Review of the Multiple Accounts Analysis Alternatives Evaluation Process Completed for the Reclamation of the Zortman and Landusky Mine Sites.

An extensive mine reclamation project is currently on-going at the Zortman and Landusky gold mines in the Little Rocky Mountains of north-central Montana. Both sites are known for playing an industry-leading role in the development of valley heap leach systems and have been in the news for ‘state-of-the-art’, regulator-driven reclamation efforts. It is an essential requirement in the mining industry today that all stakeholders, including the proponent, regulatory agencies and community representatives as well as potential opponents, participate in decision making. This has been the case at Zortman and Landusky where the US Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the MT Department of Environmental Quality (DEQ) assembled a multi-stakeholder, multidisciplinary reclamation team tasked with designing and evaluating a range of reclamation alternatives for both sites. This, by necessity, involved a collective understanding of the positive and negative impacts of the different alternatives, taking into account that the range of impacts affect numerous stakeholders to varying degrees. As we are likely to see more often in the future, the financial assurance provided in the bonds for reclamation at Zortman and Landusky fell short. Therefore, a balance had to be found between the economics of reclamation and the technical, environmental and socio-economic issues at the sites. A process called the Multiple Accounts Analysis (MAA) was selected to evaluate the various alternatives for reclamation. The process provided a clear, transparent and defensible framework that has enabled relative ranking of various alternatives, as well as the prioritization of interim remediation measures aimed at optimizing the degree of remediation attainable with the limited financial resources available. This paper describes the MAA process and the rationale developed to prioritize the remediation measures and evaluate the various reclamation alternatives.