Kennecott's dirty secret
Tribune reporters Judy Fahys, Jeremiah Stettler and Steve Oberbeck laid out a chilling story this weekend on how Kennecott Copper, our good corporate neighbor, methodically for decades kept the people of Magna in the dark about their danger of being inundated with a soup of water and mine tailings.Upon learning that their gargantuan tailings ponds were seimically unsafe, then-president Frank Joklik came up with bold plan:
- Calculate Kennecott's legal liability by assigning a dollar figure to the lives of men, women and children who might suffocate in the muck if the dike failed.
- Bully state regulators to keep the scary engineering reports hidden away.
- Secretly buy up homes that would be in the path of destruction.
- And, oh, yeah, begin a 30-year repair of the tailings impoundment.
Kennecott president of four months Andrew Harding says the tailings pond is now safe (though the shoring up won't be finished for another decade), and at least offered: "All I can do, is apologize for the history."
Memo to the residents of the hyper-exclusive Daybreak, built on Kennecott mining property: Remember those closing documents you signed? The ones that released Kennecott Land from liability because the company said everything under your house is copacetic? Might want to run an eyeball over them. You can read about the issue in this article first printed two years ago.
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