Matt Doll, Minnesota Environmental Partnership
On Monday, the Minnesota Court of Appeals unanimously overturned a decision by the Minnesota DNR not to require an environmental impact statement for Northshore Mining’s proposed expansion of its waste storage basin at Mile Post 7 in Lake County.
The Mile Post 7 tailings basin is an enormous pond, held back by dams, containing decades worth of waste tailings from Northshore Mining’s iron ore processing activities in Silver Bay. The site lies a few miles upstream from Beaver Bay and Silver Bay on Lake Superior, a well-known area for anyone who has spent time on Minnesota’s North Shore.
North Shore Mining has sought to expand the tailings basin to increase its waste storage, proposing to expand the area it covers by roughly a third and extend the height of its tailings dams. Those dams are the crux of the risk presented by Mile Post 7 – if they were to fail, the result would be a massive spill of mining waste that would heavily impact Silver Bay and Beaver Bay as well as Lake Superior.
It’s not certain just how bad the impact of a dam breach would be, but we have some idea of the consequences because of where the waste rock was going before Mile Post 7 was built: it was discharged directly into the Great Lake. Nearby residents noticed significant impacts on water quality, including drinking water in Duluth. The EPA stepped in, resulting in a court decision requiring stricter pollution controls and the construction of the storage basin.
Mile Post 7 is certainly an improvement over discharging waste into Lake Superior, but the more waste it stores, the greater the potential impacts of a spill, though the impacts have not been adequately studied by the DNR. That’s why Duluth leaders and MEP member groups including Water Legacy and Northeastern Minnesotans for Wilderness called for a full environmental impact statement (EIS) on the basin expansion. MEP published an Action Alert asking our subscribers to support a full EIS; more than 100 made their voices heard to the DNR.
The DNR disagreed, deciding last March to require a much shorter environmental assessment worksheet (EAW) for the expansion. WaterLegacy quickly appealed that decision, resulting in this week’s ruling. The Court of Appeals said that the DNR’s decisionmaking was arbitrary and capricious, and that it misinterpreted state regulations on when an expansion may be exempted from more stringent review.
This ruling doesn’t necessarily mean that the DNR is certain to issue an EIS rather than an EAW. The Court has required the DNR to reconsider the issue, though, and the DNR will have to approach it from a different angle now that its first approach was overturned. It’s yet another example in the pattern of the DNR’s permitting of mining operations being found lacking by the courts.
That’s unquestionably a victory for clean water and Minnesota’s environmental protections, and we thank WaterLegacy for leading this fight. Minnesotans on the North Shore can’t afford to live in uncertainty about Mile Post 7. The stakes for their drinking water and livelihoods and the vulnerable ecosystem are much too high.