Pat Cunneen, Environmental Scientist

Photo Credit: Montana Standard

Oral History Transcript of Pat Cunneen

Interviewers: Aubrey Jaap & Clark Grant
Interview Date: September 25th, 2020
Location: Butte-Silver Bow Public Archives
Transcribed: September 2022 by Adrian Kien

[00:00:14]

Jaap: So it's September 25th, 2020. We're here with Pat Cunneen. Pat can you tell me a little bit about your family's background?

Cunneen: Sure. So I am fourth generation Butte-Irish, the youngest of 11 kids. We grew up on the flat, behind Safeway on Harvard Avenue. My great grandfather, Patrick O'Ferrell who I'm named after, came from Avoca, Ireland to come to work in the mines for Butte. And he worked for Marcus Daley as a foreman at the Alice Mine. And then later as a foreman at the Neversweat and the Anaconda Mine. We grew up Catholic and my dad worked for the Anaconda Company for 44 years. And my brothers all worked at the mine and my brother-in-laws all worked at the mine at one time or another. So yeah, we're pretty much a Butte mining family, for the most part. I had seven sisters in one bathroom, so we were always knocking on the bathroom door. If you ever got five minutes in the bathroom alone that was pretty good back in the day.

Jaap: I can imagine the difficulty

Cunneen: Otherwise we were out in the alley quite a bit.

Jaap: Tell me a little bit more about your parents.

Cunneen: My dad actually was born on a homestead near Bridger. My grandfather worked for the Northern Pacific railroad. And he worked on the North Coast Limited, which was the passenger service. And he had their run from Billings to Butte. And when he met my grandmother, once they got married, he said, we can live in Butte or Billings and, she said, "John, get me the hell outta here." So my grandma got out of Butte for the first time in her life and never knew that there was green grass and yards. So my dad grew up and he was born on a homestead outside Bridger and then grew up in Bridger and Billings. And then as soon as he was old enough, he moved back to Butte and lived with his uncle and then got on with the Anaconda Company and worked here the rest of his life.

And my mom is actually from Harlowton and my dad was a carpenter and he was building the high school in Harlowton. I think it was a strike year in Butte. So he went down there to get work and that's where they met. And at the time my dad was courting her, he was writing letters, when he wasn't in Harlowton, he'd come back to Butte and write her letters from Clear Creek Terrace where my grandfather's home was. And she thought that sounded like a very quaint place. And when she got here, she said, "John, what the hell did you do? You brought me to this place." So it was an adjustment for her coming from the middle of Montana to Butte, but it worked out for both of them. My mom's now a hundred, she'll be 101 on Halloween.

Jaap: That's amazing.

Cunneen: Yeah. Especially raising 11 kids. Yeah.

Jaap: So kept her young.

[00:03:57]

Cunneen: Maybe I think so. All the companies certainly keeps her engaged. I remember, my niece went to see my mom one day and she knew the kid across the street and he said to her, "Hey Cindy, what are you doing going in that place? It's a meth house." And she said, "What are you talking about?" He said, "There's people coming and going all the time." She said, "No, that's my grandma's house."

Jaap: That's really funny. I love it. Yeah. I've been watching those people.

Cunneen: So yeah. So my brothers and sisters, we all grew up Irish Catholic and went for the most part, the older siblings all went to Central. We all went to grade school at St. Anne's. But when I started first grade, they closed all the Catholic schools. So I was the first kid that went to public schools. So, yeah. And that was a big change. And I think probably about then most of my older siblings too went, they were almost all out of grade school, but they all started going to Butte High rather than Butte Central at that time. We're kind of a split family, half Central, half Butte High.

Jaap: Oh, tough.

Cunneen: Yeah, it is. Yeah.

Jaap: Tell me a little bit more about growing up. What would you do growing up?

Cunneen: Well, we used to play a lot of football, a lot of baseball, and it was great. Our neighborhood was full of kids and you'd just go knock on three doors and you had enough kids for a game. And we used to play behind Safeway where Lisac's warehouse is now behind Safeway. It used to be a vacant lot. We would play there and play in the street behind Safeway. And that's how we passed most of our time. But if we weren't playing ball, we were down at what we called Bell Creek. It's actually Blacktail Creek, but I didn't know why we called it Bell Creek until actually doing research for some of my work and found out that the Bell Smelter was located on Blacktail Creek at Harvard and Harrison and that's why they called it Bell Creek. It was the Bell Smelter was there, but we used to fish in Bell Creek all the time. And the stretch through Father Sheehan Park was actually pretty decent fishing.

So that kept us busy quite a bit. We knew that if you went west of Harrison, that the fishing got pretty poor pretty quick. And we did know that if you got into the country club and got up to the pond where they have their pump that the fishing was actually pretty good there and it was all Brooks. But yeah, we used to have a lot of fun fishing and we used to shoot a lot of BB guns too. So yeah, until one of the neighbor, kids lost an eye. So then we had to stop having BB gun fights, but he was a good baseball player until that happened. But after that, his batting average got cut in half. So we had pretty free reign. In the summer, you'd get on your bike and go somewhere. And I remember we would take our bikes all the way out to the nine mile. And we used to go over to the East Ridge. My dad being a carpenter the last couple years, the Columbia Gardens was open. He was up there basically maintaining the wooden structures, which was basically everything in the Columbia Gardens. So we would take his lunch up to him. We'd get on the bus and take him his lunch and then eat lunch with him. And then we'd play in the park until he got off work. And then we'd all come home. And I just remember days and days at the Columbia Gardens. And that was just a great way to pass the summer when you weren't playing baseball. And I remember that they used to have a password to get on the rides and my dad would always get the password and then he'd tell us. And after about the third time through the line saying the password, the guy would just wave you through. So we didn't even have to say the password after the third time.

[00:08:21]

But yeah, I remember how disappointed and just shocked that all the kids in our neighborhood were when the Columbia Gardens burned down and we knew that that was gone. That was pretty devastating for all the kids in my neighborhood. I know because we'd, like I said, catch the bus and then my dad would give like 20 kids a ride home he had a big rambler station wagon, and I think we'd be probably four or five or six kids in a seat. So it was a lot of fun, but we made the most of it.

Jaap: When did you graduate high school?

Cunneen: I graduated from Butte High in 1981. So, it was right, I think, at the beginning of our senior year, they announced that the smelter was closing and the mines were closed and the concentrator closed shortly after that. And I just remember a lot of kids from my class their families stuck it out so they could graduate. And then boy, after graduation, it was like an exodus. I'm not sure how many kids we graduated with, but I think it was in the neighborhood of 500 kids. And my son graduated from Butte high four years ago. And I think there was like 260 some in his class. So roughly half of what I think went to Butte High when I was in school.

Yeah. And then really, I think most of the kids that I grew up with were, we were just blue collar kids and we had no intention of going to college, but once they closed the mine and I think shortly after I think it was a couple years after, but like Safeway warehouse closed and then eventually [inaudible] closed, which was Stauffer Chemical before that.

But I mean, Butte probably lost over 2000 jobs. Well, I would've been entering the workforce, so there wasn't a lot of opportunity in Butte if you wanted to be a blue collar kid. With that I decided to go to Tech. You know, my dad said, "Hey, there's a great school right up the hill there. Why don't you just go do that for a while?" And I actually found the receipt for my first semester's tuition. It would've been the fall of 1981. And I think it was $254.

Jaap: That's a book now.

Cunneen: Yeah. I know. Yeah. I kind of feel old when I tell my kids that it was 254 bucks for a semester, but I remember I went into petroleum and in the summers we'd go out and work on drilling rigs. And gosh, I think then they were paying like 14 bucks an hour. So one paycheck in the summer, you paid for school and books and the rest was rent and beer. So yeah, it was actually a great school. You know, most of the kids, I knew got great jobs coming out of school, but I went into petroleum and by the time I got out the oil and gas market, I think my senior year, the price of oil went from 35 bucks a barrel down to like eight bucks a barrel. And there were just absolutely no jobs. And it was kind of like someone pulled the carpet off from under you. Again, first, there was no mining jobs and now there was no oil field jobs and right about then is when Superfund was picking up. And I just thought, gee, you know, maybe if I went and got an environmental degree then I could stay around here and work and clean up. And that's what I did. I went back and got a master's at Tech in environmental engineering. And I actually went to work for Arco oil and gas and with the hopes to get back to Butte, to work on the cleanup. But I initially worked in the, we called it the AEX region. So it was Arkansas, Louisiana, and Texas.

So, I worked down there for a couple years and then transferred into Arco's remediation group that was doing all the cleanups. I went to work in New Mexico, cleaning up the Anaconda Company uranium properties. And so that was a great experience. We were the first uranium mill to close successfully and they actually closed a couple uranium mines as well. So that was all great experience. And then from there, I was hoping to come back to Montana and work on the cleanup here. And I came home for Christmas. I think it was the summer, or excuse me, the Christmas break of 95.

