8 ms·

A man who shoots at birds to keep them off a toxic pit [video]

89 points by SQL2219 5y ago

sp332 5y ago
It's hard to read in this format, but I recommend Kate Beaton's comic, "Ducks". https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketch-comic-i-made-called-ducks-in https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketc...
- teetertater 5y ago
  Depressing but interesting. Thanks for sharing. I have many friends from BC/Alberta that spent a year or two in the oil sands and made a boatload of money, I feel like this gives a good glimpse into it.
willmorrison 5y ago
Tom Scott made a great video on this: https://youtu.be/n-Ej2EtE744 https://youtu.be/n-Ej2EtE744
danboarder 5y ago
I'm wondering why they don't fire up the original pump system that drained the pit back in the mining days?
- chasebank 5y ago
  I wondered the same thing. I imagine it's because it used to pump the water out before it became toxic from absorbing the metals.
  - akudha 5y ago
    That was my first thought too. They are spending so much money on gear and employing someone full time - wouldn't it be cheaper to just drain it? There must be a reason they aren't doing it. Also, he can't be there 24 hours - what happens if a bird lands on the water at night?
    - drjasonharrison 5y ago
      They are pumping water out, treating it and returning the water at a higher pH (more alkaline). But oxidized metal minerals plus rain water results in acid.
    - DFHippie 5y ago
      I assume the reason is that draining it just moves the toxins elsewhere. No one else wants to drink this stuff or have it in their surface water either.
      - grp000 5y ago
        Might also be an issue of rainwater collection, and then the enormous cost of filling the pit.
  - drjasonharrison 5y ago
    More likely the water was pumped out when the mine was operating because digging, blasting, and other mining activities are easier when the equipment and people can breathe the atmosphere. I don't know when the pumps were turned off but it would have been after the mine ceased operations, possibly after the owners threatened to walk away completely. Because they could do that in the USA, and many other parts of the world.
- blamazon 5y ago
  In the Tom Scott video linked upthread, they cover this. The pit is being used as a hydraulic control device-collecting all the badness from a ridiculously vast (~10,000 miles) network of tunnels into one huge dilute volume. Then, they pipe it out to a water treatment plant and then back to the pit. They’ve been able to raise the pH from mid-2 to mid-4 this way.
- client4 5y ago
  The filtration and pumps in Butte are suprisingly world class.
tofof 5y ago
It's frustrating that the description of the video and the first few seconds of the video both establish a narrative of "acid cooking birds from the inside out" if they spend a few hours in the water, which makes absolutley zero sense. At no point in the entire video is that claim revisisted or explained.
- blamazon 5y ago
  Migrating birds stopping to rest in water tend to drink the water. Once inside the body, if the water is too acidic, it begins breaking down cell walls and denaturing proteins. These actions are analogous to cooking.
  - tofof 5y ago
    Except that the photos of injury they showed were damage to the duck's feet - i.e. not part of the digestive tract, and very much part of the body that's submerged in water the entire time the bird floats on a lake.
    - blamazon 5y ago
      Good catch, so they are probably ‘cooked’ from both ends topologically.
    - Retric 5y ago
      They don’t extract those birds at the moment of death, it’s likely most of that damage occurred after death. So sure, every part of bird exposed to the acid is causing harm, it’s just death is caused from the inside rather than damage to the birds skin. Further it’s likely their exposure is mostly from drinking thus inside out.
  - pvaldes 5y ago
    If you put acid in a gut you have just more acid. Why we don't "cook from inside" each day then? This birds live and nest in the tundra; not a place short of acid soils and acid water. Again, why they don't dissolve resting all day in permafrost mud? So maybe they should consider a different explanation? Lack of food in tired migrant birds?, because nothing grows in that waters... plus poisons in water. Lead maybe?. Keep shooting. Birds remaining too much time in the water could be solved providing a few artificial islands in the center. Even building a second pond with healthy water a few thousand meters away would be more simple and even cheaper that shooting at birds all the time for years (after all they have a lot of digging machines available yet). Smaller pool with food or big pool without any food? Does not seem like a difficult choice. Give them protection and food and will say goodbye in a heartbeat. More simple but less funny, of course. Apart of that, the number of man-hours spent on this looks like a total waste. And putting chalk in the water would fix it and should be doable, because you just need to reach safe tundra levels, that are very acidic yet. Chalk is relatively cheap. Why is that "too expensive" for the company?. Better kill the animals instead to do something really useful?.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
throwawaysea 5y ago
So are they going to have this person or persons man the pit indefinitely? I see they have some automated measures like the propane cannon but at some point shouldn’t they just put a net on top of the whole pit to keep birds off it?
- guerrilla 5y ago
  Or float those plastic balls [1] on it, like they do for some reservoirs to stop evaporation. It'd take a lot of them, but that'd work and could be both cheaper and more permanent. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxPdPpi5W4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxPdPpi5W4o
