Tailings' End

Cleaner days for Silver Bay

For more than a decade, the pleasant Minnesota community of Silver Bay (pop. 3,500) on the western shore of Lake Superior was the locus of an epic environmental battle. At issue was the Reserve Mining Co.'s taconite plant, whose construction in 1952 had created the town. About 80% of the local labor force is employed at the $350 million facility, which turns trainloads of the flinty rock mined in the Mesabi Range into about 15% of the nation's iron ore supply. But Reserve also dumped 67,000 tons of tailings a day into the world's largest freshwater lake, thereby polluting it with tiny fibers similar to asbestos, a carcinogen. Recalls Jon Luoma, head of public relations for the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency: "If the sun was right, or you were in an airplane, you could actually see the tailings moving southwest toward Duluth. It looked like a green slime."

Would the plant have to shut down if state environmental officials won their battle to force the company to stop pouring its wastes into the lake? In a series of court fights, Reserve maintained the answer was yes, and pointed out that the end of the plant would mean the demise of the town too. And last week, obeying a 1976 order by a U.S. district court to stop dumping in the lake, the facility did close--though only until May. Then the plant will reopen and begin shipping its wastes by rail and pipeline to a huge inland basin. There the tailings will be deposited and kept covered under 10 ft. of water so that the fiber dust cannot escape. Speaking about his town, Silver Bay's Mayor Robert Kind, an officer in the state highway patrol, says happily: "Now I think we are going to hold on."

Enclosed in a remote marshy area by huge dams made of coarse tailings covered with vegetation, the mammoth basin measures nearly 6 sq. mi. and will cost $370 million when fully completed. The other costs of the long environmental dispute have also been large, ranging from such intangibles as fears in Silver Bay of a permanent plant shutdown (which local physicians blame for a flurry of marriage breakups and a rise in prescriptions for tranquilizers) to the $7 million that Duluth had to pay for a filtration plant when the city's drinking water was found to contain the asbestos-like fibers. Company spokesmen continue to maintain that the new basin is "not necessary" and that it was built "only because we were told to do it." But of course the whole problem might have been avoided if the lake had never been viewed as a convenient dump in the first place.

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