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MAGNA - The wind chimes began to ring just after sunrise, which was noteworthy because they were hanging in Linda Walker's living room.
Then the kitchen chandelier swayed and the water in the fish tank sloshed gently back and forth.
"I was scared," Walker said.
At about 7:15 a.m. on Feb. 21, a magnitude 6.0 earthquake in eastern Nevada fractured foundations, toppled chimneys and cracked joists in the small town of Wells and sent seismic ripples into the Salt Lake Valley.
While Kennecott reported no movement on its enormous mine tailings pond, near Walker's house on the northeastern corner of Magna, people all over Salt Lake County felt the vibrations.
So the idea of a big earthquake striking the valley isn't far-fetched for Walker, who has lived in Magna for 12 years.
And now - with the revelation that Kennecott concealed the seismic risks facing the tailings pond less than a half mile away - the likelihood of a major temblor seems all the more terrifying for her.
Walker feels a little betrayed and deeply suspicious of the Utah copper giant, which used an undisclosed agent to sell her the home in 1996 - before Kennecott deemed the tailings impoundment safe.
"It won't be the first time industry has covered stuff up," she said.
Only this year did people in Walker's neighborhood learn from The Salt Lake Tribune of Kennecott's fears in the late 1980s that a big quake could unleash a thick river of mine tailings into their homes.
While Kennecott officials insist the risk is minuscule that the earthen walls of the impoundment might fail now, internal company correspondence reveals that it knowingly left Walker's Green Meadows Estates subdivision of more than 200 homes in peril.
Kennecott bought homes, built deflection berms and apparently spent more than $13 million to stabilize the southeast corner of the old tailing pond impoundment - all the while concealing, or downplaying, the risk.
"Not knowing the potential was that great, we lived here as little bubble-headed happy people," said Marilyn Bell.
"That's not fair. When you buy a house, you buy it in good faith," she said. "You expect the roof to stay on; you expect the walls to stay up, and you expect the light bulbs to burn out. But you don't expect the kind of potential that could totally devastate you in a matter of moments."
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The buyer: Early in the 1990s, a mysterious homebuyer snatched up 39 homes near the tailings pond, only to leave them vacant.
Long-timers haven't forgotten about the buying spree or the feverish speculation about the investor.
"After it was all over, you could figure out who it was," said Kirk Stephens, a Green Meadows homeowner since 1982 who suspected that Kennecott had something to do with the purchases. The company's internal documents confirm that Kennecott had bought the homes, many foreclosed upon and vacant, through an unidentified agent.
Kennecott's land manager, Keith Hansen, also openly approached several property owners on the north side of State Road 201 along 8000 West with offers. Some were accepted.
"They never mentioned at the time that the tailings impoundment was unsafe," said Marlene Norcross, who at the time lived in a home her father had built on 8000 West. "We were just told that they wanted our property as part of a buffer zone."
Kennecott officials never suggested that the sodden tailings could reach her home, although a company map showed her house was in the middle of the danger zone.
"I used to laugh about it," Norcross said. "They told me that if it [the wall] did fail it would only come right to the street and maybe slightly into the front yard. So I wasn't really terribly concerned."
It wasn't until later that Norcross began to question her home's safety. She remembers Kennecott crews working through the night in 1998 to build a 15-foot-high berm between her property and the tailings pond. She also remembers the company posting signs along the highway warning motorists not to continue if the signs' lights were flashing.
At the time of the purchases, Kennecott spokesman Greg Boyce had denied that the company's acquisitions along 8000 West had anything to do with the impoundment's instability, which some area residents had begun to suspect.
"There is no basis or foundation for that rumor," he told the Deseret News in a 1991 interview, saying that Kennecott simply wanted to create a larger buffer between its mining operations and private property.
But Kennecott had kept its fingerprints off the Green Meadows transactions.
"We knew it was a large corporation, but we didn't know who it was," Bell said. "There was a lot of chatter in the neighborhood - 'Who's buying these houses?' - because nobody moved into them."
The empty homes soon fell into disrepair. Kennecott tried renting them, according to internal company documents, but reversed course in 1995 and put them back on the market.
That's when Walker came looking for a home.
A forgotten campaign: Walker bought her house without hearing a peep about Kennecott's involvement in her neighborhood or about the potential safety problems with the tailings pond.
And when Kennecott officials say they launched a public relations campaign in 1998 to notify residents about the seismic upgrades to its impoundment, Walker again heard nothing of it.
"Seismic risk?" she asked, scanning a company news release from the time. "Are you kidding? I think I would remember that."
Today, Kennecott officials maintain that the PR campaign succeeded. Laura Jo McDermaid, former president of the Magna Area Chamber of Commerce, recalls a string of public forums during the late 1990s.
According to company documents, Kennecott hosted up to 17 public meetings and site tours of the tailings pond during a two-month period between June 1998 and July 1998.
Invitations went out to dozens of organizations, including the Utah Seismic Safety Commission, the state engineer and both Magna community councils. The company also contacted 68 households in the 269-home Green Meadows neighborhood, its documents indicate.
"Kennecott went to extra lengths to assure us they were doing all they could do," said McDermaid, who was a community councilwoman at the time.
The company touted its seismic upgrades and told community members that the tailings pond could safely survive even a 7.0 magnitude quake.
Kennecott was so proud of its community-outreach campaign that it wrote a "best practices" paper for an international mining association.
"As a responsible company, we have conducted extensive studies of the possible effects on our tailings impoundment of a major earthquake," wrote Tom Albanese, then-vice president of engineering and technical services and now president of Kennecott's parent company, Rio Tinto.
"According to a publication of the Utah Geological Survey, such an event would likely occur about once every 1,350 years," he wrote in a July 1998 news release. "While no matter how improbable an earthquake equivalent to around 7.0 on the Richter scale might be, we have been instituting further measures to mitigate its effect and safeguard the public."
What the community notification didn't include was that in the span of more than 10 years, three lawyers - one in-house and two consulting attorneys - had rebuked Kennecott executives for failing to warn the public about the possibility that the impoundment might fail in an earthquake.
'Water under the bridge': These days, some residents shrug and others steam.
"I knew there was a risk that it might collapse in an earthquake, but it's been so long since they've had a break that you just don't know," said Kirk Stevens, a homeowner since 1982. "It's just one of those gloom-and-doom stories you just don't worry about until it happens."
And for longtime resident Wayne Drage, he isn't putting his house on the market after learning of Kennecott's seismic stability secrets during the early 1990s.
Quite frankly, he said, "it is water under the bridge."
Not for Michael and Trina Winn.
Even if Kennecott is correct - that the tailings pond could withstand a significant seismic event - they say the pond's questionable history would have kept them from buying their starter home on Melville Drive.
"We looked at 30 houses before we chose this one," Michael Winn said. "We would have looked elsewhere."