[00:13:20]

And when I got home. But I was going to go to work on a mine in Colorado in 96 and then to Montana. And they called me over Christmas and said, "Hey, we decided to contract out that cleanup in Colorado. Do you want to go to Los Angeles or Houston?" I called them back, said, "Well, let me think about it." And I called them back the next day. And my daughter was about six months old and I just said, "I'm not moving to a big city. I'm sorry." So I left Arco at that time and we moved back to Butte and I got on with  Montana Department of Environmental Quality in Helena and I worked there for about a year in as a perimeter for air quality.

Then I moved to Montana Tech and was their first Environmental Health and Safety coordinator. And we did two big cleanups. One the Mining and Engineering building, which is now the chemistry and biology building. And that had probably 80 years worth of stuff stored in every corner. And it was quite the job to clean that out. And I remember one of the peculiar items we found was like four drums of jet fuel in the attic. You know, like, "Oh no, how did this not ever combust?" Because you know how hot attics get. But, then we cleaned out the Montana Bureau of Mines and Geology Lab that was in the basement of Main Hall. And I remember looking at some of the labels on some of the jars of reagents there and they were 1910's. They'd been on the shelf for, oh my gosh  almost a hundred years. So it was just crazy. But right about when we finished up those big cleanups, they wanted me to go halftime. And I said, "No, man, I got a family. I need a full-time job." And that's right when ASME opened up. And so I went to work for ASME as an operator and then eventually worked in to be their lab director and then worked into engineering and then got laid off there when they decided to downsize and sell the company.

And at that time I went to work for Montana Resources. It was just coming back online. And that was October of 2003. And actually it was a real blessing to walk in their door and get to start up the Horseshoe Bend water treatment plant. That was a great experience too. It was just, I mean, I loved it. You know, here's a facility an $18 million facility. That's brand new and we got a commission it and it's gonna treat Berkeley pit water in perpetuity. So it was  great. It was a lot of fun just to figure out how to get that plant to work, to do that heavy lifting, to treat the Berkeley pit water. And it took us a while, but we got it pretty well debugged and lined out and making good water. And once we got it running really well. They decided that we didn't have to man that plant full time.

[00:16:55]

So they basically would have one operator there during the day shift just to initially it was the 12 hour shift. But after that, they reduced it to eight hours then to four hours. So here we were four hours in the water treatment plant and then eight hours in a truck or muck and rocks or whatever else they had. The train wreck for the day. And so it kind of became, we went from probably one of the best jobs on the property to one of the worst, because you'd have your four hours and then they'd put you wherever the problem was.

And so after doing that for a couple years, I just started looking. And then I went to work for the Montana Natural Resource damage program and they needed a person in Butte to coordinate the Butte area restoration plan. And that was just another blessing to be able to work with nine Butte citizens to work up, at the time, it was a $28 million restoration plan for restoring or replacing the alluvial aquifer and Butte area one, which is roughly the flood plain of Silver Bow Creek from the concentrator down to where Silver Bow Creek exits Summit Valley at the I-90 bridge. And it took us probably about three years to pull the plan together. And then after that it was executing the plan. So it was a lot of fun and made a lot of great connections and a lot of good friends. And I think we did a lot of good work. Before we went to start that plan in the record of decision, the EPA said that the Parrot Tailings could stay. The Digging East could stay. The north side tailings could stay. Nobody could even spell BRW,  Butte Reduction Works.

So all those wastes were being left in place. And by the time we were done with our investigations, we made the case that they all had to be removed. So, I think we made a big difference in the cleanup that's going to happen in Butte. Only because we had the funds to go out and do the investigation and basically look at the nature and extent of the contaminants that were left in place or were proposed to be left in place. And I think once we did all that, it was kind of like a no-brainer that if you ever wanted to have a chance for the Creek and all the cleanup that had been downstream and been done downstream of the Creek to succeed, you had to remove the waste upstream first. So I think we made that point. And now I think Butte is getting a pretty good cleanup because of that. So good.

Jaap: Why do you think maybe that EPA thought these sites weren't an issue and then you found they were, do you have a reason why they thought that?

Cunneen: I would say it was EPA was tasked with taking care of a huge site. And you kind of go through this triage process where you take care of the worst first. And I think by the time they got to these, I would guess that they thought they'd taken care of most of the bad things, but really it's kind of like an onion. You peel off one layer and there's another, and this was just by the time they got to this layer, they didn't wanna peel anymore.

And I don't know why when we looked at what had been done for investigation, there was very little that had been done to characterize those areas. And when they looked at the Parrot Plume, the contaminated aquifer that contaminates from there. It was shortly after they had redone the Silver Bow Creek from the confluence with Blacktail up to Texas Avenue. And they had removed contamination from the channel and they put in the subdrain system. That was at that time when they engineered that, that subdrain was intended to collect the contaminated groundwater that was getting into the Silver Bow Creek channel. That was it. And it does that, but we said, "Hey, there's a lot more water coming from the Parrot than what's getting into that channel." And we had to prove that.

[00:21:56]

And I think we did a pretty good job on that. And we could show that that contaminated plume was making it all the way down to Blacktail at Lexington Avenue. And so I think we're getting a much better groundwater cleanup now, too, because of that effort. And  just to get the Parrot Tailings out at the time when they did that reconstruction of the Silver Bow Creek channel, they didn't even know that the middle alluvial unit existed and they came about the same time.

But the theory was that this subdrain, that's only six feet below surface was collecting all the middle alluvial groundwater, which is actually 40 to 50 feet below the ground surface. So we said that was quite a trick. So anyway, I think, you know what we did, and I think the only reason we succeeded is because we had the money to do the investigations. If the Montana Department of Justice did not have that money, I think the investigations wouldn't have been done and those wastes would've been left in place. And I think the Parrot, it's a big deal. I mean, if you've looked at the data of that contaminated aquifer, right at the center point of the waste, it's, there's like 15 times more copper in that groundwater than there is in the Berkeley pit water. So very toxic. And not only arsenic, I mean, not only copper, but zinc and arsenic, and basically every metal you can think of is in that Parrot water.

I think the tough pill to swallow was by the time we figured out what we had to do, the first thing was to move the county shops. And the price tag for that - I think our first estimate was to clean up the north side. Well, originally what we had hoped to do was have the county move to a temporary site and we had looked at the Kelley mine yard. And then we also looked at, gosh, I can't think of it right now. It's Robert's Rocky Mountain over in the boulevard neighborhood right off of I-90. And we had hoped to have the county work out of there for like a year. And we could do the Parrot all in one big step.

[00:24:45]

Instead of now it's been broken up into two phases, but then when they didn't want that, what we wanted to do then was clean up the north where the baseball fields were. Bring it back to grade, build the new county shop on that side and then go and remove the south. And they didn't want to do that either. They wanted a different spot because they thought there were higher and better uses for that area. So the county shop went from I think our first testaments were like around the $8 million mark and now it's gonna be about a $14 million move.

So, and that's about half the price of the cleanup. So it was just moving those shops is what made it so expensive. And I think that's a big reason why it was not going be done under remedy. Because you have to prove that it's economically cost effective to do a cleanup like that. And I think a big part of also why the EPA decided to leave them is that after 50 years of cleaning up that aquifer would still not be usable. And I think they kind of put a time limit on something. If you can't make it good in 50 years, then why do it?

Jaap: 50 years is such a little blip of time.

Cunneen: Well it truly is. Yeah. You know, so I think that was part of their criteria too, was we couldn't make a difference in 50 years, so why do anything?

Jaap: So, can you talk to me a little more about, so I saw you working because you the DNRC was meeting here a lot during this whole Parrot issue. Can you talk to me just a little bit? I know it, it got strung out for years, these talks of the Parrot Tailings. Can you just talk to me a little more about kind of specifically why you think that is?

Cunneen: Sure. You know, a big part of it was in order to remove the waste, you had to have a place for them to go. And we knew upfront that we couldn't take them up to the mine waste repository, which is up there by the Granite Mountain Memorial. The volume of waste we had, I figured it was like 40,000 truck trips up main street, and then back down. So not only would that have been a large cost, but it also was a big safety risk. And probably, I don't remember the year, but there was a gentleman that worked for Pioneer Concrete that had lost his brakes coming down Main Street. And he had to make a choice what to do with that truck. And he decided to ditch it in the Steward mine yard and ended up costing him his life. And I thought, boy, I don't want to put any truck driver in a situation where they have to make a choice like that.

