And understanding how a plume works is really kind of complicated. And if you start to explain it to most people without a background, their eyes glaze over pretty quickly, but plumes don't move very fast or they don't change fast. And this one hadn't changed. But the point being is that DEQ anyways said this plume better not move in the long term, you know, and that's our concern. NRD since then has said, you know, we're removing this at our cost. This should be remedied. And we think that if we remove it, I think they're kind of forced to say, if we remove it, we think the aquifer will clean up. 

And David McCumber hearing all of these arguments once famously said, or I think famously said, nobody else is probably not famous except in my mind, "How many hydrogeologists can dance on the head of a pin?" So it's like, you know, most people confronted with these arguments about the aquifer cleanup, is the plume advancing or not? And so, yeah, it's highly technical. I know hydrogeologists I truly respect that say, "Yeah, clean up in a reasonable amount of time." And I don't believe it at all. I think if it was gonna clean up, it would be hundreds if not thousands of years, but the other thing is they're not removing everything, so there's still sources in place. So I don't expect the aquifer to clean up. They will be capping instead of removing.

[00:53:03]

So anyways, this kind of leads us to where we're at now. They're removing the Parrot. No, I should back up one step, like I said, there's two ways to go about a final, how you finally, how do you finally get your arms around what this problem is and say, yeah, we're done, except for long term maintenance and management? And so that was that was where they started in, on the consent decree process. And the consent decree, like I said, the EPA says what needs to be done and they can either order it or they can establish a contract with the responsible parties. And so then everybody agrees on the remedy and signs off on it and that's certainly the best way to go.

So I have to go back in time now we got the ROD done in 2006, and by 2007, we were going, well, which way is this gonna go? And everybody, of course, says, "Well, a consent decree is gonna be the best thing." And I have to say the reason the Consent Decree is the best thing is if Arco orders, I mean, if EPA orders Arco to do the work, it's difficult because then Arco can say, "We don't believe you. We think you're wrong. And we have really good lawyers. And so instead of getting work done, we're gonna see you in court." So it's a bad idea. But it's a really complicated place that I have never seen this done because our local government was considered a responsible party as well because our storm sewer system dumped mine waste from the hill directly into the creek. So we're considered a responsible party here. All of us taxpayers in Butte. It's an interesting situation. I've gone back and forth on whether I think that was a good thing or not. By contrast Anaconda's government was not considered a responsible party, but they were actually given a lot of leeway to help push how the remedy went over there. So in the long term, I would say, I think it's worked really well for Butte Silver Bow to be a responsible party.

But so getting back to it, you have these responsible parties and they sit on one side of the table and then you have the agencies and they sit on the other side. And it's also in the Consent Decree besides including the EPA and DEQ. It also includes the US Department of Justice and they work for EPA. So they're another level of agency, I guess, in this whole process.

[00:56:34]

So as you might imagine the process of Consent Decree in the meetings is really complex and the meetings are not always kumbaya sessions. It can be very antagonistic and it can be antagonistic between responsible parties. Because the other one I didn't mention are the railroads and the railroads were originally in all of the meetings and it honestly, it was like a Mexican standoff and it was just like everybody's pointing guns at everybody else and including, you know, DEQ having a hard time with EPA and I'll get to that in a minute.

But eventually we would go to these meetings and Henry Ellis, EPA's lawyer would go, "Well, Arco and railroads, how are your negotiations going?" And they go, well, yeah, we're getting close. We think . . . And this is something that you need to understand about Superfund is that EPA  doesn't say the railroads have 10% share of the responsibility and Arco, you have 85 and, Butte Silver Bow, you have five. They say, you guys go figure out how you're gonna deal with this and divide up the liability. So you can see that Arco and the railroads are probably not really happy campers with each other. Actually Montana Resources or Denny Washington was also named a PRP. Everybody’s allowed them to just kind of standoff in the background.

So if Arco had stepped up and said, "Yeah, we want the mine in here too." Then they would've been there, I think that's how it works. And you go back and look at who they chose, but anyways it's interesting how those PRP work with each other. Eventually, it just wasn't working out and Henry Ellis, EPA's lawyer, said, we're gonna have settling one defendants and settling two defendants. We'll just do it that way. And railroads you're just gonna deal with your property. So that's fine. And so, you know, now we have this consent decree, which just includes Butte Silver Bow and Arco.

So getting back to what was going on between DEQ and the EPA was not the Parrot, particularly that was always kind of an issue, but it came down to the storm water part and I guess the amazing things and like getting back to being a scientist, getting to work on these huge sites and how exciting it is. It's also exciting because there's not many places that they collect this kind of data and this amount of data and Arco has collected immense amounts of data.

[01:00:05]

I'd like to know how much they've spent just on surface water and groundwater data. It pretty fun if you're a data geek like me. So starting to look at storm water is difficult because every storm event is different. And where you look at where it's hitting the creek is different. And so there were places in the creek where they set up this whole sampling program. And there were places at the mouths of some of the storm sewer systems where they monitored. Eventually they got to where they called this performance monitoring, where they would go back to different places within the storm sewer system, just to see if there were certain places that were particularly, but  you can see it's also a timing issue.

So you have water that starts to run off of the hill and it goes into the storm sewer system. And you have Blacktail Creek starting to rise and you have this other storm sewer system over here and they're discharging at different times. And the creek is rising and falling at different times. It is really complicated, but it ended up getting some pretty good data. And one of the things that Atlantic Richfield did way back when, I was still one of their consultants, was they put in two storm water ponds on Missoula Gulch. And Missoula Gulch was actually, it turns out Missoula Gulch had probably the worst contaminated storm water, because it reaches all the way back up next to the Lexington and gets all the way up by the mines and stuff. So it's pretty God awful. So they put these two storm water ponds and so one of them fills up, overflows, goes to the next one and if it overflows, it goes to the creek. So Arco started collecting data about what comes into the pond system and then what leaves the pond system. And they had a pretty good data set.

And one of the things we looked at was yeah, what is the difference between what comes in and what goes out it's amazing. It was really effective for total recoverable copper. And that means it's both particles with copper that are suspended. You know, storm water looks really muddy. It's got a lot of stuff suspended in it. So there's total recoverable which includes that fraction, plus whatever dissolved metal is in there. And then there's another fraction they do where they filter the sample. So they filter out just down to the very, very finest, and then they run analysis on that and that's called the dissolved fraction and it's not truly dissolved, but it's really small particles plus what is truly dissolved. And so we saw that total recoverable, you were reducing copper by 95% just by holding it in this pond and even dissolved, which is harder to take out.

[01:03:53]

So you can imagine course particles will settle out quick, really fine particles that takes them longer to settle out. Dissolved will never really settle out. It has to go through some kind of chemistry. So what we started realizing was this isn't just holding it in a pond and letting particles settle, there was something going on more than that. And I call it, biogeochemistry. So you have algae and you have plants growing in the water and they're, you know, the way they use and release oxygen and CO2 and stuff. They're changing the pH of the water. And so you have chemistry in action and it's controlled by the biology in the pond and maybe even bacteria and stuff, I don't know, but just really effective.

And so we were pushing, so they started in on, EPA said we're gonna do a Technical Impracticability of storm water. Actually early on in the Consent Decree process, it's interesting because you all meet in a big room and then you get so far and then everybody goes, we need to go discuss this with our lawyers. So we went off at one point and we were meeting with EPA. And John Wardell, who was the head of Montana's EPA, said, "Listen, Atlantic Richfield will never sign a consent decree, if they have to build a treatment plant for storm water and they don't think there's any way they could ever meet total recoverable standards for copper and zinc." And me being in the room, I said to my lawyers and my management, "They're right. They'll never meet it." And so we said, "Yeah, we'll start in on this Technical Impracticability Evaluation." And I was thinking, "Oh, this is gonna be great, because I've done TI's over in Anaconda. I know how this works and I'd even be working with some of the same people I'd worked with in Anaconda." The first thing that happened was EPA's manager here said, "Well, no, we're doing the TI and we'll give you the draft." And I was like, "Well. wait a minute." So that's kind of what they did. I got some chances to go over and see how it was going.

