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He tried to give me a Butte history lesson on Facebook.

“OK, we need to get over the much Fabled Dublin Gulch neighborhood,” he posted. “It no longer exists.”

That comment was from someone who is not from Butte but now lives in the Mining City. He thought he could tell me the difference between the Dublin Gulch and Corktown, apparently not realizing that I grew up in Corktown, the nearest neighbor to the Gulch.

The comment was posted below my Aug. 29 column where I exposed the secret plan to cover the Dublin Gulch with toxic slime that will be removed from the center of town as part of the cleanup work from the 2020 Consent Decree.

In one respect, the guy was right. The neighborhood of the Dublin Gulch no longer exists. Not even Redneck Kelly lives there anymore.

The Anaconda Co. stole the Dublin Gulch neighborhood just like it stole Meaderville and the McQueen.

If you go on Google maps, you can still see a few streets along with some foundations and trees from the McQueen just to the east of the Berkeley Pit. Meaderville has been completely engulfed by the Pit.

It is tragic that the people who so proudly came from those neighborhoods can never take their grandchildren and great-grandchildren there to show them where they grew up.

While all the houses were torn down decades ago, the Dublin Gulch is still there. You can look down from the walking trail at Foreman Park, which used to be the Mountain Con Mine yard, and see some foundations and relics from the time when the Gulch was a bustling neighborhood.

You can see where the Company built the Kelley Mine yard fence around the property of Redneck Kelly, who initially refused to sell to the company. So many people can go see where they lived as a child or where their parents and grandparents lived.

If that toxic slime is dumped there, the Dublin Gulch will be lost forever. We cannot let that happen. 

The funny thing is that the Allocation and Settlement Agreement of 2006 labeled the Gulch as historic. Sadly, though, the agreement was about the dumps in the old neighborhood, not the neighborhood itself.

It was part of one of the biggest lines of B.S. this side of former ARCO spokesperson Sandy Stash telling us that bad Canadian grain killed the geese who, by coincidence, landed in the water of the Berkeley Pit to die.

They don’t have to clean up the mine dump piles in the Dublin Gulch and around the Bell Diamond Mine because it is the “Historic Mining Landscape Area.”

Of course, those negotiation on our behalf — in secrecy — bought the line and left the dumps.

But they can’t have it both ways. If those little dump piles are historic, then they cannot disturb our history with new dumping. Right?

Of course, there is so much more than historic value hanging in the balance with this proposed dump site.

For one thing, they plan to dump the toxic — and potentially deadly — waste just across the fence from Foreman Park and a matter of yards away from the gazebo that hosts so many weddings, reunions and parties.

The dump site is about 100 yards away from houses at the end of East Center Street. It is probably 200 yards away from the house where I grew up.

This, of course, is the second time that we found out about a possible Consent Decree dump site near a Butte neighborhood by happenstance. In 2020, some people living near Copper Mountain Park and Timber Butte saw some surveyors in the neighborhood, and they asked some questions.

That led to an uproar and some angry meetings, and eventually Butte-Silver Bow, British Petroleum/Atlantic Richfield Co. and the Environmental Protection Agency announced that they were no longer considering that site.

After my column appeared about the plan to dump in the Dublin Gulch, I was told that some officials furiously scrambled to find out which dirty scumbag tipped me off about the latest secret dumping scheme.

Talk about misplaced outrage.

They say a good journalist never reveals his source, but in this case I will just to ease the minds of those worrisome officials. My source was my dad. He’s been retired for more than a decade, and he walks the trail nearly every day. 

Just like with the Timber Butte residents, my dad saw the surveyors. So, we started asking some questions, and the hemming and hawing that came along with the vague answers told us all we needed to know.

It’s not exactly meeting Deep Throat in a parking garage.

After that column, a meeting was scheduled with the residents of Centerville. It will be held on Oct. 17 at 6:30 p.m. in the parking lot at the end of East Center Street. If weather is bad, it will be held in the Centerville Fire Hall.

Representatives of BP/ARCO will be there, hopefully along with some members of the Council of Commissioners, the chief executive and the EPA. We need to pack that meeting to let them know that the Dublin Gulch is off limits.

We need to tell them that every neighborhood is off limits. Every. Single. Neighborhood.

Be ready, though. They are going to give us a bunch of answers that make it seem like dumping there is a good thing. They will tell us that it is the only option.

They are good at that. That’s why they have been getting the better of our county leaders, for the most part, for the last 30 years. As one friend pointed out, they have long been getting us to clip coupons for one of the world’s richest corporations.

Last year alone, British Petroleum took in $28 billion in profits. Not gross. Profits.

So, it’s safe to say that that company could spend a few million more to give Butte the cleanup it deserves. It is safe to say that it can afford to remove all the “grey fill” or “dirty dirt” instead of leaving so much contaminated material to haunt the future generations.

The company can afford to give us the cleanup Anaconda and Missoula got. It can afford to give the center of town a cleanup that matches the standard of the cleanup of the Parrott Tailings.

At the meeting, they will ask us to come up with other options for dumping, since all their other plans are suddenly no good.

We are not environmental engineers, and we are not the company that is responsible for the cleanup. So, that onus is not be on us. It is on BP/ARCO and the EPA.

But, since they want some suggestions, I have a couple that a friend shared with me.

One is to convey the toxic material and dump it in the Pit. That seems like a great, safe idea, and it would limit the use of haul trucks on the roads.

The other option he suggested is to dump it down a mine shaft, and we have lots of those.

As my friend’s better half said, then it would come full circle. The toxic material would return to the Earth from which it came.

Yes, there could be problems with the water level of the pit and mines if either of those options were chosen. You better believe that they will tell us of the many other barriers that will stop them from doing that.

The thing to keep in mind, though, is the No. 1 obstacle is money. BP has it, but it doesn’t want to spend it on us. 

Also, keep in mind that it wasn’t us who decided to turn off the pumps and let the Pit and mines fill up with water. That was ARCO’s great idea.

That right there is the key part of the history lesson that the guy on Facebook didn’t mention.

We didn’t make the mess, but we owe it to our children and grandchildren to make sure that Butte gets the cleanup it deserves.

We also owe it to our ancestors to make sure they keep that toxic slime the heck out of the Dublin Gulch.

— Bill Foley, who is always open to being schooled on Butte history, can be reached at foles74@gmail.com. Follow him at twitter.com/Foles74 before that billionaire weirdo ruins it. Listen to the ButteCast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify or wherever you find your favorite podcasts.