Innocence [2]
In just a few decades, the mine drained the front side of the mountain range into a pit. Labor issues and pollution scandals dogged its otherwise breakneck expansion. By the 1980s, investigations revealed the mine’s tailing dams would not survive an earthquake, putting a nearby town at risk of burial by over a billion tons of soupy mine waste. The mine responded to this information by buying up at-risk homes, quietly modernizing their tailing ponds, and colluding with state regulators to keep the reports away from the public record. In calculating liability, the company tallied the monetary value of the lives in jeopardy, accounting for differences in age. A child’s life, for example, was assigned a different dollar amount than an adult’s. The reporter writing the story either couldn’t or wouldn’t identify those respective values.
On March 18, 2020, I woke to a slow roar and the sound of my clothes hangers swinging. I had enough time to jump out of bed and gaze around stupidly at my apartment before the first big aftershock. I braced my legs until it slowed, then stopped. When I determined my building wasn’t about to fall down, and my friends’ and families’ hadn’t either, my next thought was for the mine. I opened Twitter, where people were posting recordings of the mine’s eerie emergency siren. Operations halted. Later, the public was told the earthquake had caused a hydrochloric acid leak, which was soon contained. Officials said it “moved toward the Great Salt Lake,” with “no more risks to residents.”
In the year since, geologists mapping the earthquake and its aftershocks have learned that the fault system where the earthquake began is closer to the surface than previously assumed, and more dangerous. The mine, a few miles from this newly mapped fault, seems poised on its edge as if ready to tip into the earth. Waiting for an appointment on the University of Utah campus one day, I wander into the geology building. In the basement, students and faculty work among seismograph stations, electronic displays, and other data monitoring technology to observe earthquakes in the region and provide information to the public. A donor’s name is plastered above the monitoring center’s bank of screens: Rio Tinto, parent company of the Bingham Canyon Mine.