[01:07:00]

I got to sit down with their  engineer who was doing the hydraulic modeling. So you have to say, how quickly does water gather in these systems and how long does it take to get down here and how big a flow for, you know, you do all this estimation, you say for the, you know, the 10 year, 24 hour storm event, you know, what are the flows gonna look like? And then you start to attach the chemistry to that. And the way then it ultimately works is you start saying, well, we could apply these different management practices and they're called best manager practices. And of course the acronym is BMPs. And so you don't have to say best management practices or management practices, so much simpler just to say BMP. Right? So they apply different things. So you say, well, we'll cap additional waste. Okay. That's one. You still have to do all of these. How much better would that make it? Well, everybody has a guess. And so you kind of, if there's something you can apply, that's more scientific, you do it. A lot of times it is almost gut feeling.

And so, then there were these things called hydrodynamic devices, and they basically will remove course stuff out of the storm sewer system. And there are various things. But in the end, EPA refused to include storm water ponds in this. And it was like, well, this is crazy. So anyways, they wrote, I don't know how much money they must have spent on this analysis, because it is really complex. And some of it could just be upgraded. So I wouldn't say it was wasted, but in the end they did this whole Technical Impracticability document. We went in and met with them. I had my lawyer there and my supervisor and Henry Elson, their lawyer started explaining stuff to me. And I'm like, "Well, Henry, I want to hear from experts." So Angela Franzen is talking. And I said, "Well, Angela." She said, "We took everything and we banged it this way. And we banged it this way and we couldn't make it meet standards." And I said, "Did you use ponds?" And she said, "Well, no." And then at that point, I said, "Well, why not?" And Henry Elson jumped in and said, "It was their best professional judgment."

And I went, Hmm. So we left and we said, "No, we reject your TI. Do it again." So they did it again and they still didn't include ponds. And in there one of the things they'd done at this point in time, so you realize that DEQs working exclusively with EPA to get this TI done before it goes to the PRP. And what I didn't realize was that the project manager for EPA had gone to Arco and said, "I want your consultant to do an analysis and show that if we put these storm water ponds in that they're gonna cause flooding basements." And I didn't even realize that that was an appendices to the TI. I missed it through this whole period, but what I didn't miss is up front in the discussions. It said, "We didn't do storm water ponds, because it would cause flooding." And I was like, well, no, that's wrong. We rejected the second TI.

EPA came back to us and said, "Just give us your comments." And our comments were extensive and it said, "Start all over again." And they said, "Well, you know what? We did our best trying to answer your comments, but we're just going to Atlantic Richfield with this now." And we said, "Oh, okay, fine. But we're no longer party to the consent decree."

And so that was pretty funny actually, because Atlantic Richfield is never gonna sign a consent decree with the state hanging out there waiting to take separate action against them. So it was funny because we got this really nasty letter from EPAs lawyer that said, "What are you guys thinking? Blah, blah, blah." And then they had their first CD meeting and there was a really conciliatory letter or email from him saying, "Oh, you guys were missed at the consent decree meetings." Yeah, I bet we were. And then interestingly enough, we started seeing if we could work something out directly with Arco. So the state meeting both DEQ and NRD started meeting with Arco. And that was pretty interesting because it really did come down to some pretty technical just discussions. And you could see where their limitations were. And we had something called a term sheet and it got pretty complicated, but it was just kind of like, you know, we'd write what we want and here you guys say what you want and scratch out what you don't like about ours. And it went back and forth a number of times.  Eventually, Arco and the state went, well, you know, this isn't going anywhere without EPA, you know, we're not gonna come up with a separate deal. So we brought EPA back in.

And a little side story, I thought this one was hilarious. And I don't remember  ARCO's main negotiator at the time, but we were at this meeting and I had missed one of these meetings and the guy from Arco and he's like a vice president or something, had had oral surgery like the day before. And so he was  on something, some kind of painkillers at this meeting. So I'm at the next meeting and, you know, it's DEQ, NDS lawyers, our technical people, all of Arco's lawyers and stuff. And speaking for the state was Richard Opper, our director, and Richard was an interesting character and he was great. He was really good in this. I'm disappointed he didn't continue on in that role, because he was very much a buck stops here. You know, “Don't talk to that lawyer. Don't talk to that lawyer. I'm telling you where the state's going on this.” And we've never had that since or before. But we go to this meeting and Richard starts it out by saying, "You know, our last negotiating meeting went so well. And we kind of think it was because of your surgery and the drugs you were taking and he pulls out this pill bottle that says Oxycontin that he filled up with Aspirins and says, "So here. Why don't you take a few of these?" I don't know, in such a serious situation.

Jaap: How'd that go over?

Griffin: All of us at the State are going [laughs into hand]. I don't know. So then we changed governors and Richard gets another job. He was then director of health and human services, I think for the state. And, you know, kind of getting back to Richard and his personality and why I thought he was so great. The next time I really saw it was from Doug Benevento.

[01:15:46]

So anyways, consent decree process, it's just kind of going along and things are, things were starting to come together a lot better. I end up retiring.  But I still knew what was going on. I knew, oh yeah, . . . So in 2014, I ended up with somebody at the head of my division, who I could not work for and so I was going to retire and so yeah, it was kind of interesting actually, they got this new person there. And I had a run in with her before she was at the head of permitting and they were working on a new discharge permit for the mine here, MR's mine, which was interesting. They hadn't discharged since 1982, any water, but if you’re a mine, you always just wanna keep that. I understand all of that. And they wrote this permit and I actually worked with the permit person, because this is what they have to say is what's the concentration of water we would discharge and what's the volume and what's the receiving stream look like. And so for metals, I had beaucoup data on what the receiving stream looked like, Blacktail Creek. So I said, well, here's all this data. This will be helpful.

Anyways, they write the permit and the draft goes out and I'm going well, the problem is, is that your permit needs to recognize that you can no longer discharge from where you used to discharge into the upper part of the MSD, because that's now under Superfund, a storm water management system. And so the head of permitting said, "No, we're just getting this permit out. I don't care what your arguments are." And again, my section, including my lawyers, including Darrell, because it kind of involved the mine, Darrell Reed, who was doing mine flooding, we all went and met with permitting and their lawyer. And they just said the same thing, you know? "Nope. We're just getting this permit out the door." So anyways, then she gets the job of being the head of my division, the remediation division. And she just starts making changes. And one of the changes was, she said, "Joe, you're a hydrogeologist, I'm gonna give you these two sites." And they were two post and poll sites or something. And I said, "You know, right now I am the technical advisor for Anaconda Regional Water, Waste and Soils. They're working towards a consent decree over there. I'm directly the project manager for this site. And I'm also running the monitoring program for DEQ for the Clark Fork."

And I had recently given up Basin watershed because I was so overloaded and she said, "You're gonna take on these other two sites." And I said, "I won't do it." I said, "You gotta understand that I'm not a hydrogeologist; I'm somebody with expertise in Butte and that's my value to you guys." And this was going through my supervisor, so I'm not talking directly to her, but he's telling me what's going on. And he said, "No, Joe, you gotta go to these meetings." And I said, "I won't go." And so he sends me an email that says you have no choice. And I responded, "I do have a choice." And I said, "When I started this job, I told the director at DEQ, I wasn't taking it because I wanted to work for DEQ, I took it because I wanted to work on Butte and Anaconda."

[01:20:34]

And I said, "If DEQ can't recognize that that's my value, then I'm gonna retire." And so I sent it to him and I sent it to my direct supervisor, who was a good guy. And I liked working for him a lot. And I sent it to the administrator. This was something that my supervisor had suggested at one point, he didn't really suggest it, but anyways, I cc'd the governor on it. And so it turned out I was gonna retire. And I was gonna retire in April, 2014, you know, April fool's day. And about a week before, one of my coworkers there said the administrator wants to talk to you. And I said, "I don't want to talk to her." And she said, "No, you need to talk to her."

Finally said, "Okay." And she said, "Would you consider staying on halftime and only focusing on Butte?" And I said, "Yeah, sure." And so I did that for a whole year. And then actually the guy that I used to work for, sort of, in the meantime, I was over there in Helena, and I had an office here finally, and when I was in Helena to get my mail and I had a computer set up, but it was in his office just a little corner and he gets on the phone and he goes, "Do you guys have  my retirement papers done?" And I looked at him and he looked at me and smiled, and then he hung up the phone and I said, "Holy smokes, Larry, you're retiring?" And he goes, "Yeah, I can't take this anymore." And he said, "Don't tell anybody, because I haven't even told my wife yet." But he felt so bad about pushing people around at her behest and basically trying to tell him how to run the bureau that he quit.

