It was like adding half a Buick a day to the Whiteman Fork that flows into the Alamosa. In December 1992, the mining company responsible for the toxic leak, run by gold speculator Robert Friedland, declared itself bankrupt and the US EPA began to clean up the site. Many locals believe these deaths were due to contamination of water and riverside gardens from the mine, the only industry in the region. Indeed studies show that the discharge from the mine has caused toxic metals like zinc, lead and mercury to be measured in the river at levels three to 3,000 times the Australian and Papua New Guinean standards. There are many more stories like these, affecting watersheds around the world, some well known but many more kept under wraps by governments beholden to large mining companies for revenues.
Activists point out that some of mining's impacts are hard to spot.
The disasters at Marinduque and Omai have caused some regulators to sit up and take notice. In May 1997 the United Nations Environmental Programme held an international meeting to examine the safety of dams that hold toxic mining waste. The resulting awareness may help prevent some future problems. Meanwhile, problems at abandoned and existing mines continue to come to light. For example, Coeur d'Alene mining corporation abandoned the Golden Cross mine near Waihi in New Zealand in Feburary 1997 after discovering that the ground under the mine's four million tons of toxic waste was beginning to slip, threatening local waterways.