Admission to the Berkeley Pit in Butte, Montana, supposedly costs $2, but there's no one there to take my money Sunday as I wander down the 100-foot-long tunnel to the overlook of one of the largest toxic lakes in the country. Indeed, it seems as though my fiancé and I have snuck in just before closing time; the penultimate group of visitorsa small group of young localsleave almost as soon as we arrive. The resonant sounds of our fellow visitors' burping contest echo throughout the chamber as they leave.
Courtesy Wikipedia
The Berkeley Pit |
Ever since the mine closed in 1982, ground water has seeped in and slowly started to fill the mile-deep hole. Sometime before 2020, the level of the lake will start endangering Butte's water supply and millions of gallons will have to be removed and treated. Until then, though, the EPA has decided that there's no real danger in letting the toxic stew collect in a giant pool just outside of downtown.
Now the town of Butte is hoping to turn the toxic waste site into a bona fide tourist attractioncomplete with a gift shop. The idea is pretty sillysilly enough to merit a segment on Comedy Central's The Daily Show with Jon Stewart. On the show (click on the play button below to watch), correspondent Jason Jones interviews a local politician, Jon Sesso, about the touristic possibilities of Butte. Jones also talks to a worried townsperson and a couple of researchers who have discovered that there may be some therapeutic properties in the algae that grows in the sludge.
According to Sesso, Comedy Central first became interested in doing a story after hearing that the Butte Chamber of Commerce was planning to increase admission prices at the pit in an effort to turn the eyesore into a Butte tourist attraction. The resulting AP story leads with "Turning lemons into tourist lemonade..." (Perhaps that's why Jones opens his monologue, "The city has taken lemons and turned them into... something that if you drank, could kill you.")
But once Daily Show crew descended on the town, the folks over at the Chamber of Commerce declined to participate in something they thought could make the town look bad. "It was their deal," says Sesso, a democratic state senator. "I was disappointed that they didn’t participate." So Sesso, who helps run the Superfund site and publishes a newsletter called PitWatch, talked to a few regular Daily Show viewers, decided it was all in good fun, and submitted to an interview himself.
Sesso's story provides a pretty good illustration of how the Daily Show goes about creating its segments. The effusive Sesso tells Gelf he was interviewed for roughly two hours. "They asked me everything under the sun," he says. "I was pretty well prepared, though, and apparently was pretty boring to them. So they closed by asking me to tell a joke."
Courtesy Montana Legislature
Jon Sesso |
After the interview was finished, the Daily Show crew claimed that they needed to refilm the interview from another perspective to get Jones's reactions. The second time around, though, Jones was animated and crude. "I was getting a glimpse of where they were going with this show," Sesso says. "Quite frankly, it was a lot worse than what actually aired. They were actually pretty kind to us compared to what they had intimated about how they were going to cover it."
Over at the gift shop, the one employee on duty is 20-year old Brian Sandford. A student at Montana State University, Sandford has been working in the shop for two years, and says that one of the store's best sellers is a wide-angle postcard of the pit. He also saw the Daily Show bit. "I thought it was funny, but some things offended me," he says. "They said it was a toxic waste land and everything." Pressed into admitting that the pit is indeed a toxic waste land, Sandford counters that he didn't like that his hometown was used as fodder for laughs. "The pit doesn't look that good," he says, "but without it, our town wouldn't exist."
While the algae and an insect called the water boatman thrive in the pit, there are few questions about the effects of the toxicity on larger organisms. Back in 1995, an entire flock of over 300 snow geese died after landing in the pit. One year later, Outside Magazine ran a piece about the incident that described the dead geese as having "feathers matted with sticky yellow residue, skin blistered with lesions, bodies ravaged with a grisly variety of internal injuriescorroded esophagi and tracheae, livers and kidneys bloated with presumably toxic levels of copper, manganese, zinc, and cadmium." To prevent a repeat of the gruesome event, a manned observation station has been set upcomplete with faux-predator alarm sounds and riflesto scare away any wayward bird flocks. (That said, a stray dognicknamed The Auditor for his habit of appearing out of nowheremanaged to live in and around the site without any apparent harm for almost 16 years (Billings Gazette).)
While Sandford says no human has ever fallen into the toxic water, there has been a close call. A few years ago, he says, an elderly former employee of the Berkeley pit followed an old mining rode around the back side of the lake and drove his car out onto the winter ice covering the ruddy pit. The police were able to coax the man, who appeared disoriented, back to safety.
After the Daily Show segment was filmed, several state papers, including the Montana Standard and the Great Falls Tribune, covered Butte's foray into national television. Several local and expat bloggers also posted their reactions to the spot. As Big Sky Girl writes, "I curse you Jon Stewart because from now on when I say I'm from Butte people will reply, 'Oh, I saw that on the Daily Show.' Fan-tastic."
We walk back out of the gift shop to get one more look at the pit before heading to the airport. Apparently, during my time browsing through the copper knickknacks and postcards, a Chamber of Commerce employee had locked the tunnel entrance and left.
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