The guy that replaced him was great. And I started working for him. And first off he told me, this is where I knew it was gonna be good. He came in and it was not too long into that. He said, "The administrator does not understand Superfund and she does not understand construction." And we were the Superfund and construction bureau so I'm like, well, yeah, obviously, she doesn't. And he was very technically competent. And so I'm working halftime under him. And he eventually says, "Well, what's this whole storm water thing?" And we had gotten a guy in over in the water quality division. He was a PhD, professional engineer, surface water modeler.

And I'm like going, wow, finally, a technical person to work with. So Tom Stoops says to me, "I want you guys to write a white paper about what the state wants going into this consent decree." And this is really focused on storm water, but he said, additionally, are there places where we're concerned about it, you know, there's not enough capping done. So Kyle Flynn and I put together this whole analysis again, showing that water coming into the storm water basins and Missoula Gulch was hugely improved by just going through these storm water ponds. Kyle added. And he started looking at, well, I wonder where we can find some data on storm water and metals.

[01:24:55]

And so there's a national urban runoff program and they had a dataset. So it's called the NURP dataset. Nice word. I like NURP. And then the only place in the state of Montana that had done anything was the town of Big Fork. And they had sampled for metals in their storm water. And so we put together this analysis and it was interesting because when you looked at our storm water, after it had run through these ponds, it looked like Big Fork storm water.

So not that their storm water was necessarily meeting standards and I'm sure it wasn't, but it was like, Wow. You take mine storm water and run it through these ponds and it looks like Big Fork and it fit in with the NP data set too. So anyways, I also spent two weeks walking around Butte, looking at places that either the capping was terrible or just still needed capping. And so I came up with a whole list of those. So this is kind of fun, right. Go out and walk around and do a visual assessment and everything. So, okay, great. So, anyways, that went into a paper that we wrote. And Tom had it sitting on his desk. No, Tom took it and set it on the administrator's desk and it just sat there and he kept saying, "We need to use this. This should go to EPA." And eventually EPA said, "All right, just to get this CD moving, Arco, you tell us what you want. Butte Silver Bow, you tell us what you want. State, you tell us what you want." And so then it was like, well, we've already written that so we just cleaned it up and  sent it off to EPA. And Arco sent theirs off. And Butte Silver Bow, you know, they don't really deal in it that much. Right. They don't have a lot of consultants either to do independent analysis. So,  anyways, that's kind of where that went and then everything started working in that direction of including storm water ponds as an element in the next TI. And, yeah, it worked pretty well.

And so the next part, and I don't remember if I said this, it doesn't hurt to repeat myself at all. So, we got to that point. Well, anyways, I ended up hearing from Tom Stoops that the administrator expected me to retire. And I said, "I don't have to retire. I like doing this and I'm doing a good job." And he said, "No, Joe, you, you misunderstand what I'm telling you, you need to retire." And I said, "Well, they can't fire me." He said, "I've been an administrator for a long time and yes, they will fire you." And I said, "I'm not gonna risk my reputation." So I said, "Good, I'm retiring." I retired and continued on. I had a good relationship with EPAs contractors and, of course, with all of the DEQ people. So it was kind of fun. I kept doing that. But anyways, then I was kind of out of it. And I was working as a technical advisor for Citizens Technical Environmental Committee. And I kind of got hooked up with the Save Our Creek people. I mean, the Restore Our Creek people, Restore Our Creek Coalition. And I started working with them right away. I said, I was trying to convince them, especially out there down gradient of the Parrot and the whole digging east, Northside tailings area. I said, that's gonna have to be used for storm water ponds. That's really, what's gonna happen. And I said, I'm willing to work with you guys. And let's see what we can do. Eventually, there's gonna be mine water that has to be discharged somewhere. Let's see what we can do about this creek thing. And so I worked really hard with them.

[01:30:00]

So, where was I at?

Grant: You were working with ROCC.

Griffin: Oh, I was working with ROCC. Yeah, that was good. So I was doing all that and trying to convince them about storm water. And actually Arco, EPA, and Butte Silver Bow were very helpful and they established some subgroups of which I sat in on and one was storm water.  And so we did a tour. We went up to Arco's house and sat there with all these consultants and they asked questions. And to me it was pretty obvious. Yeah, we gotta do [storm water ponds]. And probably legitimate questions. Why couldn't you capture it somewhere on the hill and why couldn't you do this and that? And it was like, well, you just really can't, you know, I mean, it's just physically not possible to do most of that. I mean, it's sort of like, well, you know, if we actually dug up Butte, we could do something, but, short of that, it's not gonna happen. And the other part was the water part. And I was always like, well, eventually we'll have to treat mine water and that'll be fine. They kept looking at Silver Lake water and my saying is, quit calling it Silver Lake water. They don't pump out of Silver Lake. It's coming directly out of  Warm Springs Creek. So don't rob from a highly functional ecosystem. Because Warm Springs Creek is an amazing creek and I just don't want to see it degraded.

I'm still fighting that battle everywhere I can. Anyways long story short, I thought it was pretty interesting when Doug Benevento came to EPA as the region eight administrator. So, you know, there's 10 regions of EPA and we're in region eight, obviously. So an administrator of that level, it's like combining how many states together, you know, it's big.

He comes to town and he meets with Restore Our Creek and right off the bat, he says in the near future, we're going to either have a consent decree or I'm just gonna issue orders. So it's back to consent decrees over with, I'm gonna order the work to be . . . And I thought, wow, somebody . . . and to me, this was like  Richard Opper telling Arco, you're talking to me and here's what we're willing to do and not willing to do. And I'm going, somebody's finally, you know, taking the reins and the responsibility, but he also said to Restore Our Creek and to me, you're not gonna like everything we decide. I thought, wow, now there's something. He don't pander to people, but he was actually pretty flexible. And you know, when Restore Our Creek came up with their vision statement, you know, he was up there and the Restore Creek constantly waves that picture around of him holding up their vision statement.

And I think that EPA and Atlantic Richfield did follow through on it to the extent they could because, you know, Atlantic Richfield, it's all up the Atlantic Richfield, but they're building this whole park there and it's gonna be built around the storm water ponds. And honestly, I tried to sell the storm water ponds as that's the way Silver Bow Creek was. If you're talking about restoration, it was probably all beaver ponds down there in a swamp. And it was not this little trickling creek meandering through there.  And you guys, would've been wading knee deep in muck trying to walk through there, but anyways  I have to give a lot of credit to Oppen as far as getting it off the dime and, you know, everybody knows the consent decree is so damn important that orders are a horrible way to go.

I was lucky I was out of having to do heavy lifting at that point, but there's a lot of heavy lifting to do at that point. You know, you gotta finish up all of these technical evaluations and stuff and say, "Can we get there?" And, you know, they did finish up the TI. That was a big thing. It's like a thousand page document. There's just so many pieces and parts that they had to do and there's  still in the end, a lot of flexibility in that thing. And so it didn't say this is exactly how you'll do it. It still said, and this goes back to the ROD and I think this was just key. And this goes back to the Parrot is what they said about the Parrot and the groundwater plume is not that you have to dig up the Parrot. Not that you have to try and repair groundwater. It simply said, if groundwater's affecting the stream, you're gonna have to manage groundwater better. You're gonna have to do something more with it. And in the next step is what the consent decree is based on is an amendment to that record of decision. And the amendment is just like the ROD all over again, but it recognized what it had said in the RO past ROD about that. And it just said, we now realize that there is groundwater from this whole Parrot, MSD corridor, getting to Blacktail Creek, you have to manage that.

We now know that there's groundwater affecting the creek down at the Butte Reduction Works. You have to focus on that. So, you know, you hear over and over again, "Why is this taking so long?"  I guess that's God that, that is why it's taken so long is, I think when I started this in 2004 and we thought we had answers and this whole fight over storm water and all of the things we've done along the way, truly doing more, collecting more data and a couple of more surface water characterization reports. We were so ready to get this all put together for that ROD amendment and then for the consent decree. So I don't know. But Anaconda is still working on it. I find this fascinating and it's not something that I was directly really involved in, but because it was human health and it was Anaconda and, it was Opportunity, the Opportunity town lawsuit. But I guess I had worked on it because I'd done sampling of people's wells in Opportunity. And I've looked at the groundwater technical and practicability analysis and reports and waivers over there. And so Opportunity comes along and says, we don't think what EPA is doing is good enough for us.