So really getting up to the mine waste repository on city streets was a non-starter for us. So we did look at trying to get, we were going to go underneath the railroad bridge there behind the civic center and then underneath Shields Avenue. And we asked MR if we could get on their haul road that goes up the west rim of the Berkeley. And up there, you end up at the Parrot mine yard and that belonged to Pioneer. And we asked if we could cross through their yard. And then we had to cross through the Kelley mine yard and on Arco property, up to the mine waste repository. And they allowed us to explore that option. We would've had to put in a lot of switchbacks and it would've been almost a one way haul road from the Parrot mine yard, up to the repository. And again, you're doing a several hundred foot climb and it was quickly getting to the point of not economical. So the other option that we looked at is, well, what if Montana Resources could take the waste for us? You know, we knew going in that the tailings were fairly high end copper, but not high enough for MR to treat them like ore. But we knew that the soil underneath the tailings is where most of the metals actually resided. The tailings themselves had been worked by a mom and pop outfit. And then later the Anaconda Company ran a precip plant on them to try and strip the copper out. And they basically run water through the tailings, acidic water, and it picks up the metals.

Then they run that water that's got the metals in it, across the scrap pile and the iron and the copper swap places. So it was a pretty efficient way to recover the copper out of those tailings. And so those tailings had been worked numerous times and there wasn't much copper left, but the soil below them was real high in copper. We thought at the time, we had some data that indicated like 1% copper, but we didn't have a lot of data points because we couldn't get a drill rig through the slag that was on top of the tailings that was on top of the soil.

[00:30:36]

So we didn't have many data points. But when we got in there and actually did the work and got the slag out and then the tailings out. And we started looking at that soil. A lot of that material had three to 4% copper in it. And right now the ore at Montana Resources is typically about a quarter of 1%. So this would've been basically 10 times more copper than Montana Resources ore.

And the other thing Montana Resources has a process. They have decades worth of ore lined out and they really just didn't want to risk messing up their process to go after a little bit of added value from these wastes. So they just said  we're not interested in processing the tailings or the soil, but we'll take them. And in order to get that agreement worked out, it was a pretty big deal between the Washington Corp and Montana to work out that deal.

And that's, I think probably what took the majority of the time was just working out the legal deal for Montana Resources to take that material without taking on the liability of it. So that was, that was the big delay, I think, really, because we knew we had a project and we knew that's how we could make it work.

A few of the other options we looked at was basically what we did is we go underneath the railroad bridge, underneath Shields Avenue and up the ramp by MR's crusher. And then we would stockpile it there. And then once the stockpile got big enough, Montana Resources would load it into their haul trucks that were coming back empty from the crusher and they would take it over and put it on their dump over by the old Pittsmont smelter, which is actually at the end of Ferrell Street. So, and Ferrell was the guy who started the Parrot smelter. So it was kind of quintessential. A lot of connections like that, that were really weird. So we knew that we had a project if MR would take the waste and finally they agreed to that. 33:04

And the other thing we asked them too, is in order for us to do the work, you can't have your heavy equipment slogging around in the mud. So we had to dewater the site and MR actually decided that they would take the water as well. And so that site is dewatered through a drain field and a pump system, and it's pumped over to Montana Resources' emergency pond. And that's the pond you see on the right on Farrell street and Texas Avenue. If you look over the big berm, there's a pond there with a dredge on it. That's where the Parrot dewatering water ends up. And from there, the dredge will pick that water up. And it just goes into their tailings process where they push the tailings up the hill to Yankee Doodle. So some people thought Montana Resources was recovering, at least the metals value from that water, but they actually don't because it goes into their waste process. So they don't pick up, they didn't pick up the money from the copper and the tailings nor in the water.

So Montana resources is doing a community effort, just to be a good citizen. And one of the other complications for the Parrot was we had to get over about an 80 year old, natural gas line owned by Northwestern Energy. And it was so old that they didn't have a lot of information on it and they didn't want our larger trucks driving on it. So we had to build bridges over that line. And then we also had to get across  BN tracks and it took quite a while to hammer out an agreement with BN. So, and of course the other party was the county. You know, we had to make an agreement on what to do with the shops. And the slag that was removed from the Parrot is actually . . . the copper and the other metals do leach from slag, but it's at a much slower rate. Because basically slag is glass. It's silica and iron and the other metals. So we had to design a repository for those and that's gonna be in between the elevated tracks and Shields Avenue and then on the west slope of those elevated tracks.

And so what will happen is we know that those waste are now up out of the groundwater. And that was the big deal with the Parrot is that a lot of the wastes were in contact with groundwater. So they would continue to leach the metals out of the waste because of that contact with the groundwater. So we move to all the waste up out of the groundwater or all the slag and they're laid in that sliver between Shields and the tracks.

And then they'll. What we call an evapo-transpiration cover. And that's tough to say, so if we just shorten it to ET-cover. It's more than what you see. You know, the covers on the mine dumps basically are just to prevent human contact and erosion, but the ET-cover basically is large enough so that it will hold a year's amount of precipitation. And then the plants that will be planted on top of the cover will transpire or pull that water back out of the cover during the year. So it's a much thicker cover, much more dense material on it. So the wastes are no longer in contact with groundwater and there will be no infiltration from storm water or snow melt from above. So they're pretty well isolated. So I know we caught a lot of flack for leaving those waste in place, but you know, if you look at the slag canyon, they're exposed to the elements continually and they're not gonna be covered at all. So, that was easy to defend what were our actions were there, but, so yeah, that's what we're doing.

[00:37:50]

We have those onsite repositories, but the majority of the wastes are going over to Montana Resources. Phase two is gonna be the same thing, not too much slag on that south side. The tailings and the waste and the contaminated soil under the tailings will all go over to Montana Resources.

The interesting thing there too is behind the civic center, when they were starting the Berkeley Pit, there was a certain amount of overburden over the ore body. And the Anaconda Company was looking for places to put that material, because it had no value. So they placed that material as close as they could to the Berkeley. And of course they covered the Parrot Tailings with that overburden material. So that material where the shops were built is basically going be stripped off and stockpiled and then the contaminants removed and then that overburden will be pushed back in because it's clean material so it can be used for fill. And once that project is all done, that area behind the civic center will be about the same elevation as the civic center parking lot. But we'll have to come up really to the same grade. The bridge that's over the Silver Bow Creek channel there will tie into that same elevation. But I think when we were at the maximum point of the excavation at the bottom of that excavation, if you looked up, I think it was about right in the neighborhood of 40 feet from the bottom of the excavation up to civic center road. There's a lot of material that was moved.

Jaap: Yeah, that's amazing.

Cunneen: Yeah. And I don't remember the volumes. I don't remember the exact numbers, but I remember when we were talking in thousands of cubic yards, most people don't have an idea of what that looks like. So one day I went out and decided how big is the Finlen hotel? So I measured the Finlen hotel and found out the volume and then I converted our waste volumes into Finlens so people could understand how much material we're gonna move. And I'd have to go back and double check, but I think we're moving like 13 Finlens.

Jaap: 13 Finlens . Yeah.

Grant: Does that include the motor inn?

Cunneen: Yes, it does. No, I'm just kidding. No, just the main hotel.

Jaap: Oh, that's amazing. Yeah. I think it's fascinating that you said that that water is 15 times more contaminated than pit water. And then that's just fascinating to me because the pit is this notorious thing, the water, everyone talks about this horrible stuff. And then just the fact that that's there almost largely ignored is just wow.

Cunneen: And I do think at one time too, that that thought that the aquifer at that place where the Parrot Smelter was kind of perched, meaning it wasn't going anywhere. And I do think actually when they put in the subdrain, it helped mobilize that aquifer as well, so.

Jaap: Oh, really? That's really interesting.

Cunneen: Unintended consequences, I think. It is kind of in that area where  when they drew down the aquifer to keep the underground mines dry, that was kind of right on the edge of their dewatering area.  And a lot of people think that the aquifer wasn't affected, but I know when they started mapping the underground storage tank leak at the old community gas, which would've been on Front. And I think it's still called Main Street there, like across the street from Triple S, there's that vacant lot that used to be community gas. And it was  a heavily used gas station. And when they found out their tanks were leaking and they tried to map the plume, they were heading south and west towards Silver Bow Creek. And they actually found out that a lot of the contamination went north and east, which would've been towards the Kelley mine. So that dewatering actually was reaching down there towards community gas and pulling that water to the north. So I thought if it could pull the water there, then why couldn't it pull the water at the Parrot?

So I think for a long time the contaminated water from the Parrot was actually going towards the Kelley. And then once the aquifer came back to that equilibrium point, it kind of tipped and then started going towards Silver Bow Creek or Black Tail Creek. And that was another one of the arguments that the PRP and the feds made was that if the Parrot plume was ever gonna make it to the creek it would already be there. Because it's been there for a hundred years. But I think the reason it didn't is because it was getting pulled back the other direction. And I don't have the science to back that up.

