Old Works Golf Course, Anaconda, Montana, The
On the same site, one hundred and thirteen years later, a similar degree of fanfare attended the July 30,1997, opening of the eighteen-hole Old Works Golf Course-a Jack Nicklaus-designed course that transformed acres of copper tailings, slag, and junk into a green oasis within sight of the 585-foot-tall Washoe smelter smokestack. “As if they were painting a surreal picture, a team of community, industry and government leaders brushed life back into the Old Works smelter yards,” the Butte Montana Standard waxed poetic. “Where yellowish mounds of arsenic-tainted dirt sat, grassy fairways flourish. . . . And where copper ore was refined, cool lakes provide a drink for deer and marmots.”2
To celebrate the makeover, the Anaconda community invited Nicklaus, the most famous professional golfer of the twentieth century, to play his creation before a crowd of three thousand. Facing an eight-foot putt on the eighteenth green, Nicklaus took the opportunity to make a point: “With this site, we had the opportunity to make it into something beautiful.” Capping the fourteen-year effort, Nicklaus dropped the eight-footer for a two under par seventy.3
The long, sometimes difficult, transformation began on September 29,1980, when the Atlantic Richfield Company (ARCO) called a press conference in Anaconda to announce the closure of its turn-of-the-century smelter, a move that stunned both the community and the state. The closure eliminated one thousand jobs and an annual payroll of $10 million, immediately generating an economic and social crisis for the single-industry town of ten thousand. Over the past century the deep mines of Butte and the mineral-processing facilities at Anaconda had produced over 20 billion pounds of copper, over 5 billion pounds of zinc, and 4 billion pounds of manganese. These resources speeded the country’s industrialization and electrification, allowed the successful waging of two world wars, and created of one of the nation’s most profitable corporations. At the same time, however, millions of cubic yards of tailings, furnace slag, and flue dust had polluted water and soil throughout the 138-mile Upper Clark Fork Basin between Butte and Missoula.4
Coinciclentally, soon after the closure of the Anaconda smelter in 1980, Congress passed the Comprehensive Environmental Response, Compensation and Liability Act (CERCLA), better known as the Superfund law. Largely a response to public outcry over the Love Canal crisis, CERCLA created a tax on the production of chemicals and petroleum to fund the cleanup of industrial sites.5
With CERCLA funding, the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) conducted a preliminary evaluation of former ACM properties in 1983. The findings placed the Anaconda smelter site-an area covering six thousand acres and including the Old Works (the Upper Works and Lower Works), the Washoe smelter, and the tailings ponds near Opportunity-eighteenth on its “National Priorities List.” The EPA also named three other nearby ACM sitesthe Silver Bow Creek-Butte area, the Montana Pole and Treating site, and Milltown Reservoir-to its priorities list. The agency identified ARGO as the “potentially responsible party” slated to pay all cleanup costs.6