And, you know, I thought, no, that's not. It is really, so this is just a little side story, I guess, but it's the way it works. It's the way Superfund works in big part. It's not very hard to find a consultant that will show that something's a problem. And it's really not very hard to find a lawyer that says, "Yeah, we think you have a case." And so they weren't suing EPA over their remedy. They were suing Arco. And so it was basically a damaged lawsuit. And they were basically saying Arco left their groundwater here and Arco left higher amounts of arsenic in the soil where we live. Anyways, long story short, it was supposed to go to trial. It got deferred to the Montana Supreme Court. I can't, it's hard for me to follow once it gets into that legal stuff, but long story short, it went through the  Montana Supreme Court to rule on the lower court's ruling. They supported the lower court's ruling, which was to go to trial. Arco requested that the US Supreme court hear it. And they agreed to hear. I read through all of this stuff too. And I'll tell you what I could have never been a lawyer ever, ever, ever, but I was really excited and so excited that my wife and I went to Washington DC to listen to the Supreme, the oral arguments in front of the Supreme Court. Wow.

And I read through all of this stuff and in the end I was still like, God, I just don't quite get what all these arguments are. I kind of did. But it was interesting. And Susan Dunlap had kind of followed it and she said, "Oh." She was the one that said, "Look at the lawyer that Arco hired." And so I looked her up and she had argued more cases in front of the Supreme Court than any woman and she had won like almost all of them. Well, of course, who do you think Arco was gonna hire? But, you know, I totally sympathized with Atlantic Richfield in this case. I'm like going, look it, you go into this with EPA and you say, "Okay, we're gonna do this work. Right. You're gonna do the oversight. We're gonna do this work. We're gonna figure out. What is good for this community? what is good for the environment? And we're just, you guys are setting the standard. We're gonna do the work that needs to be done." And then you have somebody, some small entity coming back and saying, "Well, that's not good enough for us. We're gonna sue you." So for Arco, it's like, we can't ever see the end of this. This will go on forever and ever.

And one of the things, and I can't remember whether it was Kagan, who was it? That said it was one of the Supreme Courts brought out the fact that Superfund is the comprehensive environmental blah, blah, blah act. And he said, it's comprehensive. So that EPA takes the great view of, you know, it's not, how do we work with this group of people over here? And then separately with this group of people, this needs to work for this whole area, this whole site. And I thought that was the most legitimate part.

But getting back to the reality of this is it seemed like the Supreme Court split the baby in their final decision. One of the arguments was whether these people should be considered PRP, even though they've never been asked to be responsible for anything. And that was the part that went in Arco's favor. Yes, they're responsible parties. And if they want to do work on their own property, then they're gonna have to go through EPA's approval and EPA will never give them approval. And so the other part of it was could they still under, state laws, sue for damages?

And the weird part about that is it works out in this case because the state law says that if you sue for damages, you have to do the work that you said you were going to do. And you can't just use the money for whatever. And I think they would disapprove it in this state, but so it didn't, it wasn't a blanket effect and it came down to still giving states some right. So that's the part I don't really understand, honest to God. I just don't get it. But the effect has been in Anaconda. They were moving forward with consent decree. From what I have heard, they're splitting the consent decree into groundwater and surface water.   It'll move forward. Anything that has to do with private property, it's gonna have to be under order.

[01:44:00]

And it's because of Opportunity's. So they're like going "No, you know, we might fight any of this." The problem for them is if somebody like Opportunity wins a lawsuit against them, it sets a precedent that they will have to live with. And every other company will have to live with. But, you know, they're only interested in their own interests, not every industry probably, but so anyways,  for me, that was really great.

And I got to see Ruth Bader Ginsburg in action. And so it was fun. It was great. It was really good. And the only person that didn't say anything was Clarence Thomas. He just sat there. He looked absolutely bored. And Ruth Bader Ginsburg kind of looked like this . . . sitting at the bench.

Grant: Just hang on a little longer.

Griffin: She was so small and shriveled up. It was just amazing. She's sharp as a tack though. I mean, the woman is just, I mean, I'm just so impressed with the justices. You just kind of go . . . I was impressed with the Montana Justices.

You go, they do this, you know, three times a week. They do this. How does anybody, I just don't get it. Somebody said, "Well, they have a lot of clerks." Well, yeah, I'm sure they do, but . . . Wow. It's not just like you have USB port on the side of your head here. Here's what you need for today. So they're very impressive people. It gives me hope right now, actually that the justice system is still a fairly intact system. So we can argue that, Clark. It's certainly better than Congress.

[01:46:00]

Grant: Okay. You ready for the question and answer period. Great. Well thank you, Joe, for all that.

Griffin: That was just, why don't you tell me a little bit about yourself.

Grant: So I'll just, I asked you to just answer these kind of generally, you know, being in the, you were actually at the table then for priority soils, the CD, you were sitting at the table.

Griffin: Yeah. Oh yeah. For a long time.

Grant: Did it ever bother you that they were closed to the public?

Griffin: No, not really.

Grant: Because then you could make Oxycontin jokes?

Griffin: Yeah. Good point. No, no. You know, I just, God, that's a terrible example, but you know, the only reason Congress functions when it does function is because people can go off and caucus and figure out where they're going with stuff. You just have to be able to deal with so many details. It would sort of be like saying, you know, for this to be a true democracy, we should vote on every single law. It’d just come to a halt. It's a great question. And it's really hard to deal with. Honestly, I understand the need for transparency too. So it's a huge gray area. That's how I would really answer that question. 

Grant: When I say Zika pond, how does that make you feel?

Griffin: Oh boy. Yes, that was, did you see me jump? You know, that's interesting.

Grant: How do you take critique of the design that you helped come up with?

Griffin: You know,  it's fine, as long as it doesn't change the outcome.

Grant: Okay.

Griffin: Which is that the ponds are getting built. Again, it's dealing with the public who, oftentimes doesn't try and even come up to speed with the simplest parts of what you're really trying to do and just throws mud. So, you know, going through the whole final CD process, I got really active because, you know, this is the, that was the most interesting part of Butte Silver Bow being a PRP is that, the council of commissioners had to approve it. And so I got really involved with meeting with them individually, as much as I could, as much as they would talk to me, I contacted all of the ones I thought were approachable or rational.

Grant: And how many is that?

Griffin: It was 10 of them.

Jaap: I wonder what the other two are.

Griffin: And then I continued to write comments to them every time, because sometimes it was like, whoa, I need to address what was said in the last comment period. And you probably know how I was so taken aback by Judge Newman's and how he jumped into this. And really it had to do with me talking to all of them.

[01:49:40]

My lawyer, it had to do with me, you start with is that I was the state's technical advisor during the headwaters coalition lawsuit over the name, Silver Bow Creek or MSD.  And again, you know, it's hard to see where anything's going, but my lawyer said, this is only about the name, but it's pretty much like trying to get the camel's nose under the tent. Do you know that expression?

Grant: Yeah.

Griffin: And so then he ruled that it needs to be called Silver Bow Creek. And honestly, when he did that ruling, I'm going, “How can you tell us what we call it?” I mean, I don't think you can even do that, but then when it came down to it, he came back and said, “No, there was more to it than that.” In this ruling, it needs to be a creek as well. And EPA's lawyer, Arco’s lawyer, Molly Buffet. You know, I had a lot of conversations with her. She's going, "I don't know what, I don't know what Newman's doing. This is really weird." And then they went and got an independent thing, that I took some out of, that said the Supreme Court had ruled on something, another thing. And it said they give broad deference to DEQ and how they apply laws. And I'm like, “Well, yeah.” And you know, the argument is, is this a creek? Well, the state doesn't accept it as a creek. They accepted it as a storm drain. And if you look at all of the state’s streams, they are all classified except that one. And it's not classified.

And Silver Bow Creek below that was classified as I class, which meant indeterminate. So when they designed the stream classifications, they said, what do you do with something that's an industrial sewer that also has Blacktail Creek water running down it? We don't know. So it had a classification, but the MSD channel does not have a classification. And I don't know.  I didn't get it. Well, anyway. So was this still part of the question about Zika ponds?

Grant: This is another examination of the independent judiciary. Judges that don't have an opinion.

Griffin: Well, so yeah. And so anyways, it was good to see because it did come up with the council and even the term Zika ponds came up and the person who termed them Zika ponds sent in miles and miles and miles of comments that aren't based on anything, except that he's outraged, that EPA is not doing the right thing and Arco is not doing the right thing and EPA and DEQ. And I don't know if anybody's doing anything right. So anyways, sorry.

Grant: That's fine.

