Blog

“Why does the Boundary Waters need to be saved?” I was asked that question in late August when I joined nearly 100 others in volunteering at the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters booth at the Minnesota State Fair. I was happy to answer questions like that by sharing how the proposed sulfide-ore copper mining threatens the wildlife, habitat, interconnected waters and surrounding communities of the Boundary Waters.

Located to the right of a sausage stand and across from the turkey booth in the Dairy Building, our exhibit at the Great Minnesota Get Together featured expansive color maps of this spectacular wilderness area, three iPads for those who were interested in signing our pledge, a prize wheel where you could win fabulous prizes (aka “free stuff at the Fair”), a large video monitor showing our new animation video and a photo kiosk with a wilderness backdrop where people could send themselves a memento of their support.

As the morning wore on, orange stickers dotted the maps as people selected their favorite places in the Boundary Waters. And then the iPad screens had to be cleaned after being touched with fingers that had already seen their share of greasy fried food! One of the main benefits of being at the Fair is the sheer volume of people you can reach – we had seven staff members and volunteers at our booth and were consistently busy throughout my shift.

And, as we were in the Dairy Building, it seemed like everyone who walked by or stopped at our booth had ice cream. (I decided my favorite was the strawberry rhubarb sundae. I also decided that Great Old Broads for Wilderness was my favorite of all the partners listed in the booth.)

The overwhelming majority of people I had the chance to chat with were either unaware of the issue and interested in learning more or already knowledgeable about the topic and eager to sign our pledge. Several people thanked me for being there and one gentleman, with a look of bewilderment on his face, said “I don’t see how this is even a question.” It seemed one woman had specifically sought out our booth.  With a very serious expression on her face, she saw our petition and asked, “Where do I sign?” In addition to Minnesotans, we had visitors from Ohio and Illinois who weren’t familiar with the Boundary Waters, but had enjoyed their time at national parks and appreciated the efforts to conserve those areas.

As with most exhibitions, a few people politely declined to take our information (and one man memorably said, “I don’t want to know nothing about nothing”) but I was impressed because when I left to spend the rest of the day at the fair with my family (it’s a tradition), we had already collected nearly 300 signatures – pretty amazing for the first morning! I have portaged some of the lakes and used a few of the campgrounds in the Boundary Waters so I know firsthand what a privilege it is to have this pristine wilderness right here in Minnesota.

After all the deep fryers have been turned off and another state fair is in the books, the work of the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters continues. Onward!

During the 12 jam-packed days of the Minnesota State Fair, 90-some volunteers helped in the booth, more than 9,000 people signed our petition and more than 1,300 people and families used our photo kiosk to send pictures to decision makers.

As Ron Meador notes in MinnPost this week, it is an unrelated yet bizarre coincidence that the Animas River in Durango, Colorado, turned an eerie shade of mustard-yellow a few days after the one-year anniversary of Mount Polley copper mine’s tailings dam failure. Instead of the week being dominated by Mount Polley retrospectives, headlines are recounting a homegrown mining disaster a hundred years in the making. Though these mines are not in Minnesota, they have great bearing on proposals to dig into sulfide-bearing ore to extract copper and nickel. They are shocking displays of what can--and often does--go wrong in the hardrock mining industry, and should serve as a warning for those considering the impacts of placing sulfide-ore copper mines in the watershed of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and Voyageurs National Park. PHOTO: Jerry McBride/Durango Herald/AP

A year ago last week, the Mount Polley copper mine tailings dam burst unexpectedly and catastrophically. News reports called the breach “Canada’s worst mine disaster," and to this day, the long term environmental impact of the spill is unknown. As of April 2015, water flowing out of Hazeltine Creek into Quesnel Lake still had significantly elevated heavy metal concentrations and water in the Quesnel River, downstream of the lake, was still too murky for residents to drink. Heavy metals had built up in the sediment at the bottom of the lake, as well, giving rise to the concern that there will be additional pulses of metals as the lake water and sediments turn over and mix during natural seasonal variations, according to the Vancouver Sun. To make matters worse, the breach altered the very physical characteristics of Hazeltine Creek: it now resembles more of a carved rock canyon than a stream. Mount Polley shows us the potential for an unexpected catastrophic infrastructure failure at a modern mine operated by a company with an otherwise good reputation in a country with supposedly advanced mining regulations and environmental protection requirements. We have learned, however, that disasters happen even in those best-case circumstances. PHOTO: Jonathan Hayward/The Canadian Press

