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Now Daily has a fresh target of anxiety. A disturbing reading in one of 42 monitoring wells surrounding the lake suggests a possible reversal of seepage; instead of flowing toward the pit, the water may be heading away from it.
Old-timers have seen flooding before from the 3,500-mile labyrinth of tunnels and shafts that underlies the town. "Anything could happen down there; nobody really knows where the danger level is," says Frank Beavis, 64, who worked 30 years in the mines. One fear: the waters will rise to invade the aquifer and cause basement flooding and further contamination of Silver Bow Creek, a key waterway, already heavily polluted, that helps form the beginning of the Columbia River.
The Environmental Protection Agency and Montana officials insist that years before the danger level could be reached, some solution--treating the mess or mining it--will be in place to halt the lake's rise. The folk of Butte say they have endured worse crises: bloody labor turmoil in the early 1900s, an underground fire in 1917 that killed 168 men, and a century of giddy booms and sudden busts at the whim of the world price for copper. But Butte's destiny, as has happened before, will ultimately be decided by outside forces. Congress is currently trying to piece together a new Superfund law that could determine how fast--or how slowly--the cleanup of Montana's newest, deepest lake proceeds.