[00:43:54]

Jaap: But you do have some evidence from the scenario to look at.

Cunneen: And still at this point, even now there's a groundwater divide. Because the Berkeley is still the low spot for the groundwater system. So there's a point where things are draining towards the Berkeley and the other side of that line, it's draining towards the creek. And it's somewhere right in there around Shields avenue, stuff is going to the Berkeley and other stuff is going to the creek. So, I think once they stopped dewatering the mines that divide shifted much farther, closer to the pit.

Jaap: So you've done a lot of research on Silver Bow Creek. What's your favorite piece of research or factoid that you found?

Cunneen: Oh gosh. You know, the one thing that I didn't really appreciate or know much about was the placer mining era and I think the best piece of work that was put together on that was actually an unpublished work by a Tech student. His name is Andrew Stroud and he put together a great piece of work that he mapped out. I'm not sure if it's exact, but he has a couple different,   plates or maps that show all the placer workings. And then also the ditches that brought water from various locations to work these placer fields. And it just really surprised me that gold was discovered in Silver Bow Creek in 1864. And the stampede actually happened probably in the spring of 1865. But they had ditches coming from Blacktail Creek all the way out to Rocker, from Basin Creek all the way out to Rocker. And there were several of the smaller creeks along the East Ridge that were diverted and brought all the way out to Rocker. And they actually diverted Divide Creek on the other side of Feely and brought it all the way to Silver Bow to work to placer workings. And when I started looking at these maps and looking at these ditches, and I went out into the field to see where they had been, and you can still see evidence of them.

All the wooden flumes are gone. If you go out to Rocker and the hill that's south of Rocker, you can still see the level place where the Basin Creek and the Blacktail Creek trenches cut across that hillside. And it just amazed me that that work was all done in the 1860s with probably saws and horses, not backhoes and trackhoes and loaders and big trucks. And it's interesting if you get on Google Earth and you position yourself about over I 90, and you look south at that hill by Rocker, and you can kind of tilt that hill and you can see those ditches. And it's just amazing that they're still there. And I think I just had no knowledge of the placer era and it just really kind of shocked me at what a big boom that was and how Silver Bow, the community, right at the I-90/I-15 junction was actually bigger than Butte because that's where all the gold was and that's where they lived. But of course, every placer field plays out pretty quick and people move on. And then I found one picture here at the archives of them hydraulically mining Missoula Gulch.

Basically what that is, is they're taking fire hoses and blasting the hillside and washing all that material down into a sluice box and recovering the gold out of the sluice. But it was just amazing how devastating that actually was. And just how that poor Silver Bow Creek was just torn up from the first time Seven Up Pete McMann put a pan in the creek until basically 1999 when the cleanup started. So there's 140 years where that stream served first a source of placer. And then after that an industrial sewer and to go down there today at the edge of town where streamside tailing starts all the way down to Opportunity, it looks like a normal stream. You can see where it's been heavily engineered, but just the fact that there's grass growing there and trees and birds and now fish, it's pretty amazing the transformation.

So I remember when I was a kid, my oldest sister lived in Anaconda with her family and we would go see him. And I remember the drive from Butte to Anaconda, there was not a tree. And once the smelter shut down, it still looked like a moonscape, but gradually you saw the grass coming back and the junipers and now, I mean, the lodge poles are just coming back like crazy between Butte and Anaconda. I remember the Big M or Big Butte had like two trees on it. And now there's the only space that's not covered in trees is right around the M. So, yeah, I think nature is pretty resilient and I think we're kind of fooling ourselves to think that we're gonna get nature to the end point. I think we're helping kickstart it, but it's gonna take over and heal itself eventually.

[00:50:36]

Jaap: So when did you quit with the NRD and when did you come to Butte Silver bow?

Cunneen: It was July of 2019. We had made the agreement in principle on remedy. And I knew we had the Parrot project all lined out. And I honestly think there's only about five years left of work to do with that plan. And I needed 10 more to get to retirement so, and I got these little kids that I'm raising. And I thought, man, I can't be out there looking for a new job when I'm 62. I knew most of the guys that worked with Butte Silver Bow and the public works program was down to no engineers. And I knew that there was a lot of the groundwater restoration money was still sitting out there that NRD had given the county. And there were projects that still needed to be implemented. And I thought, there's 10 years worth of work right there. So it just made sense for me that I could make a bigger difference at this point with the county than I could with the state.

So it was  kind of a no brainer for me to jump to the county and try and help get those bigger projects completed on the water system. And we're chipping away at it, but yeah, we're still very busy. I mean, right now I'm the only engineer on the payroll. And I think my biggest decision every day is to decide what I'm not gonna do, if that makes sense, because we just have so much stuff going on that you can't get to at all. You know, we've got very capable people in every department, but I'm not able to give them assistance like we should be able to. I hope we get staffed up so that happens in the future.

Jaap: Are there plans to do that?

Cunneen: I don't know at this point. When Schultz was public works director, he was a PE and then he had three PEs under him and two engineering techs. And right now, Mark, he's a great leader. I mean, Mark is roll up your sleeves and get 'er done. And he does a great job and I know that all the crews respect him and a lot gets done. But I'm the only engineer there. And Bob Boone is our engineering technician. We lost a technician a couple weeks ago. Then we have that job advertised for so, but there's a lot of work here. A lot of things to do for Butte Silver Bow.

Jaap: I'm gonna let you roll some of your questions, Clark.

Grant: Okay. A minute ago, you touched on this notion that nature can kind of fixes itself eventually when given a chance. And I've always thought that this notion of a forever remedy was so vain to think that we'll be here forever to keep pumping. So I wanted to just ask you what is perpetuity.

Cunneen: Clark, I have a very good definition for you. Okay. So when I worked at Montana Resources, it was on a night shift and I was at the Horseshoe Bend water treatment plant. And I was contemplating that very word. And I said, what does this mean? Well, we're gonna pump and treat in perpetuity. So you know that the Berkeley Pit is what, a mile and a half wide and a mile long. And I can't remember how many thousand feet deep. But the process at Horseshoe Bend is,  it's basically high density, sludge precipitation. So milk of lime solution is added to the dirty water and the calcium and the metals basically trade places. So what happens is the end product of that process is sludge, a metal sludge. And Horseshoe Bend, what it does is it continues to circulate.  You go through a reactor and then a clarifier, and that sludge keeps getting denser and denser. And then at some point, you can't move that sludge because it gets too dense. And at that point, that sludge is blown down to the Berkeley pit. And so I think typically the density that we used to blow down at is like low twenties, anywhere from 21 to 25% density. And then, so that sludge gets blown down into the Berkeley. And so eventually that sludge is gonna displace all the water. And so the Berkeley, if this were to go on forever, at some point, the Berkeley becomes a hole full of sludge.

Grant: That's an improvement?

Cunneen: Apparently. And so that was my thought is, is this really the best? I mean, this is the answer? And the other thing I thought with that is, okay, where do we get the lime from? And right now, Montana Resources has a contract with Graymont and their facilities over there by Townsend. And I thought to myself, well, how much lime does it take to make this sludge? And in the end, there's a hole over near towns in the size of the Berkeley pit, where the lime came from. So it's a tradeoff.

Grant: I did not find that answer reassuring.

[00:57:07]

Jaap: I love that you do the math with all this though. That's really great.

Cunneen: And that was not scientific. That was a 2:00 AM., fourth night shift in a row.

Jaap: Are there consequences to this sludge? I imagine like the Blob, I'm sorry. Like that's what goes to my mind, like moving.

Cunneen: Well, if you look at the sludge, it would be, it's more like coffee with cream, it's heavier than that, but, you know, it's a two stage process and in the first stage they take the water and raise the pH to about a seven. So when we started the pH of the Berkeley water was 2.5. And so we'd take it to a seven and that would knock out all the plus three metals like iron and aluminum. And then the second stage, you would take the water from the first stage and add more lime and knock out your copper, your zinc, your cadmium. The first stage, the sludge used to be more of a pea green color, because you're knocking out iron and aluminum. Then the stage two sludge, you're knocking out copper and zinc. But the one that would really make it black is when we got the pH closer to that end point like a 10.8 or 11. And we knew we had to get it up that high to get out all the cadmium. So getting out the cadmium and the manganese, the manganese, I think is what turns it black. But that stage two sludge was much darker and blacker.

Grant: How will infill work when it is full of sludge? And do you think it's when or is it if?

