BUTTE – A top Environmental Protection Agency leader says the agency is targeting mid-August to deliver a signed agreement that aims to finish the decades-long Butte Superfund cleanup.
Outgoing EPA Regional Administrator Doug Benevento said Thursday that agency officials will give a U.S. District Court judge 135 days’ notice of their plan to file the consent decree detailing final cleanup plans.
Benevento says the agreement will include the EPA, the state, Atlantic Richfield Company and Butte-Silver Bow County. He says it will organize the final work so that Butte can be removed from the nation’s Superfund list by 2024.
Butte was declared a federal Superfund site in 1983 because of the damage done by more than a century of mining and smelting. Butte-Silver Bow officials say more than 600 acres of land have since been remediated and reclaimed.