Water runs downhill
On Aug. 5, a crew from the
Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) was excavating an old leaking
mine in Colorado, when workers using a backhoe were surprised by a
deluge that came pouring out. Some three million gallons of waste
water from the abandoned Gold King Mine spilled into Cement Creek and
then into the Animas River.
An article on the Accuweather Web site
noted that the plume of toxic water deposited “dangerous metals,
such as lead, arsenic, cadmium and mercury along hundreds of miles
[of waterways] through three states.”
The City of Durango and La Plata County
reportedly declared states of emergency. The spill turned the Animas
River a sickly ochre shade and made its way south to the Navajo
Nation, where farmers in the northern part of the reservation face
ruin, with a ban on using river water for crops and livestock.
“Thousands of acres of farmland could dry up, and hundreds of
families could see their primary source of income disappear,”
according to New Times, a Phoenix newspaper.
Of course, it’s ironic that the EPA
caused this environmental disaster. But I wondered about the
implications for a proposed copper-nickel mining project near Hoyt
Lakes, in northeastern Minnesota. In numerous columns about PolyMet
Mining’s copper-nickel mine (the NorthMet Project), I’ve noted
that hard rock mining in the West has a miserable record in terms of
polluting groundwater and surface waters. Many mining firms have gone
bust and left the public on the hook to clean up the messes they
made.
So, does the Gold King Mine disaster
foretell what Minnesota might experience with the advent of
copper-nickel mining?
“It’s pretty different,” said
John Coleman, environmental section leader for the Great Lakes Indian
Fish & Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC), which provides natural
resource management expertise, conservation enforcement and legal and
policy analysis to 11 Ojibwe bands in Minnesota,Wisconsin and
Michigan.
“That was primarily gold mining,”
he added during a recent telephone conversation. “I mean, it’s a
lot of the same geochemical processes that generate contaminants; but
every mine site is different.”
Regarding the “same geochemical
processes,” Coleman points out that PolyMet, with its planned open
pit mine, would be “digging into sulfur-containing rock, and that
will generate acid and release heavy metals – and there’s a lot
of water. So there are a lot of similarities.”
He concludes, as far as the Gold King
“containment and remediation effort” that went bad, that
PolyMet’s project presents “a different scenario than what you
have in Colorado.”
This question was one part of our phone
chat; I called Coleman mainly to discuss what’s called the
Preliminary Final Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for the
NorthMet project. And while waiting to connect with him, the
Timberjay, the Iron Range newspaper, put out a story that seems to
seriously undermine one crucial aspect of the EIS.
The issue is loaded with hard to
understand technical terminology; but, basically, the environmental
review process – a collaboration among the Minnesota Department of
Natural Resources, the U.S. Forest Service and the U.S. Army Corps of
Engineers – botched the model for determining water flow through
the area of the proposed mine, in the view of GLIFWC’s Coleman.
In a June 18 letter to agency managers
responsible for the NorthMet EIS, Coleman wrote: “Since before
2008, GLIFWC staff have consistently raised concerns about the
quality and validity of the groundwater modeling at the mine site.
Most recently it has come to our attention that the mine site MODFLOW
model was incorrectly calibrated and unlikely to provide the
hydrologic characterization of the site that is needed in order to
perform adequate project impact evaluations.”
The EIS has looked at a flow of water
to the south of the project; but Coleman has pointed out that
contaminants from the mine likely would run north, into the Peter
Mitchell pits, a series of taconite pits that were used by Northshore
Mining. The pits are located high on the Laurentian Divide, where
water either runs south, toward the Gulf of Mexico, or north, to
Hudson Bay.
This area of concern raised by GLIFWC
should be addressed in the final EIS, which is due for release in
November. “We feel that [the EIS] shouldn’t be released until
they get some analysis done on what the impacts might be from
contaminants going north toward Birch Lake,” Coleman said, who
added, “There are a lot of implications related to things like
dewatering and wetlands; but they’ve been very reluctant to look at
interaction between this PolyMet project and the adjacent taconite
mine.”