  - bmitc 5y ago
    I was wondering the same thing about a net, and those plastic balls are interesting. The manual solution(s) just don't seem that efficient.
  - scottlawson 5y ago
    I also wondered about the net. Never considered the ball idea, that's very interesting. One thing the video doesn't cover is potential other solutions there are for protecting birds. Maybe they have just been doing it for such a long time that nobody thinks about alternative solutions, combined with the fact that they have already spent money into the bird hut and other equipment and further investments in alternatives would just not have a higher net present value.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- micromacrofoot 5y ago
  not indefinitely, just until people stop paying attention
- sjwalter 5y ago
  This case in Butte is somewhat better than usual because BP is actually footing the remediation bill. More typical is having the taxpayers foot the bill, like with the fascinating example of Giant Mine, 5km outside of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories. Some 200 kilotonnes of arsenic trioxide were created as byproducts of the mining process, enough arsenic dust to kill off every human and animal on earth. Once the company (and the company that bought the company) that mined the gold went belly up, the government is stuck footing the bill for remediation. The remediation plan is to indefinitely freeze, using compressors like used for hockey rinks, the arsenic underground. An eternal, ongoing operation, costing >$1bn, costing more in present-day dollars than gold was even extracted from the mine, in order to avoid the arsenic seeping into the groundwater. Kind of hilarious the implicit bet on a stable society that this remediation plan entails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine
ghastmaster 5y ago
The interesting thing that this video does not show you, is that they are likely killing some of the animals on purpose. A USDA Wildlife Management employee once gave a presentation on various pest animal control techniques to my class of wildlife science students. He spent some time controlling birds at airports. Birds learn that noises do not kill them. Eventually they ignore the noises. To fix this, every once and a while he had to make a kill with the stimulus. Some of the techniques in the video may not require occasional kills. I would love access to their logs. It would be interesting to see if indeed they are making occasional kills and how long it took to find the optimal interval.
bmitc 5y ago
I saw this video yesterday and one thing I wondered was, why isn't the company legally, and thus financially and criminally, held responsible for this disaster? If I as an individual dump a bunch of toxic waste, especially something that kills thousands of animals, then I would be held responsible in a vice grip-like manner. I never understand why if something is done by a company, or individual with large wealth, but at massive scale, they can simply get away with it.
- gruez 5y ago
  >I never understand why if something is done by a company, or individual with large wealth, but at massive scale, they can simply get away with it. because limited liability. The solution, obviously is to recognize that they have limited liability and not extend them "credit". In this case the "credit" is letting them do environmental damage on the expectation that they'll "pay back" remediation costs. Force them to pay a deposit upfront prior to a mining permit being granted. see also: "It Pays to Not Pay Your Debts" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-14/it-pays-to-not-pay-your-debts https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-14/it-pay...
  - bmitc 5y ago
    That seems to just partly explain the mechanism by which these companies get away with things.
- reddog 5y ago
  Because the company in the video -- Atlantic Richfield Company, aka ARCO -- acquired the pit in 1977 only to shut it down in 1982 after discovering what a white elephant it was. The company that actually dug the thousands of miles of tunnels and later the pit was Anaconda Copper (one of the most rapacious, amoral corporations to ever exist) which went belly up in 1983. Anaconda Copper made fortunes for the usual suspects like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds throughout the 20th century. Good luck clawing any restoration money back from them after its been laundered through generations. If you ever find yourself driving though Butte I highly recommend a stop to see the Berkely pit, the access towers, the enviromental devestation and the excellent mining museum. Its facinating.
krick 5y ago
That's so backwards it's just depressing.
undersuit 5y ago
I spent the last week in Butte for Thanksgiving. We made our way up to an overlook of the pit on Friday. We got to hear the wailers mentioned; there were no other actions but the dump trucks running material from the still open parts of the mine. It's odd visiting the thing that's messed up so much of what I call home in Montana. I grew up in Missoula, downstream of Butte. That city also had a nearby superfund site, Milltown Dam, that had captured mining tailings washed downstream from Butte and the other town I visited Anaconda. Of course to escape Missoula once they removed the dam I moved to East Helena, home of the East Helena Slag Pile a remnant of when the ASARCO lead smelter spewed smoke all over the town.
noetic_techy 5y ago
I would think that some enterprising university could get the funds to set up an automated system with AI to recognize and shoot near the birds at a distance. Some decent learning in optics and AI to be had there. Sure that guy would lose his job, but it seems pointless to dedicate one man to do this all day.

