Chevron USA is still fighting the Environmental Protection Agency, contending that the Federal government should pay some of the cleanup costs at the Superfund site that once was the company’s Questa Mine in northern New Mexico.
The company made recent arguments to the U.S. 10th Circuit court of Appeals in Denver, hoping to revive its lawsuit that seeks to have the U.S. Department of the Interior and the U.S. Department of Agriculture into sharing the cleanup costs. It contends that since the government has title to the public lands, it is an “owner” and should bear some of the Superfund liability.
Chevron lawyers argued the federal government was “quibbling over irrelevancies” over who should pay for the cost of cleaning up the mine that started operations in 1920 just west of Red River, New Mexico. The giant mountain of mine tailings is closer to the little town of Questa that sits along the Red River..
The mine was formerly Molycorp. Inc. and sits on three square miles of land. Open pit mining of molybdenum took place in 1965 and continued until 1983. The EPA says the mining operations placed over 328 million tons of acid-generating waste rock into nine piles surrounding the open pit and disposed of more than 100 million tons of tailings in the tailing ponds. But the mining operations and waste disposal practices also contaminated soil, sediment, surface water and groundwater.
Rachel Conn, projects director for Amigos Bravos, a New Mexico water conservation organization wrote about the impact of the pollution for Earth Justice.
Having the title to public lands makes the government an “owner” for the purposes of Superfund liability, Chevron USA told the Tenth Circuit Thursday, saying the federal government is “quibbling over irrelevancies” in a fight over cleanup cost liability at a New Mexico mine waste site.