The Hecla Mining Company has been fined more than $140,00 by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency for mismanagement of hazardous waste at the Greens Creek Mine on Admiralty Island.
The silver mine in the Tongass National Forest racked up five violations during a 2019 inspection at the site.
Some of the violations were procedural, including a week of missed inspections and a tank of waste oil that was mislabeled. According to EPA attorney Shirin Gallagher those kinds of errors are pretty standard, but there was something else.
Gallagher: “I think the unusual aspect of this had to do with the leak from the storage building.”
Inspectors discovered that lead dust had escaped a storage building through a gap between the building’s walls and its foundation. That dust contaminated the soil around the perimeter with toxic levels of lead.
Hecla’s Director of Government Affairs Mike Satre said the company has worked to fix that by removing the contaminated soil.
Satre: We’re just doing some ongoing sampling to make sure that we’ve collected all of it. And we’ve redone the sheathing on the building. We’ve redone the insulation on the building, to ensure that it won’t leak through again.
The mine was also cited for improper disposal of tools used to mine metal ore and air filtration bags from the mine’s laboratory. Those items were not treated as hazardous waste even though EPA inspectors found that they had high amounts of lead.
Satre said the mine has changed procedures to address that violation too. Those items are now shipped out of state to a hazardous waste dump.
The EPA requires that the company continue cleanup and monitoring efforts under the supervision of the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation.
