CORINTH — The EPA will host a public hearing Tuesday night concerning its plans to clean up the Pike Hill Mine site. While there have already been a few informal, informational meetings regarding the cleanup, which is still in its initial planning phase, tomorrow’s public hearing is formally required by statute, and comments made at the hearing will be on the official record.

“Input from this hearing will shape the EPA’s plan,” Corinth Selectboard Chairman Rick Cawley said. “This is the real start of their official planning process.”

The abandoned copper mine off Richardson Road was deemed a Superfund site in 2004, a designation held only by the most harzardous polluted areas in the country. Due to overstretched funding, the EPA wasn’t able to focus its efforts on cleanup at Pike Hill until around two decades later.

Now scheduled to begin in 2024, the cleanup is expected to cost between $18 million and $20 million, with the federal government fronting the entire bill.

Contaminated runoff from Pike Hill — two of its three mines are owned by Vermont land-holding corporation Second Growth Holdings and the other by an individual — will be addressed through a cleanup that will likely involve moving over 5,000 truckloads of material. ‘The toughest is going to be the burden for those on Richardson Road,” Cawley said of the residents that live near the cleanup site. “It will also cost a bit to do to the road what it needs to withstand that heavy traffic, but the EPA will cover those expenses.”

The Pike Hill Mine site is made up of three separate mining areas along with Pike Hill Brook and a tributary to Cookville Brook. The concentration of toxic copper leaching into those streams far exceeds federal and state water quality standards, and in lab tests, fish exposed to the levels of chemicals present in those streams all died. But while significant harm is posed to ecological life, there is unlikely to be a human health risk from the mine waste deposits at the Vermont sites, EPA’s cleanup coordinator for the site Ed Hathaway said.

The meeting will be at 7 p.m. Tuesday night in the Corinth Town Office at 1387 Cookeville Road. The meeting can be joined virtually at the following link: https://tinyurl.com/uwj6uy7r

Further information about the mine and the cleanup process can be found at https://cumulis.epa.gov/supercpad/cursites/csitinfo.cfm?id=0102121, or in hard copy at the Corinth Town Hall and Blake Memorial Library.

Frances Mize is a Report for America corps member. She can be reached at 603-727-3242 or fmize@vnews.com.