ROUNDUP – Monty Sealey had a full head of blonde hair when he started work to bring fresh water to Roundup.

On Aug. 13, when he and other officials celebrated the arrival of clean water to roughly 2,000 people’s faucets, Sealey’s hair was completely white.

Sealey was among a group of Roundup leaders who gathered more than 20 years ago to do something about their disconcerting water. The acidic groundwater coming from their faucets had long been discolored an orange-brown, tainted by minerals like iron and sulfates leaching from deposits and the nearby abandoned coal mine.

There was no easy answer to residents’ water woes, according to Bob Church, project manager at Great West Engineering. Most of the water rights on the nearby Musselshell River were already claimed, and the groundwater

See Full Page