Cunneen: Well, I think they really don't know. Eventually better technology will be available. I mean, lime precipitation has been around for a hundred years. It's not new technology. And the one thing I remember when I was at Horseshoe Bend is there was always somebody that had a better mouse trap and they would come and try and prove it at the Berkeley. And I think Montana Resources and Atlantic Richfield were actually very gracious to those researchers to let them try doing some pilot tests there. And I think they all struck out. 

Grant: It's just hard to scale.

Cunneen: Well that and I think there are certain things you can do in the lab, but when you get them into the real world, they just don't work because of that quantity of scale and just the dollars that it would take to build something like that. But I think eventually they'll get it figured out. I actually thought, you know, another 2:00 AM thought was when I was at Montana Resources, their greatest expense was to pump the tailings from the main tailings pump house, which is at an elevation there at Ferrell Street. And they would go roughly three miles up the hill to Yankee Doodle. And I think it's about a 700 foot lift. At the time I was there, they had three pump stations going around the clock, each 5,000 horsepower. And now there's a fourth one up on top of Yankee Doodle. And so that's 20,000 horsepower continuously. But my thought was, why don't they just let Montana Resources fill the Berkeley with their tailings? The tailings are actually a 10.8 pH. So you'd get the neutralization from the tailings working on the acidic mine water. And I did the back of the envelope calculation one day. And I think it's about 20 years, they could fill the Berkeley with Montana Resources tailings.

Grant: That's it? Huh?

Cunneen: Yep. I thought the best chance to make it not such a large problem. I think it would still be a small problem after that, but I thought that was a much better endpoint than the path that they're on.

Grant: Did you share that opinion?

Cunneen: I think at some point we looked at doing that and really it boils down to, for the mine, an economic question. And is it that because they would be pumping tailings into the Berkeley, they'd be displacing the contaminated water in the Berkeley, which meant they would've had to treat that added amount of displaced water. And at that time we knew what our treatment costs were and it came down to were those treatment costs greater than the cost of not pumping the tailings up the hill? And at that time they weren't. So even though it was a good idea, environmentally, when you look at it economically, it wasn't an even trade off.

[01:03:07]

Grant: I wrote another question here, of all the sacrifices that have been made for minerals in Butte, whether it's the creeks or human lives or the landscape, you know, do you think on the whole it's been worth it?

Cunneen: Oh, absolutely. When you read about all the copper that came out of this hill and what it went for, there's so many things that we take for granted, just flipping on a light switch. And you hear these stories about, well, if it wasn't for Butte, the country wouldn't have not had the copper to fight World War II. And part of the research I did when we looked at the Parrot was following Franklin Farrell. He took copper from Butte and took it back to his plant in Connecticut. And they actually made munition shells. And you think of how efficiently they could do that if they had a good source of copper and  without this . . . if you can't put the shells in the rifles and in the artillery guns, you couldn't fight that war. And from that perspective, and just the fact that I think in a car there's like 28 pounds of copper. And I think every one of us drives to work or to school and we all turn on that light and yeah, I think it's been worth it. And you think of  the technology that was developed on this hill. I didn't understand that Butte was actually the cradle for the smelting industry.

You know, I always thought growing up here, the smelter was in Anaconda, but there were actually a dozen smelters in Butte where that technology was  developed and improved and the evolution of just smelting. A big part of it came off of this hill. And now you look at where smelting is and still it's a dirty industry, but the footprint that humans leave behind now is much smaller than it was when we first started here. Absolutely. And I think too the mining technology has just improved vastly too, but had it not been for places like Butte, that technology never would've evolved and had it not been a heavy footprint here, it would've been a heavy footprint somewhere else.

So as long as we want to enjoy modern conveniences like electricity and  I think, yeah, this has all absolutely been worth it. And I think at some point what we're left with after remedy and restoration are finished. I think you'll still certainly see unless they do something with the Berkeley, that's gonna be, I remember Matt Vincent saying, it's like the mole on a lady's face, you just can't take your eyes off it.

Jaap: That's really accurate.

Cunneen: But I think eventually we'll be left with a mole and that's it. I think  already the comeback of the creek and just the area around Anaconda, just like I said, it used to be a moonscape and Silver Bow Creek from Butte to Warm Springs ponds was just, well, you just saw the pictures and Aubrey's file today. I mean, the whole creek was like that for Butte to Anaconda, well, to Warm Springs. And I think of the thousands of people that made a living and enjoyed their life here. You know, I think if you go talk today, even to the average Butte person, if you ask them if they were happy with their life, they'd say, yeah.

And I know a bunch of my friends that left high school, after everything closed down, I'm seeing kids moving back here now that I grew up with and they haven't been here for 30 years, but this is where they want to come. So I think there's just, I think that tough work develops a comradery among people that you don't get in other ways. And those are bonds that are just stronger than, than just having nice parks or things like that. But yeah, I think Butte is a great place and you know, I've lived other places and I've always wanted to be back.

Grant: We've done a lot of oral histories with older people who I've asked them  how could you sit idly by while they tore down whole neighborhoods to put the Berkeley pit in? And I wonder what parallels there are between that pit being developed and the current pit that they run at MR. Do you see any parallels there and what will the end game be for the Continental pit?

Cunneen: Well, I think there were much fewer residential areas where the Continental pit is. Of course, the one big structure that was in the way there was, of course, the Columbia Gardens.

[01:08:58]

And I was actually in a haul truck one night when they took out the last piece of infrastructure from the Columbia Gardens. And it was part of the dam where they dammed up the creek to make the lake up there. And they put that on one haul truck. And it was right after we got the new 240 ton haul trucks. And on the side of that truck, there's like a scoreboard. And you can see how much tonnage is in the truck. And they typically only load them to 240 tons. And when they put that piece of concrete in that truck, it went up to like, well, they had to put some rock in at first, so they could bed the concrete.

So it wouldn't tip out of there. But that load that night, I think that truck had like 265 tons on it. And once you go over 250 or 260, the truck won't come out of second gear. So I followed that guy all the way up to the dump. And then I remember watching him dump that load off. And it was so heavy that when he put his bucket up, the front wheels came off the ground, probably six feet. When the load slid out of the truck, then the front wheels slammed back down on the ground. And I asked the guy, if he chipped any teeth and he said he was okay. I think the Continental pit is from a perspective of destroying neighborhoods, it's much less collateral damage for the Continental pit as there was the Berkeley.

Grant: And in the end, I mean, will, MR be held to the same Superfund laws that Arco has been. Will we see another consent decree of this scale?

Cunneen: Yeah, well, Superfund pretty much addresses abandoned sites, closed sites. And right now Montana Resources is active, but they still have to do a certain amount of reclamation every year. And when the mine closes, they have a reclamation plan where they have to bring things back as well as they can. And the continental fault actually runs between the Berkeley and the Continental pit. And there's much less water in the continental pit than there is the Berkeley. And to actually capture that water and reroute, it is gonna take much less effort than what has happened with the Berkeley. But certainly there's gonna be a big hole there. And another one of those 2:00 AM thoughts on night shift is, well, what could you do to the east continental?

And it would be to sluice the Yankee Doodle tailings pile down into the east Continental and, of course, a huge monumental task where you'd have to  basically make a structure that would act as a channel to take them from the high elevation to the low elevation, but eventually you could sluice it, run it down, recover the water, take the water back up and sluice more material. It could be done. Would it be done? I don't know. Probably not. And I remember one field trip that we actually guided and this group was from, I think they were from Brazil, so they didn't speak English and they didn't speak, they could speak Spanish. So I asked Butch Gerbrant to come with us. And these guys would talk to each other in Portuguese, but then Butch could talk to him in Spanish and I would talk to Butch in English to find out what they said in Spanish. But it was fun because we had that kind of exchange all day long and we went all around and  we went along the creek, we looked at the old smelter sites. And then we looked at the hill and we looked at Yankee Doodle and the Berkeley. And at the end of the day, the guy that was kind of the head of the contingent came over to me. And he grabbed me by the elbow. And he spoke to me in English and he said, "Pat!" and he waves his finger. "Pat, Pat, I've got to tell you something." I said, "What's that?" He said, "Tailing's high. City low. This is not very good." Yeah. And you know, it wasn't, oh, it's probably two years later. And you can, yeah, a few years later that you saw that the big tailings dam break down there that killed over 300 people.

So I mean, the guy knew what he was talking about, so yeah. And that's, I think part of the other consequence of having moved something from a lower elevation to a higher elevation is, and now you have a water source with it. There's always that potential. Things in nature want to come to equilibrium. So if you put something high, it wants to go low. So that's something that you need to consider.  Are all those jobs worth it? Are they building a structure that can withstand what nature can throw at it? And we all certainly hope so.

Grant: As an engineer, do you believe that it can?

