Historic mining town plagued by arsenic gets federal funds for cleanup effort
To many of the 100 or so full-time residents of Red Mountain, a historic mining town on the northwestern tip of San Bernardino County’s desert, John Hall is unofficially known as mayor. Hall, 75, isn’t quite sure why. Maybe it’s because he’s lasted more than 30 years in this hard-scrap place, where locals truck in water to avoid the arsenic that decades of mining left in the ground and their tap water. … It’s estimated the state has about 47,000 abandoned mines. And of the roughly 24,400 sites on BLM-managed land, some 84% present physical hazards, such as open mine shafts, while 11% present environmental hazards such as contamination. Red Mountain has both. Soil testing has found as much as 10,000 milligrams of arsenic per kilogram in some parts of Red Mountain.