89 points by SQL2219 5y ago

It's hard to read in this format, but I recommend Kate Beaton's comic, "Ducks". https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketch-comic-i-made-called-ducks-in https://beatonna.tumblr.com/post/81993262830/here-is-a-sketc...

teetertater 5y ago
Depressing but interesting. Thanks for sharing. I have many friends from BC/Alberta that spent a year or two in the oil sands and made a boatload of money, I feel like this gives a good glimpse into it.

willmorrison 5y ago

Tom Scott made a great video on this: https://youtu.be/n-Ej2EtE744 https://youtu.be/n-Ej2EtE744

danboarder 5y ago

I'm wondering why they don't fire up the original pump system that drained the pit back in the mining days?

chasebank 5y ago
I wondered the same thing. I imagine it's because it used to pump the water out before it became toxic from absorbing the metals.
- akudha 5y ago
  That was my first thought too. They are spending so much money on gear and employing someone full time - wouldn't it be cheaper to just drain it? There must be a reason they aren't doing it. Also, he can't be there 24 hours - what happens if a bird lands on the water at night?
  - drjasonharrison 5y ago
    They are pumping water out, treating it and returning the water at a higher pH (more alkaline). But oxidized metal minerals plus rain water results in acid.
  - DFHippie 5y ago
    I assume the reason is that draining it just moves the toxins elsewhere. No one else wants to drink this stuff or have it in their surface water either.
    - grp000 5y ago
      Might also be an issue of rainwater collection, and then the enormous cost of filling the pit.
- drjasonharrison 5y ago
  More likely the water was pumped out when the mine was operating because digging, blasting, and other mining activities are easier when the equipment and people can breathe the atmosphere. I don't know when the pumps were turned off but it would have been after the mine ceased operations, possibly after the owners threatened to walk away completely. Because they could do that in the USA, and many other parts of the world.
blamazon 5y ago
In the Tom Scott video linked upthread, they cover this. The pit is being used as a hydraulic control device-collecting all the badness from a ridiculously vast (~10,000 miles) network of tunnels into one huge dilute volume. Then, they pipe it out to a water treatment plant and then back to the pit. They’ve been able to raise the pH from mid-2 to mid-4 this way.
client4 5y ago
The filtration and pumps in Butte are suprisingly world class.

tofof 5y ago

It's frustrating that the description of the video and the first few seconds of the video both establish a narrative of "acid cooking birds from the inside out" if they spend a few hours in the water, which makes absolutley zero sense. At no point in the entire video is that claim revisisted or explained.

blamazon 5y ago
Migrating birds stopping to rest in water tend to drink the water. Once inside the body, if the water is too acidic, it begins breaking down cell walls and denaturing proteins. These actions are analogous to cooking.
- tofof 5y ago
  Except that the photos of injury they showed were damage to the duck's feet - i.e. not part of the digestive tract, and very much part of the body that's submerged in water the entire time the bird floats on a lake.
  - blamazon 5y ago
    Good catch, so they are probably ‘cooked’ from both ends topologically.
  - Retric 5y ago
    They don’t extract those birds at the moment of death, it’s likely most of that damage occurred after death. So sure, every part of bird exposed to the acid is causing harm, it’s just death is caused from the inside rather than damage to the birds skin. Further it’s likely their exposure is mostly from drinking thus inside out.
- pvaldes 5y ago
  If you put acid in a gut you have just more acid. Why we don't "cook from inside" each day then? This birds live and nest in the tundra; not a place short of acid soils and acid water. Again, why they don't dissolve resting all day in permafrost mud? So maybe they should consider a different explanation? Lack of food in tired migrant birds?, because nothing grows in that waters... plus poisons in water. Lead maybe?. Keep shooting. Birds remaining too much time in the water could be solved providing a few artificial islands in the center. Even building a second pond with healthy water a few thousand meters away would be more simple and even cheaper that shooting at birds all the time for years (after all they have a lot of digging machines available yet). Smaller pool with food or big pool without any food? Does not seem like a difficult choice. Give them protection and food and will say goodbye in a heartbeat. More simple but less funny, of course. Apart of that, the number of man-hours spent on this looks like a total waste. And putting chalk in the water would fix it and should be doable, because you just need to reach safe tundra levels, that are very acidic yet. Chalk is relatively cheap. Why is that "too expensive" for the company?. Better kill the animals instead to do something really useful?.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

throwawaysea 5y ago

So are they going to have this person or persons man the pit indefinitely? I see they have some automated measures like the propane cannon but at some point shouldn’t they just put a net on top of the whole pit to keep birds off it?