Griffin: That's a Zika pond for you.

Grant: Well, on that topic of commissioners, you know, I know there are several of them that are thinking delisting for Butte will mean economic development. We can get back on track to building Butte, you know. The way I look at it is some of the remedies take place in perpetuity. So is there really a post-Superfund era?

[01:53:27]

Griffin: I think that's a great question. And that's yeah. That's maybe the $54 million question. Yeah, what's so unusual about, especially this site, but Anaconda too, is these sites will go on in perpetuity, but you know, the super granddaddy of all in perpetuity is the 10,000 miles of underground workings and the Berkeley pit, which will continue forever and managing that. So it's a great question in this context. And again, you know, it really goes back to that idea of technical impracticability.  You just can't clean up the mines and that groundwater. So it'll always be a problem. It can be managed. We know it can be managed, but it's going to be in perpetuity. I have a guy that I work with, Rich Prodgers, and he's done a lot of reclamation work. He's a plant expert. He did all of the vegetation design and plantings on Silver Bow Creek stream side tailings. And he, in a way, laughs at that question of economic development and Superfund. Because he said, look at the pit there. That's what people see. They don't come to town and go, ‘Oh, it's a superfund site.’ No, they look at the pit and they go, they either say, ‘What's the story here? I'm going to find out about this.’ Or they go, ‘What a shit hole. I'm not stopping here.’ And there's two kinds of people in this world. There's the ones that say, ‘shit hole.’ And there's the ones that say, ‘God, there's something cool about this place.’ Which of those do you fit in on, Clark?

Grant: I think it's clear.

Jaap: We had some people come in and ask how to get to the lake. Not a lake.

Grant: Beautiful Lake Berkeley? Well, I was hoping  you could help us kind of understand, again, generally Butte mine flooding, you know, what is going on? If someone did just blow into town and they were curious, they heard about the tunnels, they know about it filling up the pit, they're concerned about overflowing, you know, can you kind of just give us a picture of that system?

Griffin: Yeah, I can. So but first of all, it's the nature of underground mining to start with. So you know, you quickly hit the water table when you go underground. And so you have to de-water the mines as you go. So as you're de-watering and going deeper and deeper, you're drawing down the water table. And for a hydrogeologist, we think it looks like an inverted cone. So, the lowest point is where your pump is and then it rises up until it meets the natural water level and it's cone shaped. So one thing that people understand is water flows downhill, right. And so in this case, you've created this cone where water at the top of that cone is flowing down in towards the pump. So that went on for, well, when did underground mining start? And then they turned off the final pumps for the Berkeley pit in 1982. So, after all of those years, over a hundred years, I guess, probably over a hundred years of mining and pumping, that cone of depression began to rebound.

So at the time it started to rebound, we had over 10,000 miles of workings. And the workings don't even include stoping and stoping is these big hollowed out areas. So the workings are just the drifts and the hallways and the shafts and stuff. But it's even bigger than 10,000 miles actually. And then you have the Berkeley pit whatever space that is, and really the Berkeley pit compared to the underground mines, the Berkeley pit didn't go down that far. And so, not that it's inconsequential, but really it's a hydrogeology to kind of look at it and how much void space is there to fill up now that water is starting to come back in and it's flowing back in. What's the void space? And it's a little less than half of the void space between underground and the pit. So the water is rising.

So that was an interesting decision. I'd really like to know more of the history of that. Maybe it's buried in Arco’s corporate documents somewhere that we won't get to, but, you know,  Atlantic Richfield buys the Anaconda Company and  because they are making huge profits and they're losing a lot in windfall profit tax. And so they can sink their money into some other industry. And I guess other oil companies did this, they said, “Let's buy a mine. Hell, we're smart people. We're an oil company. We could run a mine.” And so how long did they run the mine? Do you remember? You don't know either?  Not long. Four years, five years. I think it was something like 78 to 82. And they said, “Well, this is dumb. Let's just walk away from it.” Well, first they shut down the smelter that was probably, you know, Clean Air Act. They were probably never going to be able to run that smelter. But I guess they didn't look at the Clean Water Act too hard and they said, “Let's just turn off the pumps.”

And so then they turned off the pumps in 82. Like I said, the Butte area was added to Silver Bow Creek as part of the Superfund site. So,  EPA comes in here and I'm sure they said, ‘Holy shit, what do we do with this thing?’ She's writing down, "Holy shit." 'Holy shit. What do we do with this?' And so, you know, they named Silver Bow Creek Butte area, NPL site. They named Butte mine flooding as an operable unit. And so they're kind of behind the times. Nobody asked the EPA if they should shut off the pump or if they could shut off the pump. That's an interesting question: Was the federal government ever asked about turning off the pumps or was this just made somewhere? I don't know. It's a good question. So you guys at the Archives should dig into this. Yeah, well, it's the hinge point for all of this. It’s a good question anyways. It's coming up in Arco’s contractors then, it's part of the remedial investigation. They did a technical impracticability evaluation and it is the, it is the most interesting technical impact practicability evaluation, I think, on the planet.

[02:01:32]

So here's the way it worked. First of all, they said, 'The reason we have a problem with . . . you know, this was clean water, who cares if this fills up and overflows, no problem there.' But the reason it's bad is that we have 10,000 miles of underground workings, and we've now introduced air, oxygen and water into what was once pretty much solid rock, a solid ore body. And what happened is the oxygen and water are causing oxidation of the sulfides, primarily pyrite that's producing sulfuric acid. And that sulfuric acid is then leaching the residual metals into the water. So we end up with, at that time, pH water up two and a half going into the Berkeley pit. And we ended up with exorbitantly high metal levels, including, you know, copper zinc, cadmium . . . arsenic wasn't that high, but it is pretty high, but . . . aluminum, I don't know, you name it. Cobalt. There's a bunch of them.

So what would happen then if we got rid of the source of the acid and metals, which means what if we just hollowed out the rest of the underground system? So down to, as we all know, a mile deep and hugely extensive area, and then it's back down to solid rock down there. And it begs a lot of questions, like, where would you then put all of that? But, they said it was a pit. I'm going to make up some numbers here, but they're close. It's a pit that was 60 times bigger than the Berkeley pit and it was going to cost, I think it was close to a trillion dollars. So do you think they could, with a straight face, approach Arco? Here's what we're going to ask you to do? That was rejected. That was rejected as entertainingly absurd.

So the next one was, well, okay, what if we drilled the holes on a hundred foot centers and either injected lime so we neutralize the system or we grouted the whole thing up? And  I assumed that meant grouting up the Berkeley pit too, but maybe it just meant the underground. Anyways, that would still cost between nine and, I think, $13 billion. And it's really back of the envelope calculations. There's so much there that you would go, would this really work? And so again, rejected as technically impracticable.

[02:04:54]

The last one was, should we hold water levels low? So it doesn't even fill the Berkeley. Or should we let it fill up to the extent it can? And that was pretty reasonable. And that was, I don't think holding it down for a longer period of time. I don't remember. It might've been in the a hundred million range or the $10 million range, but ultimately the decision was we're going to let it fill up to a safe level, which they call it critical level, critical water level, which I think a lot of us feel is unfortunate. Because it's not critical. It's got quite a margin of safety built into that water level. Ted Dwayne at the Bureau kept saying, let's rename it the safe level, please. But I don't know, anyways, it was already written in the record of decisions and all of those things. So yeah. So anyways, the reason they decided on that rather than holding the water level deeper was you're continuing to fill up more of the underground. And honestly, if you look at those cross sections of those maps, that the Bureau's done, the Berkeley doesn't intersect all that much in underground mining. Most of it's below the depth of the bottom of the Berkeley pit. But there was some. And so anyways, that's what they decided on. So then you have to understand that we have this cone of depression, but somewhere . . .  so uphill from that, it's just water coming from way up above Walkerville coming down into this. On the south side of that, you've got a cone of depression, that's got a groundwater divide. And so on the other side of that groundwater divide, you've got alluvial aquifer and groundwater aquifer that's going down towards Silver Bow Creek and will eventually discharge into Silver Bow Creek. So got to keep in mind there's that divide there. But the cone of depression on the inside of that, so on the north side of that divide, is certainly capturing all the mine water. And it's a very effective system.

