The Mining City has had no shortage of heroes over the years.

We had mining heroes like Manus Dugan and J.D. Moore. We’ve had sports heroes like Bob O’Billovich, Colt Anderson and Tommy Mellott.

We’ve had political heroes like Pat Williams, Jimmy Shea and Don Peoples. We’ve had so many military heroes that we can’t even keep track of them all.

Perhaps the one hero who has had a larger impact than all of them, though, is an unassuming Catholic nun who came to us from, of all places, Anaconda.

Yes, Sister Mary Jo McDonald is a hero, and environmental justice is her game.

Sister most famously got involved with an environmental cause in 1989. That is when residents of Butte were under an order to boil their drinking water because the tap water was not safe.

Sister was the lead plaintiff in a class-action lawsuit against the Butte Water Co. and billionaire owner Dennis Washington. She was joined in her fight by great people like Jim McDonald, Janet Lindh, Dale Rawlings, Dan Dolan and the aforementioned Jimmy Shea, who picked up some major victories over the all-powerful Anaconda Co. when he was mayor of Walkerville.

Thanks to that lawsuit and the vigilance of Sister Mary Jo and Co., Butte’s water is now safe, and the water operations have been turned over to Butte-Silver Bow.

When student sections from high school sports teams around the state chant “dirty water” at our teams, we can laugh at the ridiculousness of that claim thanks to people brave enough to stand up to giants.

Sister, though, was not done there. Later, she joined forces with Ron Davis and Fritz Daily in a fight to clean up Silver Bow Creek. Again, Sister was on the winning side of the monumental lawsuit, though an order by Judge Brad Newman was basically ignored by Butte-Silver Bow, British Petroleum and the State of Montana.

British Petroleum, by the way, is responsible for Superfund cleanup in Butte because the multi-billion-dollar foreign company bought the Atlantic Richfield Co., which bought the Anaconda Co.

Sister’s latest fight involves lead contamination in Butte. This time, we can all join her fight.

Earlier this year, the Environmental Protection Agency announced it was drastically lowering the action level in Butte for lead in residential soils and interior dust. That level is proposed to be dropped from 1,200 parts per million to 175 ppm.

The proposal will also greatly expand the boundary of the cleanup area. If testing in any house or yard inside that expanded zone hits that new level, it will have to be cleaned.

However, the EPA is planning to give those responsible for lowering the high poison levels — British Petroleum and Butte-Silver Bow — 25 years to reach compliance. Depending on how you read the proposal, they might have up to 40 years to clean up the expanded area.

That timeline is way too long.

Even though she now lives in Leavenworth, Kansas, Sister was one of the first to speak out against the timeline during a public meeting with the EPA last Monday at Montana Tech. She was joined by several other speakers, including Mike and Mickey Boysza, Erik Nylund, Rayelynn Brandl and a lowly column writer.

While we all applaud the lowering of the lead level, we don’t think we should have to go another couple of generations poisoning our children before that level is lowered.

We have already been exposed to lead. Our children have been exposed. It will be a shame if our children’s children are also exposed because the EPA and our local government decided that the financial interests of British Petroleum are more important than the health of our children.

At the meeting, Chief Executive J.P. Gallagher offered some fence-sitting remarks that indicated he is not about to push for faster action. As one of the meeting goers said, his comments could not have been more generic if they were on a cereal box.

Our chief executive, who actually reached out to Senators Steve Daines and Jon Tester in 2021 to try to weaken lead standards for affordable housing governed by the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development, made it perfectly clear that he still isn’t on our side.

We are going to have to fight this one for ourselves.

That seems crazy because, as Sister pointed out, Bangladesh, a third-world country, successfully took action to protect its citizens from lead poisoning in the early 2000s. Yet, here in Butte we have to run everything past British Petroleum.

Other places around the country have received swifter environmental justice, too. In Omaha, Nebraska and St. Louis, Missouri, citizens see thousands of houses and yards cleaned up each year.

In Butte, the Residential Metals Abatement Program (RMAP) cleaned an average of about 50 properties each year since 1992. Each year, we sample an average of about 640 yards and houses. 

Even if those numbers were doubled, they would still be criminally low.

Recently in Black Eagle, Montana, a contractor tested 70 yards in one day. At that pace, the contractor could test more properties in 10 days than we do in one trip around the sun.

At the rate our RMAP program is operating, there is no way we will get all our contaminated homes tested and cleaned this century, let alone within the 25 or 40 years the EPA is proposing to allow.

By the way, that is not a shot at the people who do the work in Butte. Those workers climb into some attics that are full of hazardous material for not nearly enough pay, and Butte-Silver Bow doesn’t even give them decontamination showers to clean themselves at their shop.

Since October of 2023, the RMAP workers have had to drive their personal vehicles from the new shop at the old National Guard Armory building to Ridge Waters Water Park so they can take “decontamination showers.”

In addition to possibly contaminating the changing rooms at the water park, they risk bringing contamination into their vehicles and homes.

By the way, when those workers complained about the lack of showers to the EPA, they were told their boss will contract out their jobs and lay them all off if they keep pushing this issue.

As Nylund and Brandl pointed out, the process to bring Butte’s yards and homes to the new lead levels could easily be sped up. This can be done by forcing British Petroleum to hire contracts to help with the work already being done by the RMAP program.

There is no legitimate reason that we can’t make sure this timeline is measured in single digit years instead of decades.

The children of Butte and the future children of Butte deserve as much.

That is why we all should join Sister in her fight. Go to buttewatchdogs.org and sign up to be part of the new group “Butte Watchdogs for Social & Environmental Justice.” Evan Barrett, Mick Ringsak and Sister Mary Jo are the original members of that group, and Nylund is an advisor.

The Watchdogs will lead the way as we fight for Superfund cleanup that puts the people ahead of a foreign oil company. When our government tries to cut backroom deals that compromise the safety of the citizens, the Watchdogs will be there to shine a light on their secrecy.

We are already seeing the bite in those Watchdogs as the EPA tries to allow the poisoning of our children to continue for decades to come. We saw it when they shut down the “Dirty Dirt Train” earlier this year.

Those Watchdogs will only grow stronger with numbers.

The comment period for the EPA’s proposal runs through Feb. 14, 2025. Please send in your comments to EPAButtePPcomments@epa.gov.

Make sure to remind the EPA that its job is to actually protect the environment. Make sure to remind the agency that poisoning children is as wrong today as it will be 25 years from now.

Make sure to tell the EPA that the polluters should not get to decide how long we have to wait for them to clean up their mess.

Oh, and make sure to tell the EPA that you are fighting for the people of Butte alongside Sister Mary Jo McDonald.

If that doesn’t put a scare into them, nothing will.

 — Bill Foley, who wishes he could go back in time and meet Jimmy Shea, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 or Bluesky at @foles74.bsky.social. Listen to him on the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.