Dennis Gaddy

Dennis Gaddy Sr. was born in 1949 in San Bernardino, California, and studied chemical engineering. He came to Nevada in 1971 to work as the Production Superintendent for the Foote Mineral Company (now Cyprus Foote Mineral) at Silver Peak. Its extraction of lithium in the area offered steady employment to the community of Silver Peak. Gaddy was interviewed by Victoria Ford in 1996.

     In the 1960s and early 1970s, there was very little regulation—almost none. In the last ten to fifteen years [as of 2000] there has been a lot of federal legislation, which comes down to the state. As long as I can remember, we’ve had air-quality permits. I do that part for the company [Foote Mineral Company], and I inherited that from my predecessor. We never had to have a water-pollution control permit until, actually, during 1975 or so. We got what they call an NPDES [National Pollution Discharge Elimination Systems] permit, which is really not applicable to Nevada, because it’s for navigable water, but it was the closest thing that we could get to meet federal requirements.
     Then in the 1980s, with all of the changes that were going on in environmental legislation, the state started a water-pollution control permit program. What we have to do is send in a permit application, which in our case took about a ream paper, and that’s just providing them with enough information to make a decision on whether we should be operating or not.
     On the application, there is a cover sheet that tells who we are and the location, type of permit, and our general activities for the property, size, surface area disturbance (we have 6,300 acres), water flow at peak activity. And we have to send in all relevant plans, specifications, and designs and tell them where we’re going to get our water, our sources of water, and people who own land. Then we have to provide a geological assessment with maps. Weather data is required, and we have to actually research and go find out what our hundred-year event is and two hundred-year event [weather-related storms]. We have to send samples to be tested, so that we can determine if we’re going to have problems with contamination and toxic-leach procedures that the federal government came out with. Virtually everything we use out here that can leach into the ground has been tested, and that ensures that we aren’t going to contaminate the water with heavy metals or insecticides or poisons.