As a matter of fact, if you were going to deal with, say a petroleum plume, you go out and you do a capture system by putting in a series of wells that'll capture that plume, and then you can pump and treat that groundwater and you can contain it. So sometimes I think of the Berkeley pit as the world's largest capture well. And so it's a good system and it's very effective. And another question it answers is, you know, people say why are they still mining? And, you know, when you find yourself in a deep hole, aren't you supposed to quit digging? But the answer is really all of that water is going to report to the same system. It'll all be part of the Berkeley pit capture system. And so it's nothing outside of what's already being managed.

And so the last part of the story is you have to hold that water level in the cone of depression at a level where you maintain that groundwater divide. So water will never leave the mine system. And that's where the safe water level comes in. And it's actually established not in the Berkeley pit lake, but it's the lowest point in the underground mining system. It's the highest point of any of those. So it's the, yeah. Sorry. When I was still familiar with the data, it was about 20 feet higher than the Berkeley pit. I think it's a little less now, but I think it's 60 feet below that. The water level is 60 feet below the groundwater divide. It's probably another 40 feet below the level of the lowest point in the rim of the pit.

Because that's always a question that people ask too, is would it actually overflow? Not likely. It would just get into the alluvial aquifer and then travel through the alluvial aquifer. You know, at some point, I guess it could get enough precipitation, maybe it would clog up the aquifer enough that water levels would continue to rise and you might end up with a stream coming out of there, if left to its own devices. But it wouldn't overflow really.

And so then the question is what do you have to do to treat that water? And originally they said, it's lime. You add lime, you raise the pH, lime mass in calcium oxide or calcium hydroxide.  And what that does, it raises the pH. They raise the pH up to about 11 and so then you have these hydroxides come off of the calcium and things like zinc and copper attached to the hydroxides. So you create this hydroxide sludge, which then has to be managed. And so the sludge, so that's when they designed and built the horseshoe bend treatment plant, which has been treating for the longest time, just a separate flow, not the Berkeley pit, underground stuff, but a separate flow for years, when they designed it, they wanted to make it a high density sludge, so that there's less volume going to the pit. So it's not filling up the pit quicker or it's filling the pit much slower. So they've been doing that. And so the stuff goes to the pit. Well, it's actually high pH stuff, so it can maybe interact with the acid.

[02:12:07]

The final part though, is that, well, they also knew they were going to have to build some kind of polishing to that. So it's really good at taking all those metals out. Now you're left with water that is very high in calcium. And so let me explain, copper and zinc and cadmium are plus two CAD ions. So they have a plus two charge to them. And so hydroxides are negatively charged. That's why the hydroxides pick up the copper. And so what you're now left with is a whole lot of calcium in the water. But sulfate, which is very high in the mine water, is an anine, and it's negatively charged. So it doesn't react with the hydroxides. So you end up with very high calcium water, very high sulfate water, and overall you have sort of salty water, saltier than fresh water. Anyways, high total dissolved solids is the way it's classified.

And one of the tests they knew they were going to have to pass. So they have to pass all these tests that just says, is uranium coming out? Is copper coming out? You know, are you meeting all these standards? But one test that is a common industrial discharge requirement is called the whole effluent toxicity test. And it's meant to say, we know the toxins that you deal with, that we're trying to control, but we don't know what we're missing. And so it's, you take two sensitive species and you put them in this water. And one's a snow flea, it's called Sarah Daphnia, it's a little insect. And the other one's a fat head minnow and you subject them to this water. And there's two kinds of tests. One is the acute test and one's the chronic test. So the acute test says, we put them in there and we held them there for 24 hours and they didn't die. And these are sensitive creatures. The other one's the chronic test. And that one says you're going to have to stay in this water for like 92 hours. And for the Sarah Daphnia, they're a little insect, then they reproduce rapidly. And so they have to reproduce three broods. And the fat head minnows have to not only live, they have to gain weight and size. So, this is a test to just make sure what are we missing.

And it was always a big question. The other question is if you combine high levels of calcium and high levels of sulfate, you produce gypsum. And so the other question was, are we going to just cement Silver Bow Creek in with gypsum? So anyways, Atlantic Richfield built this polishing plant there and it's an extra filtration system. I went up and looked at it and I'm not a process engineer. So I'm going to fake my way through this, but it used crushed coal and gravel beds and stuff, but then it also has a separate circuit that's reverse osmosis and reverse osmosis just means you have a membrane and you use high pressure to push the water through a membrane and it'll take out ion. So it's taking out atomic level stuff, very, very expensive. The other part is nowhere near that expensive, but they have built this plant with both the filtration system. And I don't know if it's state of the art, but it's a pretty amazing plant though. They've just done some amazing stuff, but it was in October of last year, they started actually discharging this water and sure enough, it's pretty high TDS coming out of there still. They were given some leeway about how to do this because they're putting it into a living stream. So there's a lot of caution about it.

[02:17:06]

They've done a lot of testing and they've been allowed to, now that we're in the summer months, they've been allowed to use some Silver Lake water, Warm Springs Creek water just to make sure they're getting through this. So they can balance it out. You know, what I hear is that they do have problems. So they have to do the whole effluent toxicity test. End of the pipe, it has to meet the acute test. So they take water directly out of there and say, does it kill these things outright? And then in stream, they sampled downstream after it's mixed, they have to do the chronic tests. They're actually having problems with the chronic tests. So yeah, but I mean, and these are very sensitive species. I don't think we're killing any of the fish that are now living in the creek. So It's interesting.

Part of all of this is, and I explained this before, when you're a mine and you're crushing ore, and you're making a concentrate and you come up with tailings, your slurry solution is very high pH because you don't want any of that to be dissolved. So when they started on the horseshoe bend treatment plant, they ended up with pH water of 11, which is exactly what the mill wants. And so all of that water since they built that plant has gone into the operation. And so it goes through there. They mill their ore. Have you guys have ever taken the tour up there? That's impressive, isn't it? That room is huge. So the rod mills and the ball mills and then all the vats where the flotation takes place. So anyways, so then you have the tailings and the tailings are a slurry and all of that is pumped up to the Yankee Doodle tailings pond, right? And I think that is probably one of the highest costs is the electricity to get that water up, roughly a thousand feet. It's big pumps and big pumping costs. Because it's not just water, it's something with like near the density of rock. So it's really heavy stuff you're pumping up there.

So then that water goes up to the tailings impoundment and it's slowly settling out the particles and it's running. So the water's running off to the north, the opposite gradient of the original Silver Bow Creek. And it reaches a pond up there, Yankee Doodle pond, I guess. Yankee Doodle Creek and the old Silver Bow Creek's still comes down and meets this decamped water. Then they pump out of that and that water comes down and goes back to the mill as well.

So you have water coming out of their original treatment plant and water coming down from up there. Now that they have started taking water out of the Berkeley pit, that water instead of Horseshoe Bend water, which I'm not going to go into the details of that. But they're taking Berkeley Pit water. It now goes to the Horseshoe Bend treatment plant. It now goes to the mill.  So then it all goes up to the Yankee Doodle tailings pond, and then it's part of the water that they're taking out and sending back down to the mill. The water that's going to the pilot treatment plant right now is a tap into that return line that goes to the mill.

So that water has been at pH 11 for so long. There's not a chance that there are any dissolved metals in it, but really high in calcium and sulfate. So then it goes to the polishing plant. And obviously in all of this, they have to do a lot of pH adjustment before they can release it.  They release the water at pH seven.

And so ultimately under Superfund, they will have to use that polishing plant and make sure that they treat this water. As long as the mine is operating, they can use as much of that water as they  need in their operations. So we're not guaranteed that there's going to be like,  you know, 10 CFS flowing into the creek which is about what's flowing right now.

I think in the next few years with this pilot test of their polishing plant, it'll slowly get reduced down. So that's you know, the question. Can you tell me more about the Berkeley pit? That's where we're at now, really.

Jaap:  So I have a segue question to that. So that Yankee Doodle tailings pond, if that's left to its own devices, do you know the implications of that body of water?

Griffin: That's a great question, actually. I know the mine would probably prefer to keep the lake there because it keeps the tailings wet. So it keeps them from oxidizing. It's called a wet closure and it is a common way to manage your tailings in the end. Matter of fact, there was some mining engineers up at Tech, and I know they were dealing with a mine in Indonesia that was slurring their tailings out into the ocean and you're kind of going, "What could go wrong with this?"