Cunneen: Well, that's out of my area. It would really take, I think, a huge quake right on that fault to really have that kind of effect. And where I live now, I'm kind of in between that and Basin Creek and I thought if we had the big one, what's gonna get us first, is it the water from Basin Creek or is it the tailings from Yankee Doodle?

Jaap: I never thought about Basin Creek, Pat.

Grant: Me neither.

Cunneen: Well, we actually did the inundation mapping. The Montana Department of Natural Resources and conservation, they go out and inspect every high hazard dam, every five years. You know, that connotation of high hazard is really kind of awkward in that most people think, well, high hazard means it's gonna go in any minute. But really what a high hazard dam means is if it does go, the consequences would be pretty bad, either in loss of life or loss of property.  And when we did the mapping of Basin Creek,  the one thing that really prevents a lot of destruction is that old Chicago, Milwaukee railroad berm that goes across the flood plain, like when you're driving out to the reservoir and you're probably within a mile of the treatment plant, you look to the left and there's that rail bed that goes across the flood plain. And when I would look at it before, I always thought that, you know, you look at it and there's not much vegetation on it. And you're certain that it's made out of mine waste and you'd like to see it removed so that Basin Creek could have more potential as a fishery. But then after we did our inundation mapping, I thought, let's leave that.

Jaap: Leave that waste in place.

[01:16:51]

Grant: I wanted to ask, how you think all this cleanup work will pertain to the health of Butte as a whole. In your mind do you see a connection between cleanup and economic development?

Cunneen: I think right now where we're at with mining and Butte, I personally don't see that there are many adverse health effects with the general population of this town connected to the current mining operations.

[01:17:31]

And I know there are people in our population that are sensitive to metals, just like other people are sensitive to carcinogens and genetics are strange and hard and complicated to even figure out. But I think all in all that right now, the health effects from having a mine in our backyard are minimal. You know, I worked there for seven years and I honestly didn't miss a day of work in seven years. And I think if I was working there and had effects from the process or whatever, I would've missed work and I never did. So I really think that the average person has little to no effect from this operation in our backyard. And where does Butte go in the future once Superfund's behind us? I think it's a big step.

I think you're seeing it now. And I think Covid has probably ushered it in quicker than we would've seen it otherwise. And that's that Bozeman's getting too expensive and Missoula as well. And I think people are looking elsewhere and Butte right now, I think is looking pretty good to a lot of these people that want to move to Montana, but don't want to pay a half a million dollars for a home in Bozeman. And you know, the thing of it is too, I remember my dad used to say Butte, America, we're only 15 minutes from Montana. And as a kid growing up, I didn't really understand that. But you know, there wasn't, I mean, Butte was hammered, but if you drove 15 minutes in any direction, you were in some pretty nice country, you know, hunting, fishing, shoot just going to Discovery to ski. And we used to go up to Moulton and ski all the time, cross country ski. I mean, we're in a beautiful place and you know, you look at our views from,  if you go up to the top of Walkerville and look around, you can see the Highlands, you can see the East Ridge, you can see the Pintlers, you can see the Pioneers, you can see the Flint Creek range.

I mean, this is a wonderful place that we live in. And I think it's because of Butte's reputation, that's been overlooked, but I think now people are saying, Hey, Butte's got some good stuff going on for it. And I think the one thing that does keep a lot of people out of Butte is the fact that we're at a higher elevation and our winters are longer and colder than most every other place in Montana. And I think  I saw that when I worked at ASME. They would hire people from Florida to come in, because they had expertise in QA QC or whatever. And there was one in particular individual that I worked with fairly closely and he was from Florida. And after his first winter, he said that was kind of a fluke, wasn't it?

And I said, "Sorry, bro, that was kind actually a mild one." After the second winter he was gone. I do think Butte is just gonna become more and more attractive. And I think the things that Butte has going for it that some of the other communities in Montana don't is the fact that the Montana Natural Resource Damage program has pumped $70 million into our water infrastructure. And we've got some of the best water in the country and  hopefully we have room to grow with the community and I think we do. And the other thing is the Silver Lake system has water for industry. So I think Butte has actually got a lot of potential to grow in the future. And I think you'll see some sensitivity towards bringing heavy industry here. But I do think the footprint is getting less and less heavy with heavy industry. And I think we've got the water and we're in good position to grow.

Grant: Maybe working at public works now you can speak to this, but I'm kind of fixated on this idea that Montana Resources will one day close. Every mine has a lifespan and if they're 25% of the tax base, how bad will the roads be after they close?

Cunneen: Certainly, I think, the community will obviously take a hit when you lose 350 jobs. That hurts. And then there's those jobs that are feeding those jobs. So yeah, it would be a big loss to the community. I think people will find other things to do here. You know, there would be an Exodus, I would think if it happened tomorrow. And of course you lose that tax base. And I think probably what would, I don't know where all the tax money goes and how it's divvied up from what the mine produces. But I think not only your roads, but your schools would take a big hit too.

[01:22:54]

But you know, I think if you can parse it out correctly, I think we'd get over it.   I think the road system, I think we all hit potholes and everything and that's another drawback of living in this climate is we spend a good part of the year in that freeze thaw cycle. And that's what busts things up.  You have in the day it gets warm and everything melts. And then at night it gets cold and everything freezes and that just tears things up. And we'll always, always be battling our streets. And I think more so than other communities because our winters are longer and colder. And I think that's just the nature of the beast.

Grant: I didn't mean to bitch about the roads.

[01:24:00]

Cunneen: No, no, that's okay. No, I drive on them too. Right after I got on with the county, I had so many friends telling me where the potholes were and I would talk to our roads guys and they'd get them fixed. Finally, the road guy got tired of me talking to him. He said,  "We got a website. They just gotta go and they can say right where the pothole is and we'll have it fixed within a week."  And so I had a friend call me, it was about his third call on a pothole. And I said, "Why don't you use the website?" He said, "What do you mean?" So I told him about it and I said, "Let me know how it works." And he filed it. And he said within two days, that pothole was filled. So I didn't try and usher that through or anything that just happened. That was the system.

And I think we're doing better at that kind of stuff. Roads are a big deal. And I think for a long time, I don't have the data and I don't want you to take this as fact, but I think where we ran the hot plant for years and I think since I worked at the hot plant in 1989, so I know it's been around for at least 30 years, and I know that that was used when the county bought it. So it's an old system. And  typically the way government works is when you need materials, you go out to bid and you accept the lowest bid. And I think for a long time, we were spending the lowest amount of money on something that was very important and we were getting the least quality out of those materials and then we'd make roads with them and they'd fall apart.

And so now because of the cleanup of the Butte reduction works, that has to move, the hot plant does. And for now we're gonna go out and buy our hot mix. So I think we'll end up, because we'll have a spec for it. So the contractor who supplies it has to meet that spec. Whereas when the county was making it, we didn't have a spec so I think you're gonna see better job getting done on our streets, but you know, we've got 30 years of makeup to do. Because I know there's one street in my neighborhood that they paved every other year. And when you're paving that road every other year, that means there's another street over there that's not getting paved, but if you can pave the street and you don't have to come back for 10 years. Then those other streets get paved. So I think we'll gain on it.

Jaap: Who's living on that street that's getting paved every other year?

Cunneen: The one that it seemed like they were always paving was Emett. And you know, it's steep and it gets a lot of runoff and it gets a lot of traffic and now they've actually kind of, you know, they keep paving and paving and paving and pretty soon there's no curb. I mean, there's other streets like that, that just kept getting paved and then two years later they're paving it again. And one to watch  would be Hill Avenue. Do you know where hill is? It's like on the east side of Stodden Park. So watch that. I mean, that was one that they would pave it every other year or every fourth year or fifth year, but they actually went in and did it right this time. And hopefully you won't see them out there doing much other than maybe a pothole here and there for the next 15 years.

Grant: Kind of going back in time a little bit more. I wanted to ask you about the closures of the schools, which you had mentioned took place right before you were about to, was it right before you were going to high school or middle school?

Cunneen: Well, the Catholic schools closed in 69. And that's right when I was, they didn't have kindergarten then. So we all started first grade.

Grant: Right when you were entering school.

Cunneen: Yeah. So they closed them down, I guess, it would've been the spring of 69 was their last year. So fall of 69, all those kids that were coming from the Catholic schools had to go to public schools. And we used to go to St. Ann's and our walk to St. Ann's was probably five blocks. But when that closed, we had to go to Emerson and Emerson was like a mile and we had to cross Harrison. So my mom was always worried, "You gotta cross Harrison. Cross at the light." And of course that meant you couldn't. But there were so many kids at Emerson, they actually had to rent St. John's school to put all the kids in it. And they had first and second and fifth and sixth in Emerson. And then third and fourth grade went to Emerson annex, which was St John's. And it was that way, the whole time I went there. I remember St John's or Emerson annex didn't have a playground. And we had two barricades that we would put out on, I think it's Majors that runs right in front of the St John's church. And we would put a barricade on one end of the block and a barricade on the other end of the block. And that was our playground.

