This is an archived article that was published on sltrib.com in 2006, and information in the article may be outdated. It is provided only for personal research purposes and may not be reprinted.
PARK CITY - They were partying in the streets in Prospector Square on Saturday, more than two decades after the EPA threatened to place the Park City neighborhood on its dreaded Superfund cleanup list of environmental hazards.
Cause for the celebration: Last month, the federal Environmental Protection Agency told the city the agency had "archived" Prospector Square - meaning that it no longer considers the area a health risk.
"As a Prospector resident, I'm absolutely thrilled," said Park City Mayor Dana Williams, who has lived there for 15 years.
"It's time for the neighborhood to dance in the street - and on one very well-capped lot," he said, referring to the 6 inches of soil placed in the late 1980s over silver mine tailings the neighborhood was built upon.
Prospector's annual summer lobster bash - held on Saturday on one of the area's few remaining empty lots - was billed this year as the "Prospector EPA-Free Zone Party," said organizer Joe Maslowski.
"We're celebrating a bit more this year because EPA has determined that the tailings problem is contained."
What it means is that property values are soaring, and both sellers and buyers have nothing to fear, Maslowski said. The neighborhood is so happy, they have even invited folks from the EPA to the celebration.
Prospector Square's travails began in the fall of 1983, when a soil analysis by the Utah Geological Survey showed abnormally high levels of heavy metals - lead, arsenic and cadmium.
The news, in 1984, that EPA had Prospector in its Superfund sights sent residents into a panic.
First, they grew angry as property values plummeted. Then, they became anxious for the health of their children after three residents were shown to have slightly elevated blood-lead levels.
"Everything pretty much flattened out and went in the tank," said longtime Park City realtor Mike Sloan. "But [in the long run] it didn't have the adverse effect we thought it would."
In 1984, you could buy a place in Prospector for $85,000. Today, that same house would be about $500,000, he said.
More frustrating, said Sloan, who was then a Prospector resident with a young family, was anxiety about children's health.
"I had my children tested three times, and nothing ever came of it," he said. "We didn't think there was a problem, but you can never be too safe."
Park City business leaders cringed, believing a Superfund designation could spell doom for the then-fledgling destination ski town.
"It was very bad for Park City as a destination," said Sally Elliot, a 20-year Prospector resident and former City Council member. "That's why the city worked so very hard to convince the EPA there was no health hazard."
She said it's about time Prospector and Park City emerged from the controversy.
"It's been a very long road," she said. "It was like they were going to punish us for living here."
City officials blanched in 1986 when Hugh Kaufman, EPA's assistant director of hazardous site control, compared the resort town to Love Canal - a chemical dump site uncovered in an upstate New York neighborhood.
"This cries out to have a massive testing in those homes to find the magnitude of the problem," Kaufman told The Salt Lake Tribune at the time.
Kaufman blasted then-Utah Sen. Jake Garn for amending the Superfund Reauthorization Act in 1985 to eliminate Prospector from the National Priorities List of cleanup sites. That legislation set up a tug of war between EPA and Park City over how to deal with Prospector Square.
Garn recalled last week that Park City officials had sought him out, complaining that state and federal agencies weren't using good science in their analysis of health risks at Prospector. Park City officials didn't believe that tailings from hard-rock mining presented a health hazard.
"If you get on the Superfund list, you have a real black eye," Garn said this week. "It's nice in hindsight to be proven right."
It was Park City's initiative that eventually placated the EPA, Garn said.
"That's a credit to the Park City people, who did their own studies and came up with their own solution" - the 6-inch soil cap.
Community members had feared that EPA would never resolve the issue, leaving Prospector and Park City under a sinister environmental cloud, said Ron Ivie, Park City's chief building official.
The city passed an ordinance demanding residents cover their lots with untainted dirt. It also established a special-improvement district to help them cover the costs. Ivie supervised the mitigation effort.
"The discussion since then has been, is [the cap] effective?"
For the past two decades, there has been no evidence of health risks to residents or visitors, Ivie noted.
Now, it's party time.