Before the Gold King Mine in Colorado released a torrent of acidic water into the Animas River, I had planned to follow up the Mount Polley anniversary notes with observations of other mines across North America that have made the news for unexpected releases of polluted materials into their surrounding environments. These fall into the category of contamination considered to be less individually severe but that occur more frequently than a catastrophic failure like the one at Mount Polley. For instance, British Columbia shut down the Yellow Giant underground gold mine on Banks Island in mid-July 2015 for releasing polluted materials into lakes, creeks and a wetland. Yellow Giant had only been operating for three months before it released an “unauthorized” discharge in March, and again released effluent and tailings in June and July. The same article references additional small spills occurring at the Myra Falls and Copper Mountain mines in British Columbia in the last year as well. These run-of-the-mine (as it were) spills fit into a larger context of the industry’s frequent leaks and spills due to infrastructure failure, human error or unexpected conditions. To some extent, these releases are simply expected to occur -- thus the distinction between an “authorized” and an “unauthorized” discharge.

What happens when polluted material makes it into the creeks, lakes, streams, wetlands and groundwater that surround a mine? It becomes incredibly difficult to monitor and clean up. Ask residents of Butte, Montana, who are locked in a debate with the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) over whether a plume of metal-contaminated leach water is creeping toward the Silver Bow Creek, part of which was recently restored. Experts in mine waste remediation cannot agree what to do with the Parrot mine’s pile of tailings that has sat in the center of town since at least 1906. Over 100 years later, residents still fear the uncontrolled underground spread of contaminants, and must live with the toxic legacy of one the nation’s largest mining booms.

A similar theme can be found in the in-depht articles discussing the Gold King mine spill. As Jonathan Thompson reported in High Country News, water pollution has been ongoing since miners first started digging up minerals in the Animas River watershed in the 1870s. A complicated series of corporate responsibility handoffs and ultimately legal and technical difficulties allowed water to build up in three mines, including the Gold King. Contaminated water seeped out of them, untreated, into tributaries of the Animas River. The EPA, in its efforts to address the thorny, complex problem of ongoing runoff, proved just how difficult it is to clean up mine waste: it accidentally triggered an even larger spill of an estimated 3 million gallons of acidic mine seepage water and sludge that turned the Animas River orange. The complexity of the issue is truly stunning, and it is instructive how promises of mitigation, remediation and responsibility for water treatment in perpetuity ring false.

Mt. Polley. Yellow Giant. Myra Falls. Copper Mountain. Parrot. Gold King. Though these mines are far away from the Boundary Waters, we must learn from their failures. If we don’t, then the pristine water of the Boundary Waters and Voyageurs National Park will be at risk for decades --and centuries--of contamination. As the diverse array of mine failures in the past year has shown us, the complexity of mining pollution makes prevention and clean-up incredibly difficult. The only fail-safe way to protect the Boundary Waters and Voyageurs from sulfide-ore copper mining pollution is to prevent it from occurring in their watershed in the first place.

Rachel Garwin is the Campaign's policy director. She holds an M.S. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. Every month, Science Desk will include our latest scientific support and share a deeper understanding of the potential environmental impact from sulfide-ore copper mining near the Boundary Waters.

By now, you’ve no doubt heard that Twin Metals proposes to build a massive underground mine on the edge of the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness and upstream from Voyageurs National Park. Minnesota Public Radio described the resulting operation as a “vast underground city.” Though used to downplay concerns about the impact of the mining activity, the underground design still leaves plenty of pathways for significant negative environmental impact. Putting aside the fact that Twin Metals’ own Pre-Feasibility Statement states that the Maturi Southwest deposit “will likely be mined to the surface at some point in the future” (see PFS [PDF], page 14-30), it is crucial to understand the multitude of ways an underground mine will still impact the surface.

Two months ago, we detailed the toxic leaks, seeps and spills that are likely to occur. These byproducts result from surface waste storage ponds; the tailings storage facility slated to hold 234 million tons of toxic tailings; the tailing pipelines throughout the area; and even from the underground caverns themselves.

Last month, we discussed the habitat loss and fragmentation from paste plants; a 1,000-acre concentrator plant facility; a 7,000-acre tailings storage facility; and increased traffic. What would that surface infrastructure look like, and what impact would it have on the environment? Underground mine infrastructure from other parts of the world, such as the world’s largest underground copper mine in El Teniente, Chile, (pictured left) can give us a sense.