[02:23:21]

But anyways, I guess I'm laughing at all of humanity right now. What have we done to ourselves? So my favorite comic in the whole world, and if you've ever seen me give a presentation, about two-thirds of the time, I include a Pogo. And did you ever see Pogo? You guys are young. So Pogo was these animals that lived in the Okefenokee swamp and Pogo was an opossum. He was a cute little character. And Walt Kelly was the cartoonist. And for the first Earth Day, he drew a comic and the punchline was, "We have met the enemy and he is us." And he was standing on this big pile of trash in the Okefenokee swamp. And I'm like, 'Oh man, I'm going to hang on to that line for a long time.'

So anyways, yeah, getting back the Yankee Dooley tailings pond, we create these huge waste piles. And so the way it gets looked at, honestly is, I think, it's probably their latest permit to increase the heights of the berms. I don't know if they have one more beyond that. There's obviously a limit to how much they can store up there. I guess the commonest question asked is, it's all behind a berm, which is a dam, really. What happens if there's a big earthquake? Do these dams fail? Yes.

There's been a couple of big failures in, I don't know, I was here, I gave this guy a tour. I don't remember how I got hooked up with him. He was from Sweden and he was a mining engineer and we went up and looked up there and he was the first one that told me about a couple of big dam failures. I was like, 'Holy smokes.' So I started looking into them and I kind of found out how dams are built. This one's actually built pretty well. It's funny because it wasn't like when they started it, they were looking into the future and that's how most of them are built so they can be built downstream. So you basically have something that looks like this. You gotta remember, it's not water behind it. It's a bunch of sediments with water in the pores. Or you can build them upstream. So it kind of looks like that with the tailings underlying it, or you can build them center-built and ours is mostly center-built. There's a couple of short sections where it's not.

[02:26:36]

But anyways, they have had to look into that question and it's a really good question. They've looked into it several ways. One is they do need to understand where water is in all those pores, both in the dam. So the dam is just built out of waste rock and that waste rock doesn't look like it, it looks pretty solid. I know the one over at Golden Sunlight that rock has so much pyrite in it and it looks like it falls apart and degrades pretty rapidly. This still looks like pretty solid rock, I think. But anyways, you have to understand where water is in the pores, the water level in the pores, in both the dam and the tailings. And they've got a lot of little wells out there. We call them Pizometers because they measure the water table, which is called the PZ metric surface, because if you're a hydrologist, you look at it in terms of pressure or elevation and pressure. But anyways, so the question, first of all if they have done several seismic stability analysis on it. I don't know how they come up with what's the biggest probable earthquake we could have here, but they come up with a number and they think that it's stable. So they understand where the dam sits. They understand the water pressures all around that. So they can do this analysis. All I can say is that it's a really, really interesting question, especially if you'll live in Butte, right?

Jaap: It's a little scary.

Grant: Not reassuring.

Griffin: No, no, I know, but no, here's why I say it's reassuring, honestly, is, would you absolutely be afraid to live in San Francisco if you could afford to live there and you love living in a really cool city? So here we're faced with something that is extremely low probability, but pretty high consequences. If you lived in San Francisco, it's actually pretty certain they're going to have an extreme earthquake there and it's going to knock down a majority of the city. And I don't know, all those people run around pretending that it's not going to happen. So I don't know if that reassures you or not.

Jaap: Not going to sleep any better tonight. No.

Griffin: Well, you know, we are in, it's funny, we're just off the inner mountain seismic zone and this place has been really quiet. Although it's called the Continental Pit because the Continental fault runs through it. So I mean, the East Ridge is there because there's a fault there. None of this is active as far as we know, but in the San Francisco area, along all of that San Andreas fault system, which is a system, not an individual fault, but they do so much analysis and they can dig these pits and then they can see all of these offsets and they can find organic matter in the offsets. And then they can start to date the faults and then they can put return intervals together. But it's just because there's such active faults and there's so many of them and they have geologists that dedicate their lives to doing this stuff. Here, we don't have anything like that. There's just no way to know what's the probability of an earthquake.

So I don't know, honestly, you should sleep at night.

Grant: There you go.

Griffin: Your risk is far greater going to Bozeman to shop at Costco and getting on the interstate.

Jaap: Thanks.

Griffin: That's my simple risk analysis.

[02:31:29]

Grant: There you go. Well, I just had a couple more questions.

Griffin: Okay.

Grant: Alright. Does TI really mean FI, financially impracticable?

Griffin: Well, that's a good question. No, that's a part of, I've never, I don't think I've ever read really the TI. You know, I don't know how that's defined. I have read through the guidance document about how to conduct the evaluations and stuff. And there is nothing really more than guidance. It's not really law. And I have looked into it and I've looked into the number of them that have been done. And I can tell you as of mid, probably 2015, maybe 2010, nobody had ever done a storm water TI. So this might be the first in the nation.

Grant: Wow.

Griffin: But I know the way my lawyer said, "Inordinately costly." There's your threshold. So what does that mean? To you inordinately costly would be $3.75.

Grant: But to Arco it's different.

Griffin: To Arco it's a different thing.

Grant: Well, I wanted to ask too, speaking of Arco, you know, you had worked for them. How does working for a multinational oil company differ from a state agency?

Griffin: Oh, that's a good question. And I didn't work directly for them. I worked as a consultant to them. It's a good question because, you know, I learned a lot from Arco and I did get to see how they look at all of this. But from the other side, when you start to work for a state agency, you really do have to start looking at, well, what more can you get done here? But working for Arco, I really started seeing, you know, those limits to things and thinking that in large part, they did a really good job on stuff. I mean, there were things where I didn't agree with them.

Grant: So I wonder, is there a mission? Do they talk about the mission? Obviously, for Arco that would be profit driven. For DEQ, it would be a public service. Is that part of the culture?

Griffin: Yeah. You know, that's something I found frustrating working with Arco because, you know, I was, I had smaller pieces and sometimes, well, I almost, I kind of got in trouble one time. It was like, that's what I wanted. I wanted, what are we trying to get out here? You know, Arco, how do you look at this? What are we trying to get to here? And you never got that. It was just here, get this done. You know, and one time I went into a meeting and I'd been evaluating, and this was a meeting with Arco and EPA. And we had been looking at technical impracticability, and I was looking at the different kinds of technical impracticability waivers. And one of them was a temporary waiver. And I went in and said something about a temporary waiver. And Robin Bullock said, "No, we're not." I said something about what we may be looking at all these different ones. And we might be looking at a temporary waiver. And she said, "No, we're not." But it's like, well, tell me what we're doing here. And I'm not sure it was any different when I went to the state.

Grant: Really?

Griffin: No, it's just kind of like, 'What are we trying to do?' Only there you're working with lawyers and it's like, 'Hey, wait a minute. No, you're wrong on this? Let me explain to you how this works.' And they're like, 'No, we're the lawyers. We're in charge.' So they were really frustrating, actually, sometimes.

Grant: It sounds like it. Especially near the end.

Griffin: Oh yeah. Well, and you know, trying to figure out how to deal with water coming into the system. So Blacktail Creek upstream and how you're going to, if you're going to waive standards or how you're going to give Arco, you can't, you can't say Arco started with clean water and then dirtied it. What if they're starting with dirty water and how are we going to deal with that? And I was dealing with my lawyer and he decided he was going to do these analysis and I kept going, 'No, that doesn't work.' And he goes, 'Well, no, try this. Look at . . .'  And I'm going, 'You're coming up with negative numbers. It says Arco should actually be adding contaminants in here.' And he goes, 'Well, if it's negative number, we'll just call it zero.' And I'm going, 'No, no, no, I can't live with that.'

Grant: Early on, you know, seeing the Butte bias from Helena. And after spending time there, you know, I'm just curious how that bias manifests? What does it really look like in to day-to-day operations in State government?

[02:36:56]

Griffin: It was particular to Butte from what I said, I can't really answer that question that well. I can answer it. I can answer it as regards to Butte because it really is a particular case and Butte being a PRP actually made it even tougher. So here was where I first saw it happened.

So I was kind of new still with DEQ. We were working towards the record of decision at the time. And I used to come over here and talk plain talk to Sesso, which I probably was not supposed to, but I knew Sesso pretty well. I used to go and drop in his office all the time, because I was working on mine flooding and stuff. As an Arco contractor I got to know him, so I already knew him pretty well. And when I started on this, I was like, well, you know, we're gonna get this ROD done. And here's what you gotta do. You guys are trying to work out, you know, how are you going to work things out with Arco. You should understand this. And so at one point, and Sesso largely wrote this, Sesso wrote what I would call Butte Silver Bow's Term Sheet. They kind of said, here's what we want out of this. And here's how we see the ROD. And so I thought, well, that's interesting. I think is what we should do is have a meeting in Helena and we'll bring EPA over and us DEQ guys will sit down with Butte Silver Bow and their lawyers and let's see what you guys want.