Jaap: Brings new meaning to go play in the street.

Cunneen: They had no, no equipment or nothing there. That was it.

Grant: Reflecting on that, what do you think it meant that so many schools closed?

[01:30:10]

Cunneen: Where my kids go is Hillcrest and we live on North Lake, so they have to go, it's a pretty good walk and they have to cross over I-90. You either have to go on Sheridan Street bridge or Continental bridge. And they just weren't designed for pedestrians. And I think kind of what happens when you consolidate kids into a bigger facility is that you kind of lose your neighborhood camaraderie. And it was even like when I was going to Emerson, there was like four different groups of kids and they were based on your neighborhood, you know? And my kids are only like two blocks from Hawthorne, which closed  probably in the early eighties when they consolidated a lot of schools. But I just thought how great it would be for my kids to just walk two blocks and be at Hawthorne. You know, now you see when I would drop my kids off at Hillcrest. It's, it's crazy. I mean, it's stressful to drop your kids off. Because it's kind of a bottleneck in that parking lot, one way in one way out. And if you're the first one there, you have to actually drive to the end of the line. And you know, everybody wants to drop their kids off, close to the door, but if you're first, you got to go the farthest away from the door. East Junior High is the same way, but they're redoing that parking lot now.

But I do think that there was just more camaraderie when you had these smaller groups and kids could walk to school. I wonder how Covid is going to affect that because you know, now you've got like, instead of maybe a hundred kids in the school, you got 400. So if you have an outbreak, does it run like wildfire more in a bigger school? Where it would be easier to contain if it was a school of a hundred kids? I don't know. Good questions. Yeah. I guess I didn't know any other way, but you know, Emerson, when I went, there was a big school. I think we had two or three grades or two or three classes in every grade. And I mean, every class I was in was 35 kids. So you probably had a hundred kids in every grade, so probably 600 kids in one school. Before I think at St Anne's they had like 30 kids in the class at most. So yeah. It changed things quite a bit.

Grant: What about strikes you had mentioned, I think, is that where your mom and dad met? He was working out of town on a strike. So I was just curious about how strikes affected the family and what you recall of them?

Cunneen: You know, I remember strikes pretty well because it was every three years and my dad being a carpenter, he would go somewhere else to work. I remember  one strike year, he went to to Big Sky and helped build, oh gosh, I can't remember the name of the first development down there. The guy was an announcer for one of the news stations or like national news. He went down there and built that one year and then another year he went to my sister and lived on Long Island and he went and spent, gosh, that strike, I think lasted nine months. So he was on Long Island for nine months and just sent the money home. You know, I have a birthday card still from when he was on Long Island. He sent me a birthday card with like five bucks in it, which was a big deal then. But it was like, it was like a dog and the dog had a tear because it couldn't be at the party. So, it was strange. And you know how my mom kept everything going, just kind of amazed me. I think kids today have no idea of what that would've been like, because, you know, if my kids want seconds, "Hey, go dish up." Or we used to have little glasses that weren't much bigger than this plastic cup. And you got like one glass of milk and that was it. If you wanted seconds, man, you had to go out and mow the lawn or take out the trash or something, but it was like, you didn't have a second glass of milk.

Grant: What about being the youngest of 11? I'm I'm the youngest of four. And that seemed like a lot.

Cunneen: I guess growing up that way, you don't know any different. But yeah, seven sisters. It's kind of unbalanced. We've got like in the first six there's one boy. And then in the last six there's three boys. There were certain things that you just like I said, bathroom time was a premium. I remember the worst beating I ever got in my life. Two sisters were fighting over whose bra a certain bra was and they were. I remember they each had an end of it, but they were pulling on it, fighting over. "That's my bra. No, it's my bra." And I made the stupid comment that said, "I don't know why you're fighting over it. Because neither of you have enough to fill it."

Jaap: Oh Pat, no, no, no.

Cunneen: And they beat the tar out of me. They had a common enemy at that point. Yeah. I unified them. And you know, the other thing was our dinner table was the size of this table. It was more square than this, but you know, we had 10 spots around the table and I remember when Mom said, "Dinner." You were there because if you weren't, big brother was going to take yours and eat it. So, and then too, I remember I had to sit in the middle with the brother on either side. And you know, if you elbowed him accidentally, when you were using your utensils, they'd jab you under the table or whatever. And I actually slept on the couch in the front room till sixth grade, and then I had enough sisters move out and get married and then I finally got my own, not my own room, but got a bed in the boys or in the bedroom when I was in seventh grade.

But yeah, I think my kids, we live in a house with five bedrooms, so they all have their own room. And initially I had the two youngest boys together and they just fought. They said, "I want my own room. I want my own room." And I'm just like, get over it. You know, you're lucky you got a room to share.

But every day you woke up and you had to fold your blankets and put them in the closet. And so I always told my mom, I have one brother that's 6'4" and another brother that's 6'1". And then my third brother's like, he's 5'11?, like I am, but I used to joke that I am short because I never got enough sleep because when I slept on the couch, I was always the last one to bed because my dad would stay up and watch TV. And I'd be the second one up because you know, they flip on the lights and you're awake.

Grant: And what about your mom nowadays? You said she's about to be 101.

Cunneen: She'll be 101 on October 31st and she still lives by herself.

Jaap: Oh my God.

Grant: Do you reflect on all this?

Cunneen: She's always got somebody there. We call her house Gram Central Station. I think she's getting hard of hearing now, just in this last year, her hearing's kind of gone and so it's tough talking to her, but everybody still goes to her house and COVID was pretty tough because nobody wanted to go see her and potentially expose her.

And she got it. I mean, she's still savvy enough that she understood that. And you know, we kind of loosened up over the summer. Everybody's, let's go see grandma and she's always got something for the kids, candy bars or whatever. I don't know if there's too much reminiscing. 

[01:39:17]

I think most of my siblings are on Facebook and they do it that way and I'm not. So I miss out on all that but my brother will text me, "Hey, they're trashing you, you better." But everybody still gets together, but it's more about what's going on. Their extended families, their kids and their grandkids and stuff, but every now and then they'll start talking about the good old days and my one brother, who's the other one that's my height, is kind of one of the favorite topics because he was a hell raiser. And I remember when they made the Evel Knievel movie and there's a scene where Evel Knievel rides up the steps at Butte High and rides into the classroom to get his girlfriend and take her out. And my brother, you know, the park across the street, this is the Wyoming Street entrance and there's a park across the street.

And we always called it Head Park, because that's where the guys would go to smoke their reefer. And so in this scene you could see my brother in the background. He was a football player and a wrestler and a shot putter.  A jock, but you could see him in the background with a cigarette and my sisters blackmailed him for two years. "We're gonna tell dad." So every now and then they give my brother a bad time. Because he always had something that he was getting away with and my sisters always knew it. So yeah. It's pretty tough to keep a secret from a sister.

Grant: Well I just had a couple more questions going back further. You'd said was it a grandfather or great-grandfather was a foreman at the Alice?

Cunneen: Correct.

Grant: Can we hear about that?

Cunneen: You know, I didn't really actually know too much of my history. You know, my dad talked about him quite a bit, but you know, when you're a kid, you don't listen. And my dad always talked about Seldom Scene. And I had no concept of Seldom Scene. And when I finally looked up my grandfather in the city directory and it said resides at Seldom Scene, and I went and asked Ellen, I said, what do you know about Seldom Scene? And she said, "Well, the only one I knew from Seldom Scene was Con Kelly." And I said, "Oh, well, do you know where it was?" And she had to call her dad. And her dad said, "Yeah, it was kind of in the shadow of the Cora Mine." And anyway, she found out that when you do the loop around the Granite Mountain Memorial and you're coming up back to the main road, if you look off to the right, you can see there's like a set of stairs. And somebody told me that was Con Kelly's back porch, where he grew up. But when I went and finally pulled out my great grandfather's citizenship paper, Con Kelly and James Murray were his sponsor. So I was thinking these guys must have known each other. And the other thing that I didn't, I haven't even tracked this one down, but his last name was O'Ferrell.

And I know that if you go down to St Patrick's cemetery and there's the one great big statue of the angel crying at the cross, that guy's name was O'Ferrell, John O'Ferrell. And he was Daley's nephew and a plot like two plots away is my great-grandfather Patrick O'Ferrell. And these guys must have known each other. But for him to come here to mine, to go mining and having a position of leadership right off the bat. I think they must have known each other. And I've been gypped out of the inheritance. That's all I can tell you.

Grant: Yeah, really.

