Mine Tailings

I mentioned yesterday about the awful thick dust covering everything outside and inside my house.  This is an example of me trying to sweep it off of my patio.  I swept and hosed it down yesterday but as you can see, I'm still struggling to get it clean. Same with my patio furniture which I have been bashing with brooms and hosing down for days. Picture this stuff all over my newly refurbished interior.  Since the link to yesterday's Green Valley News article wasn't viewable, I thought I'd copy an edited version of what will be in Wednesday's paper.  I had reached out to the reporter for help so part of our conversation is included.


Since Saturday, the Pima County Department of Environmental Quality has been fielding complaints from Green Valley residents who said they were inundated with an unprecedented amount of dust over the weekend. They said it coated their homes inside and out and continues to cause respiratory issues.

The DEQ department hasn’t received this number of complaints since 2010, when Asarco [different mine/company] agreed to pay a $100,000 fine and $350,000 for three environmental projects following several dust incidents in late 2009 and early 2010. This time around, residents are blaming Freeport-McMoRan’s Sierrita Mine for the problem and on Tuesday afternoon, Freeport issued a statement accepting responsibility.
The mine is “identifying affected neighbors and will be providing the necessary cleanup assistance,” Hayes wrote.

The dust may not have violated any EPA standards, but numerous residents are complaining that they can still taste the dust and are experiencing coughing fits and have difficulty breathing. Among them is Laurie Cirrincione, a Las Campanas resident who suffers from asthma. Her 84-year-old mother is on oxygen due to pulmonary fibrosis and she (recently) had her kitchen remodeled, the inside of her house painted and her carpets professionally cleaned, she said. “I’ve vacuumed several times and I washed everything several times and it still keeps falling out everywhere,” Cirrincione said. “None of my windows were even open. God only knows how it came in.”

Most complainants say they’re making little headway cleaning their homes. The gray dust is similar to concrete dust. According to Freeport’s website, the company uses several methods to control dust.

After the complaints were lodged against Asarco in 2010, the University of Arizona  studied the mine tailings composites and determined “the tailings appeared to be chemically innocuous”; concentration of heavy metals and toxic metals, such as arsenic and beryllium, was low and the amount of calcium and sulfate in the samples were higher than in the native soil, but weren’t toxic. “We cannot say that the Freeport-McMoRan tailing dust would be the same. However, the mining processes that Asarco and Freeport use are similar.”

NB:  Mine tailings are the debris left over from the copper the mining process.
I also Geo-tagged this, so if you look at the map this time and click on satellite, you should be able to see the enormous mine and where I live relative to it.
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In non-related news, we went to see the  remake of A Star is Born.  It was really, really fantastic.  Lady Gaga was brilliant and who knew Bradley Cooper could sing?  We highly recommend it.