So we did that and this included NRD and then afterwards we were cleaning up, you know, everybody had left. Then I was there with one of my lawyers who will remain nameless, I guess at this point. And he said, "Goddamn, Butte Silver Bow, all they want is money." And, you know, the voice in my head said, "Fuck you. Of course, they want money. You think? What do you think?" And so there was always that. They were always just 'Sesso is so conniving,' and I was just like, Jesus Christ. It got better at the end, honestly, I think with DEQ. I had a hard time with NRD. And they really maintain that there. They still do, I think. So, you know, I side with them a little bit sometimes on some of that, but sometimes it, I don't know, it's hard. The chief lawyer, Rob Collins. He's the one that started the whole Natural Resource damage lawsuit. He's the head lawyer for the department of justice, the damage lawyer.

[02:40:22]

And he was a bulldog or as I used to say he is a real asshole, but he was our asshole. So it was good. He was tough, but I got into screaming matches with him about stuff here in Butte. It's like going, what the hell are you guys doing? And for Rob, it was like, I'm in charge. And it's like, no, you guys are in charge of restoration, not remedy, but for me, I'm kind of a peon compared to this chief lawyer at the department of justice.

And it was hard, but a couple of times that worked out. We would be using the Bureau to look at the MSD corridor and the groundwater and everything. And he'd go, "Well, who's gonna pay for this, Joe?" And I go, "Well, you guys are the ones with the money, you pay for it." But sometimes it was like, I would be asking the Bureau to do certain things and they would say, "No, we're not doing that."

Grant: I'm kind of working backwards, back to the beginning of our conversation. You had just mentioned briefly your dad was in the air force. What did he actually do?

Griffin: Oh man. How long are we going to be here? Another three hours?

Grant: Just generally.

Griffin: He was something. Have you heard of the Flying Tigers?

Grant: I don't think so.

Griffin: So, he knew we were going to enter world war. He was always interested in flying. And we were going to enter World War Two. We weren't in it. I mean, it was started, but the Japanese, the Japanese had been wreaking havoc on the Chinese for a long time. There was a guy over there,  General Szenol. He was assembling a Chinese air force.  He eventually went to President Roosevelt and said, "Hey, you know, this is bigger than just China fighting Japan. You guys are going to be in it too. Why don't you give me some planes and pilots?" So Roosevelt said, "Okay." This is a covert action, right? And so he supplied them with P-40's and he had these naval pilots. He said, "You resign your commission. You become a mercenary for the United States and we'll pay you and you will get, I don't know how much, a bounty on every plane you shoot down." So anyways, long story short, they just started in, I think, they started in like June of 1941. So before the war started, but just before something like that. So then Pearl Harbor happens, my dad enlists in the Army Air Corps. And he goes through all this flight training. He was originally going to get sent to Germany and then he got diverted at the last minute and they said, "You're going to be doing this other thing."

He finds himself in China. He's the first of the military in there that takes over these P-40's. They're called, the Flying Tigers because they had painted on the emblem of these P-40's, a tiger shark mouth. So it's got these big teeth and then an eye up here, and it was for a tiger shark actually, because the Japanese thought that the tiger shark was bad Juju. So anyways, he becomes a pilot and he did that. He flew 75 missions in China. He left there, came back to the United States, trained some pilots, took them over to Europe and flew another 75 missions in Europe and was a squadron commander in Europe. He was in an ace and shot down eight airplanes and created a bunch more havoc for the Germans and had amazing stories about aerial combat and shit.

And then in between that, interestingly aside, in between that, he was in the United States in San Francisco. He met my mother on a blind date. He went back. He went over to Germany and said, "If we come back, we'll get married." So I have this bundle of letters that they sent back and forth when he was in Germany. And then he said when he was in Germany, he said he flew 75 mission and he went into the surgeon and said, "I'm done." And he said, the surgeon said, "Joe, you've got army fatigue. You're going home." So he just kind of recognized, yeah, that's 75 missions. That's good. So anyways, in Germany, interesting part of this, his brother was an engineer and became his crew chief in Germany, which was probably a mistake for the Army Air Corps. Because he got grounded on a couple of occasions because the plane wasn't up to snuff.  But when they liberated France, he and my dad. So I never asked him questions about what he did when he went to France, but he went to his grave with whatever secrets he might have had.

[02:46:48]

Anyways he came back, did a number of, I mentioned this, he was a test pilot. Right after the war, he was in the Philippines and he had a fighter squadron because right after the war, we thought that the next thing, we were going to be at war with the Russians. And so he had that squadron, he went to the Pentagon, he got a business degree, a master's, an MBA from Harvard. He started buying stuff for the military, ended up buying parts for ballistic missiles, ended up being the director of the Titan Missile Program.

Grant: Jesus, Joe.

Griffin: And then he went to something called the Electronic Systems Division in Massachusetts. And that's where he retired from. And I think he was, he was like, just, I don't think he liked Electronic Systems Division. So he did that for like four years and then he retired. So that's what he did.

Grant: Wow. What a career.

Griffin: And then my mother taught school in the Philippines when they went there and stuff.

Grant: Well, that was my final question. What about your mother? We didn't hear about her.

Griffin: She thought school and raised me when he was off doing things he wanted. When he started in with the Titan Missile Program, he went to a meeting in Denver. He said he didn't even take a toothbrush because he thought he'd be back that night. He didn't come home for a month. So we were living in California, my mom and I, she taught school. So she was a working lady, hardworking lady. And so about three times a week or four times a week, "I don't feel like cooking." Good. Let's go to Lupis. So, I'm about half Mexican.

Grant: Okay. California is good for something.

Griffin: It is good for that. Definitely. Yeah.

Grant: Do you think they were proud of your career?

Griffin: You know, that's interesting because, you know, I went off to college and became a hippie and, you know, my dad was full Colonel. It's kind of interesting relationship for a long time. Yeah. I know he was, in the end, but you know, and my mom died when I was still, no, it started in on this stuff. So you know, it was funny because I'd go off to the oil fields and I was logging wells and stuff and my dad would always say, or my mom would always say, "Well, did you hit oil yet?" Nope. "God, you're not worth much." Eventually, and I know towards the end of his life, I'd visit my dad every year and we'd talk maybe once a week. My mom died right after I moved to Butte, or a year after I moved to Butte. And so, yeah, I talked to my dad all the time and yeah, a couple of times he would introduce me to friends and he would brag about me. So I was like, cool. Yeah. And when Bush senior was elected, no maybe it was Bush Jr, we were talking about it and I said, "What do you think, Dad?" And he goes, "Eh, he's pretty leftist for me." Okay. But, honestly talking to him and growing up with him, I'm certainly socially, very liberal.  I'm probably a fiscally conservative Democrat, so he didn't influence me. I don't know if I influenced him in that aspect. But I guess I have a good respect for the military after growing up with him.

[02:51:12]

It was pretty funny, you know, back there, my chance to serve would have been in Vietnam. And when I first went to Missoula, it was 1969. It's the first draft. So I was just another, I was just a number,  birthdate thrown into the big hopper and I'd got a good number. So I didn't have to go to Vietnam. Once I asked my dad, you know, what did you think about me not having to go? He goes, "I didn't want you to go." And I'm like, Oh cool.

So anyways, it was interesting. Yeah. In the end, we certainly worked things out. My dad once said,  "We're not going to waste much time between you and I discussing politics." And it was usually me who would bring it up and I'd say, you know this. So we kept it to discussions that we could have.

Yeah. So it's too bad politics aren't like that now. They've just kind of gone off the rails.

Grant: Did you have anything else on there?

Jaap: I have no further questions.

Grant: Not at this time. Thank you very much.

Griffin: Wow. Jeez. This was kind of fun.

Grant: Thanks for sharing all that with us.

Griffin: Yeah. My wife's tired of listening to me talk about Superfund. She went with me to the Supreme Court. Of course, she idolizes Ruth Bader Ginsburg. But we both went and watched them breach Milltown dam and stuff like that.

Grant: That would have been a site.

Griffin: Oh, that was, yeah, that was something, that was really something.

Grant: We can go over and watch the breaching of the Yankee Doodle one day.

Griffin: I hope not.

[END OF RECORDING]