Cunneen: But I know he lived up in Dublin Gulch or no, he was in Corktown and on [inaudible]. And I remember my dad, so they moved out to the flat  before I was born. But one day I asked him because he was  just so enamored with Corktown and that was the place to be. And I said, "Well Dad, why did we move?" And he said to get away from the thievin' Irish. And I said, "But dad, we are Irish." And he said, "Well, I ought to know."

Grant: I wanted to ask you about your dad too. That was my last question. 44 years with Anaconda. I mean, did he talk about work much?

Cunneen: Yes and no.  He had some great stories. He worked in the mines setting timbers. I remember one time he told me he got sassy with a boss and they sent him out to the Rocker timber plant as a result. There was one guy going on vacation. And so my dad went to take his place while he was on vacation. And so he broke him in for a day. And when they sat down to lunch, this other guy gave him like a pill bottle and he opened it up and looked at it and it was full of black powder. And my dad said, "What's that?" And the guy said, "Oh, it's flu dust from Anaconda." And he said, "What do you do with that?" He goes, "Well, we treat these poles here with arsenic. And if you get away from arsenic and your system goes without arsenic, your blood pressure goes way up. So we take this flu dust and we sprinkle it in our coffee to keep our blood pressure down." And my dad said he went to the boss that he offended and apologized so he could get back.

[01:45:39]

He had done several jobs all over the place. And he had talked about like I've got a picture of him when they were actually building the new precip plant and him and this other guy got like a big 12 by 12 timber up on their shoulders. And those structures are still there. And you know, my dad had his own workshop at the house and I knew his designs. And when I got on at MR I was sitting in the lunchroom one day and I'm looking at this bench and I said, "My dad made that." I could just tell because of the way, you know, instead of legs being straight like this, they were canted. And then they had a little bevel in the middle and you could not, I mean, no matter how you rocked on that bench, you couldn't tip it over. And I thought these guys knew what the heck they were doing. And there were examples like that, that I could see that he had a hand in. And it was interesting that when we cleaned out his stuff, he died in 2001, and my daughter's actually redoing the house I grew up in and we were going through his stuff and he had all this stuff that I discovered. And I just wanted to say like, where did that come from? How did you? And of course he's dead, so you can't ask him, but it was like, dang, I wish I would've known to ask those questions while they were still alive. So that's why, I'm glad you guys are doing this.  When I'm old and gone and my kids are wondering what did dad do again? Well, just go up to the archives.

Grant: Well, thanks for sharing.

Cunneen: Yeah, he was quite a guy and he was a catcher on the Billings Legion team, the first team that won a state championship for Billings. And I mean, Billings is the perennial power and he wanted to give the pros a try. And so my grandpa who was from Chicago, said, "Well, go back and live with your uncle Bill and try out for the White Sox." They were from the south side. So he tried out for the White Sox and they cut 'em and my uncle told him, "Well, the Cubs aren't as good. Go try out for the Cubs." So he did, and he made their squad and he played with the Cubs in their farm system for two years. And you know, basically those guys didn't make enough to live on. Then they all had to have side jobs.

Jaap: That's why you're a Cubs fan?

Cunneen: That's right. Yeah. And he was kind of a twisted soul because he grew up rooting for the White Sox, but then he played in the Cubs system and those two are rivals and you don't talk to White Sox people that hate Cubs fans and vice versa. So my dad was always kind of, okay, we played for the Cubs, but I'm a White Sox fan.

Jaap: You keep that quiet and at home.

Cunneen: I remember when I was 15, he was 50 when I was born. So he'd have been 65 years old and he was still throwing batting practice to the baseball team. He coached when I was a kid and you know, and batting practices are for batting. So you can perfect your swing. And I remember hitting a couple nice balls out to the fence. And I said, "Come on old, man, let's see what you got." And he could still put it by me. And I didn't appreciate that, you know, when you're 15, but now that I'm getting close to 60, throwing to my kids, I'm thinking, damn Dad, where did you get that?

And the other thing that he used to do is he was like a champion marble player. And he could put a marble between his finger and his thumb like that. And he could shoot it across the room and he could hit a target this big. And it was just amazing. And I remember my brother was smarting off one day and he wasn't doing what my dad told him. He grabbed, I don't know where he got the marble, but he shot it across the room and he hit my brother in the head. Straightened him right off like that. I was kinda like damn, note to self don't smart off when dad has a marble.

Jaap: Oh, that's a great story.

Cunneen: We cleaned out his garage. And he had a 1937 Chevy convertible and that was the car he had when he and my mom were dating. And I found all these parts for that car when we cleaned out the garage. And just like, they never threw anything out but I'm sure that car probably went in the scrapyard in the forties, but yeah, here, he still had parts for it. But it's funny, this house that my daughter Emma's redoing, probably two thirds of it was stuff that he brought home from work. But I mean, that house is so solid. When you look at the real dimensional lumber that they used back in the day versus, you know, a two by four now is, what it's actually 1 1/2 by 3 1/2. It's like you can twist them like this, but that old stuff, man. It's amazing. And then I think about what they probably used for all their structures was that real old growth, dimensional lumber and how solid all that must have been and how good of a fire it must have been when they burned it down.

[01:51:34]

There's one other story that I think is worth sharing that about my dad. They were roofing the hoist house on the Belmont and I think it was in the forties and his partner, and my dad said he didn't know, but the guy was epileptic and he had a seizure. And so the guy is convulsing and going closer and closer towards the edge of the roof. So my dad said he grabbed him and laid on him to try and hold him down. And he said he was convulsing so bad that they were both going towards the edge of the roof. So he said he took the guy's clothes and he pulled out the slack on his clothes and nailed him down to the roof. That's thinking dad.

Jaap: What else do you do?

Grant: I want to be on the job with him. Yeah. You think fast.

Cunneen: It was funny. I had a girlfriend that worked at the Copper King's Games and they had all these wooden bats. So whenever they'd break a bat  they were just putting 'em in this pile. Because we used to glue our bats back together. They were sacred and I asked the guy, I said, "What are you gonna do with those bats?" He said, "I don't know." And I said to my girlfriend, bring me a couple home so she did, and I made stools out of them. Those were the stool legs. And we just used a 2x10 plank to make the seat and to get the angles and everything. My dad just wrote it all down by hand and did the tangent and everything just off his head. And I just thought, man, those guys never had the calculator or nothing. They had to do it all like that, but he had those angles right. And had the machine set up and we made stools like that. And I just thought it would've taken me a day just to figure out the angles. But when that's your business that kind of stuff was pretty amazed how those old timers could do that without the modern stuff.

Grant: He was union then, right?

Jaap: Yeah. He was carpenters' union. I remember going up to your building.

Grant: Really?

Cunneen: Yeah. As a kid.

Grant: Did you go upstairs?

Cunneen: No, I think it was on the first floor. I don't remember. Yeah, I was pretty little, but I remember whenever he would work an overtime shift, they'd give you a meal ticket and a gas token. And these tokens were kind of like silver dollars and he had like a coffee can full of them. And so we'd go to the gas station and fill up and we would go to the gas mat, which is over by the concentrator. It's like a mini storage place now, or community gas, which was the one on Front Street. And he'd give me the silver dollars and you just plug them into the gas pump. And I remember loving to go do that. And then he would save up these meal tickets. And of course you wouldn't want to take all those kids out to dinner. So we would go get chicken to go from the Acoma. And if you ever look, I think the ghost sign's kind of gone now, but we used to go up on Wyoming Street and there's the staircase. And there used to be this hand pointing down the staircase saying "Chicken-to-go." And I remember taking all those meal tickets in there to go get that bucket of chicken as a kid. Chicken-to-go . Working for the company had its perks that and knowing the password for the rollercoaster.

Grant: Oh, I wanted to ask, do you recall any of the passwords?

[01:55:26]

Cunneen: They were always, sometimes they were phrases. "My aunt Jemima told me to tell Colonel Sanders that I could have a free ride." It was stuff like that.

Grant: Really?

Cunneen: It was always a catch phrase. Yeah. Wow. It was a phrase.

Jaap: Oh, that's funny. They probably loved seeing little kids trying to put together those.

Grant: How did the Gardens burn?

Cunneen: Well, of course that's a controversy. But I think there's pretty good evidence that it was arson. That was the time that there was a lot of arson going on in Butte. I guess it wouldn't surprise me. I have no evidence that it was arson, but it certainly wouldn't surprise me if it was. It was quite a loss. Because I remember, like I said, we were up there all the time.

Jaap: Do you have more questions, Clark?

Grant: I think that's it for me.

Jaap: I don't think I have anything unless you wanna close with any certain statement, Pat.

Cunneen: No real statement, but thanks for having me, you guys. I appreciate it.

[END OF RECORDING]