Other infrastructure would include four paste plants built above the Maturi and Maturi Southwest deposits. These industrial plants would mix tailings, cement and fly ash before the mixture is then pumped underground. Thirteen ventilation facilities are currently planned to be built, to ensure miners deep underground have sufficient air to breathe, and these systems can be quite large. The axial-flow ventilation at the Kriel coal mine in South Africa (pictured right, photo courtesy of Dr. Steven Bluhm) and the Turf No. 3 Vent Shaft at Newmon’s Leeville underground mine in Nevada (pictured left, below) are some examples of ventilation facilities used with this type of mining.

Besides the destructive physical footprint and negative visual impact of these facilities, they would have a noticeable noise impact. Fans from the ventilation facilities, diesel engines from round-the-clock truck transport and even surface crushing of ore (for at least 13 years) would drown out the natural sounds of the Northwoods. In addition to disturbing human environment, the constant and continued noise pollution could have severe impacts to wildlife.

Studies have shown that noise alone can harm birds, as detailed in a recent New York Times article. When researchers built a phantom road out of speakers, birds affected by the noise had significantly less body weight when the road was “on” than when it was “off.” The researchers in that study and others hypothesize that when too much noise drowns out the early warning systems birds and other animals use to warn of predators, they spend too much time worried about being eaten and not enough time looking for food. Combined with a harsh northern Minnesota winter, the impacts of such constant noise could be disastrous.

These examples of surface infrastructure are not the only ones that would be involved in building and running a “vast underground city.” A truly massive industrial zone would have to be created on the surface to support the workers, trucks and machinery busy at work below. Fueling stations, high voltage transmission lines (with their own distinct hum), chemical storage tanks, water retention ponds and even sewage storage or treatment facilities would create their very own surface city on top of the one underground.

Rachel Garwin is the Campaign's policy director. She holds an M.S. in Natural Resources from the University of Vermont. Every month, Science Desk will include our latest scientific support and share a deeper understanding of the potential environmental impact from sulfide-ore copper mining near the Boundary Waters.

Two months ago, I loaded up my parents’ Subaru with all of my belongings, my kayak strapped firmly to the roof, and made the roughly four-and-a-half-hour trip north from St. Paul to Ely, Minnesota. It was not an unfamiliar drive, but rather one that brought back memories of countless journeys that I had made to Ely and the Boundary Waters with my family and friends throughout my young life. Despite the nostalgia, as we neared Ely, I could not deny that this adventure had a decidedly different feel to it, as well as a different purpose.

I made the decision to move to Ely in large part because of the surrounding wilderness, the endless miles of forest to be hiked and waters to be paddled. I also came here to answer a call from this very same wilderness which has given me so much, a call for defenders who will work to protect this uniquely special place now when it needs them most.

I am an intern here at Sustainable Ely, the home of the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters. Along with our Northeast Regional Organizer Jake Flaherty and our fabulous team of passionate volunteers, I help keep the office staffed from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m., 7 days a week.

Our mission is to spread awareness about the threat to the Boundary Waters Canoe Area from proposed sulfide-ore copper mining to the people who come to Ely to enjoy this precious wilderness. We work to educate and provide accurate information to visitors about this newest threat to the Boundary Waters, share what this wilderness means to the region and to the 250,000 people who visit this national treasure annually, and tell them how we can all contribute to the effort to protect it.

We also bring the Campaign to exciting events in and around the community, such as the Fourth of July Parade and Blueberry Arts Festival in Ely and the Boundary Waters Expo on the Gunflint Trail. Sustainable Ely also works with the many local businesses who recognize the value of the Boundary Waters and help us in our efforts to protect it by promoting our growing national movement.

If you find yourself in Ely, be sure to stop by. We have a large selection of of brochures and educational materials that will help you understand the issue and let you know why it is so important that we act now to protect this wilderness. Sustainable Ely also has a number of displays that explain where these sulfide-ore copper mines are proposed and the areas that they could impact. These resources are intended to help visitors take an informed stance with regards to proposed sulfide-ore copper mining in the Boundary Waters watershed, but also to provide our supporters with the tools that they need to educate their friends and family about this issue.

The staff at Sustainable Ely are knowledgeable and always excited to have a conversation about protecting the Boundary Waters, a place that we all love and that we want to make sure is here for future generations.

Please come visit us here on 206 E. Sheridan Street to find out more about the Campaign to Save the Boundary Waters, chat with me about paddling, talk to Jake about fishing hotspots, or find out about the best places to visit in town from the longtime residents of Ely who volunteer here daily. Before you leave, be sure to sign your name on one of our Wenonah canoes and our petition in support of the National Park and Wilderness Waters Protection Forever Act to permanently protect the Boundary Waters from the dangers of sulfide-ore copper mining.

Photo Credit: Becca Dilley