BONNER — The removal of the Milltown Dam started with community meetings in rooms across Bonner. On Sunday, many of those involved in the project returned to one of those same rooms to reflect on the dam, the restoration and the creation of Milltown State Park.
For about 100 years, the Milltown Dam loomed large over the Clark Fork River. For many of those invested in its 2008 removal, its memory still looms just as large. The Bonner Milltown History Center & Museum hosted a roundtable discussion to reflect on the dam and its legacy.
“The other day I went into the courthouse to get my license plate renewed. I’ve got one of the Milltown license plates and the guy behind the counter, I asked him, ‘what do you know about this?’” said Peter Nielsen, a former adviser for the Milltown Superfund Site Redevelopment Working Group.
People gathered at St. Ann Catholic Church in Bonner. It all started with the Milltown Dam, built between 1906 and 1908.
“It looked really peaceful. People boated, fished, learned to ice skate, recreated on this beautiful reservoir. But, meanwhile, unbeknownst to many of us until 1981, there were toxins in the sediments that were causing problems,” said Diana Hammer, former remedial project manager of Milltown for the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA).
The toxins were heavy metals, including copper and arsenic, that washed into the reservoir from mining operations upstream in Butte and Anaconda.
“Nobody really knew much about what was in the water. Because, what was in the water was something you couldn't really see or taste or smell,” Nielsen said.
In the 1980’s, Milltown became home to one of the country’s first Superfund sites, placing it on an EPA list of the country’s most contaminated places. The community had plenty of input for the EPA on how to clean up the Clark Fork.
“We got 15,000 public comments,” Hammer said. “We reviewed them all. Overwhelmingly, they were 98% in favor of what we were proposing, which, I've worked on a lot of Superfund site cleanups, and never had that many comments.”
Included in that input was plans for the future. The EPA asked the community groups for their take.
“We posed a really big question like, so what would you as a community like to see in 10, 20 or even 50 years? They came back and said ‘we would like a public space for all people, all abilities and all time,’” Hammer said. “At the time, this is like a huge aspirational, stretch goal because, at the time, it was privately owned, it was underwater and it was contaminated.”
Over the next few decades, the EPA, the polluters responsible for the site and many community organizations got to work. The dam came down in 2008 and 2.2 million cubic yards of sediment was removed. The waste was hauled train car by train car up river to Anaconda, for use on another clean up project.
Ten years after the dam was removed, Milltown State Park hosted its grand opening, featuring trails, open water and reminders of the toxic waste site that was once there. It is one of the most successful Superfund projects in the nation.
“There’s some other Superfund sites within the basin and within the state that don't have that type of support. That, I would claim, that's some reason why they are stalled out,” said Doug Martin, Natural Resource Damage Program administrator. "I think that's the important thing about this. This project was not for any of us, it's for everybody here in and the generations to come.”
Sunday, many of those who worked on the project were in the room at St. Ann’s Church, where some of the first meetings on dam removal were held.
“I'm such a history nut. There are just so many stories to tell at Milltown. I feel like you could stand at the confluence and basically tell the history of the American West there,” said Michael Kustudia, the former manager of Milltown State Park.