guerrilla 5y ago
Or float those plastic balls [1] on it, like they do for some reservoirs to stop evaporation. It'd take a lot of them, but that'd work and could be both cheaper and more permanent. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxPdPpi5W4o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uxPdPpi5W4o
- bmitc 5y ago
  I was wondering the same thing about a net, and those plastic balls are interesting. The manual solution(s) just don't seem that efficient.
- scottlawson 5y ago
  I also wondered about the net. Never considered the ball idea, that's very interesting. One thing the video doesn't cover is potential other solutions there are for protecting birds. Maybe they have just been doing it for such a long time that nobody thinks about alternative solutions, combined with the fact that they have already spent money into the bird hut and other equipment and further investments in alternatives would just not have a higher net present value.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
micromacrofoot 5y ago
not indefinitely, just until people stop paying attention
sjwalter 5y ago
This case in Butte is somewhat better than usual because BP is actually footing the remediation bill. More typical is having the taxpayers foot the bill, like with the fascinating example of Giant Mine, 5km outside of Yellowknife, the capital of Canada's Northwest Territories. Some 200 kilotonnes of arsenic trioxide were created as byproducts of the mining process, enough arsenic dust to kill off every human and animal on earth. Once the company (and the company that bought the company) that mined the gold went belly up, the government is stuck footing the bill for remediation. The remediation plan is to indefinitely freeze, using compressors like used for hockey rinks, the arsenic underground. An eternal, ongoing operation, costing >$1bn, costing more in present-day dollars than gold was even extracted from the mine, in order to avoid the arsenic seeping into the groundwater. Kind of hilarious the implicit bet on a stable society that this remediation plan entails. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine

ghastmaster 5y ago

The interesting thing that this video does not show you, is that they are likely killing some of the animals on purpose. A USDA Wildlife Management employee once gave a presentation on various pest animal control techniques to my class of wildlife science students. He spent some time controlling birds at airports. Birds learn that noises do not kill them. Eventually they ignore the noises. To fix this, every once and a while he had to make a kill with the stimulus. Some of the techniques in the video may not require occasional kills. I would love access to their logs. It would be interesting to see if indeed they are making occasional kills and how long it took to find the optimal interval.

bmitc 5y ago

I saw this video yesterday and one thing I wondered was, why isn't the company legally, and thus financially and criminally, held responsible for this disaster? If I as an individual dump a bunch of toxic waste, especially something that kills thousands of animals, then I would be held responsible in a vice grip-like manner. I never understand why if something is done by a company, or individual with large wealth, but at massive scale, they can simply get away with it.

gruez 5y ago
>I never understand why if something is done by a company, or individual with large wealth, but at massive scale, they can simply get away with it. because limited liability. The solution, obviously is to recognize that they have limited liability and not extend them "credit". In this case the "credit" is letting them do environmental damage on the expectation that they'll "pay back" remediation costs. Force them to pay a deposit upfront prior to a mining permit being granted. see also: "It Pays to Not Pay Your Debts" https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-14/it-pays-to-not-pay-your-debts https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2021-10-14/it-pay...
- bmitc 5y ago
  That seems to just partly explain the mechanism by which these companies get away with things.
reddog 5y ago
Because the company in the video -- Atlantic Richfield Company, aka ARCO -- acquired the pit in 1977 only to shut it down in 1982 after discovering what a white elephant it was. The company that actually dug the thousands of miles of tunnels and later the pit was Anaconda Copper (one of the most rapacious, amoral corporations to ever exist) which went belly up in 1983. Anaconda Copper made fortunes for the usual suspects like the Rockefellers and Rothschilds throughout the 20th century. Good luck clawing any restoration money back from them after its been laundered through generations. If you ever find yourself driving though Butte I highly recommend a stop to see the Berkely pit, the access towers, the enviromental devestation and the excellent mining museum. Its facinating.

krick 5y ago

That's so backwards it's just depressing.

undersuit 5y ago

I spent the last week in Butte for Thanksgiving. We made our way up to an overlook of the pit on Friday. We got to hear the wailers mentioned; there were no other actions but the dump trucks running material from the still open parts of the mine. It's odd visiting the thing that's messed up so much of what I call home in Montana. I grew up in Missoula, downstream of Butte. That city also had a nearby superfund site, Milltown Dam, that had captured mining tailings washed downstream from Butte and the other town I visited Anaconda. Of course to escape Missoula once they removed the dam I moved to East Helena, home of the East Helena Slag Pile a remnant of when the ASARCO lead smelter spewed smoke all over the town.

noetic_techy 5y ago

I would think that some enterprising university could get the funds to set up an automated system with AI to recognize and shoot near the birds at a distance. Some decent learning in optics and AI to be had there. Sure that guy would lose his job, but it seems pointless to dedicate one man to do this all day.