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A massive front end loader deposits the first shovels of dirt removed from the Parrot tailings site into a dump truck at the old ball field behind the Civic Center in Butte, June 2018.
A major mine waste cleanup in central Butte is entering a new phase of tailings removal in February.
After years of debate on how to handle the heaps of mine waste just outside the city’s civic center, work began on the Parrot Tailings in 2018. The waste was left behind by a smelter that ran in Butte for about two decades in the late 1800s.
The tailings themselves contain arsenic, lead, zinc and cadmium, all of which can leach into the city’s creeks. Those creeks are headwaters to the Clark Fork and eventually Columbia rivers.