A proposal to expand the waste storage facility for Hecla Greens Creek mine on Admiralty Island is open to public comment for two more weeks.
Some environmentalists say the expansion shouldn’t move forward without more research to prove that toxic metals from mine waste haven’t damaged natural resources in the Tongass National Forest, where the mine operates.
“Are these metals bioaccumulating up the food chain?” said Guy Archibald, a contract environmental scientist with the nonprofit Friends of Admiralty Island. “We measure fugitive dust out in the environment. But is that being taken up by the plants, then in turn being concentrated through the deer? And the eagles ?”
Extending the life of the mine
Greens Creek is the nation’s largest silver producer. They mine gold, zinc and lead too. They’re also one of Juneau’s more prominent and profitable private employers.
The waste facility in question stores tailings — ground rock that is left over from the extraction of valuable metals. It’s stored and managed in piles on the mine’s grounds. Tailings are the source of what’s called fugitive dust — fine particles that have the potential to deposit toxic metals like lead in the environment.
This would be the third expansion of the waste facility since Greens Creek opened in 1989. The last one, which was approved in 2014, was smaller than the mine had hoped, which is why it lasted just 10 years.
From the mine’s perspective, the latest proposed expansion is routine.
“It’s really just a continuation of managing our tailings facility the way we always have,” said Mike Satre, manager of government and community relations for the mine. “But simply letting us add a little bit more space.”
Without it, the mine could run out of space by 2025. But if the expansion is approved, it would extend the mine’s operation for up to 40 years.
“What we really want to do here is not have to come back every 10 or 12 years to permit an expansion on an existing facility that’s been managed responsibly for decades now,” Satre said.
A baseline of pristine conditions
Though there are few outright opponents to the mine’s continued operation, nonprofit groups like Friends of Admiralty Island the and the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council feel that there is a need to take a step back. They want the U.S. Forest Service to replicate the original environmental studies that were done to record the “pristine” conditions before the mine opened.
“We need more baseline information that compares the existing situation to what it was before the mine started,” said John Neary, a retired Forest Service employee and President of Friends of Admiralty Island.
Greens Creek operates within the Admiralty Island National Monument in the Tongass National Forest, which requires higher environmental standards and oversight. They regularly monitor water quality, sediment and tissue samples from some marine animals like mussels, clams and sea worms in Hawk Inlet.
But Neary says that monitoring doesn’t do enough to ensure the health of subsistence resources in the inlet. Regular monitoring does not extend to things like deer, seal or some other food sources.
“One of our top concerns is that there are people that eat whatever occurs in the marine environment,” said Neary. “There are crabs and clams and halibut, so it needs to be safe enough for human consumption.”
The health of Hawk Inlet
Whether conditions in nearby Hawk Inlet are really uncontaminated is the question Archibald posed in a peer-reviewed study of clam shells he released last month with Friends of Admiralty Island.
It compared the shells of live clams collected from the inlet to shells from Young Bay, which is further away from the mine. The study found a 50% increase in lead levels in the Hawk Inlet shells and concluded that the lead came from the mine’s tailings facility.
Archibald’s study came out just before an environment impact report from the Forest Service, which considers four proposed plans to expand the tailings facilities. Contrary to Archibald’s study, that report said that marine conditions in Hawk Inlet remain unchanged from pre-mining conditions.
And both the mine and the state echoed that sentiment. In a recent press release, the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation called the clam shell study “misleading,” citing their own studies on clam tissue in the same areas.
“So there’s an overall conclusion that the mine is not significantly impacting Hawk Inlet,” Satre said
But Archibald says he’s not convinced by the tissue studies. He said he hopes the mine, along with the state and federal agencies, will conduct a more robust marine population study to assess the health of the inlet.
“This is the most profitable silver mine, I believe, in the United States,” said Archibald. “They need to be able to do a better job here.”
Future plans for fugitive dust
The Forest Service report acknowledges that some concerns about heavy metal pollution are legitimate. Fugitive dust has already been linked to contamination in nearby watersheds. Tributary Creek, which runs close to the existing tailings facility, was designated as an “impaired water body” by the state last year due to elevated levels of lead levels caused by the mine.
All of the proposed expansion alternatives have the potential to further spread fugitive dust. To address this, the Forest Service report calls for plans to further mitigate dust as the expansion moves forward.
Satre said Greens Creek has a good track record of meeting environmental quality standards, and he said the mine has already met with concerned stakeholders since the Forest Service report was released.
“We understand that there are stakeholders who are concerned,” Satre said. “We want to make sure that we’re responding to any of our agency and stakeholder concerns moving forward.”
Joe Zuboff is one of those stakeholders. He lives in Juneau but grew up in Angoon, where he returns each year for hunting and fishing.
“I’m not against mining, but I am against damage to the ecosystem,” he said during a public meeting held at the Forest Service Ranger Station in Juneau earlier this month. “And Angoon is just barely surviving. They depend on that ecosystem.”
He recalled a seal that was harvested in Angoon in 2016, which showed high levels of mercury contamination. The state said those elevated mercury levels could not be definitively linked to mining activities, but Zuboff still feels there is not enough environmental monitoring to address his concerns.
Public comments can be submitted online, by fax at 907-586-8809 or in-person at the Forest Service Ranger’s station in Juneau through May 8.
Correction: A previous version of this story identified Guy Archibald as an environmental scientist with the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council. He is a contract scientist for Friends of Admiralty Island.
