Two environmental advocates recently came to Haines to discuss mining in the region. The Takshanuk Watershed Council hosted the talk at the Chilkat Center on Wednesday evening. 

Guy Archibald has a lifetime of experience with mining, working in uranium fields and oil shale in Utah and Colorado. Archibald was an analytical chemist for close to twenty years, working with companies on monitoring and testing wastewater from mining projects. It was his job to design sampling protocols. 

He now puts that expertise to work in reviewing the impacts of different mines. He was one of two advocates who  came to Haines to talk with residents about the potential impacts of the Palmer Project, a copper and zinc exploratory operation in the Chilkat watershed. 

He compares it to the greens creek mine, also known as Hecla, on Admiralty island

He has had an interest in the Greens Creek mine since they first were issued a wastewater discharge permit.

Archibald: “And I figured well the first one out the door is probably something I should look at, because things tend to start out good and then deteriorate over time.”

Recently, Archibald was contracted by the nonprofit Friends of Admiralty Island to study the impact of Greens Creek on its surrounding. To do this, he collected clam shells around the site. Living clams build up their shells using the minerals around them, so a shell is a time capsule showing what was in the environment at the time. Because Alaska’s land mass is rising out of the ocean, the higher off the beach he collected the shells, the further back he could see in time. 

Archibald says he saw significant lead level increases in the shells right around the time the mine started operating. This and other cues lead Archibald to suspect the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation does not require the mine to monitor its surroundings properly.

Archibald presented his findings on Wednesday night to a full crowd in the Haines Chilkat Center. One employee of the Hecla Greens Creek mine  criticized Archibald’s work. He said Archibald has few samples, where then mine collects tens of thousands. Archibald says that is beside the point.

Archibald: “So Hecla collects what is required of them from the state of Alaska. And they do a great job, and I have total respect for the amount of effort, coordination that goes into creating defensible data on that scale.” 

But he says in his view, the data collected by Hecla will not reveal the full impact of the mine.

Archibald: “Nowhere are they actually testing for the harm to the biological community. They are testing how many metals are in this tissue over and over and over again. And they are doing the very lowest order of organisms, it doesn’t say anything for the higher consumers, the deer, the eagle, the fish that eat those things.”

Archibald does not claim his study is definitive, but he wants the DEC to require Hecla to test its impact on the environment more thoroughly.

Gene McCabe manages the DEC’s wastewater discharge program. He says he looked at Archibald’s paper but hasn’t formed an opinion yet.

McCabe: “The tricky part with reports and data is taking that data and drawing this nice crisp line to a specific conclusion. The scientific community spends a lot of time discussing. Does the data support the conclusion? And that is really where we are taking that hard time to evaluate that, before we come out with a – do we agree with the conclusion, do we disagree? We are just not there yet.

Archibald and co-presenter Chris Zimmer of Rivers Without Borders say a gap in data collection has implications for Haines. The Palmer Project is regulated by the same agency. They say mine tailings would be stored in a similar fashion, with the same potential for pollution. During the presentation, Archibald and Zimmer were asked about their concerns for the Palmer Project.

Zimmer answered:

Zimmer: “Well we are concerned about the exploration activities and their potential to create acid mine drainage. We are worried about an uneconomical getting started, where it might get halfway done, the company then goes bankrupt, goes away, leaves a big mess, like we saw on the Tulsequah Chief [mine] in the Taku watershed, the other worry is that the questions we are asking now need to be answered now, not after the mine is built, or developed, because then it’s too late.”

American Pacific operates the Palmer Project. The company declined a request for comments.

Correction: A previous version of this story spelled Hecla as an acronym, the Hecla Greens Creek Mine is owned and operated by subsidiaries of Hecla Mining Company and Hecla is not an acronym.

DEC has issued a press release calling the Hawk inlet study misleading, and has additionnal information on it’s website.

Updates: A previous version of this story stateded the DEC’s Gene Mc Cabe had not qanswered further request for comment, he has since reached out. Here is partof the reply: “Greens Creek monitors for fugitive dust as a part of their monitoring plan, and reports those values to DEC as part of the requirements of their Waste Management Permit 2020DB0001, available at: https://dec.alaska.gov/Applications/Water/EDMS/nsite/map/results/detail/7657790493879920099/documents The specifics of the monitoring are contained in the Greens Creek General Plan of Operations, appendix 1, Integrated Monitoring Program, available at: https://dnr.alaska.gov/mlw/mining/large-mines/greens-creek/pdf/HGCMC-GPO-June-2020.pdf

At this time, our program has not initiated a further study, but we continue to review monitoring data supplied by their permits and review other literature, such as the clam study, to inform our permit decisions.”

Below is an edited audio of Guy Archibald addressing the DEC’s comment on the Hawk inlet study.

And the transcript:

Archibald: “So the response to DEC, I also noticed they apparently sent it out to the media, because it was in the news, didn’t seem like the media was an appropriate place to have this debate. But, you know, I’ve been perfectly willing to state the limitations of any certain study or any certain data set. So I find it interesting that it’s on me to identify the limitations of Hecla mining zone data set, but I can certainly do that.

So in general, they talk about how they’re testing the water and the water meets the water quality standards. So then the ecosystem is protected by all water quality standards, or the, you know, entire picture of the ecosystem. And again, like they’ve said at the meeting the other night, the EPA defines an ecological community, as including all populations of animals occupying a given area. The Supplemental Draft EIS states over and over again, for every type of tissue they sample above, quote, “As discussed above, tissue concentrations are not useful predictors of adverse effects to aquatic communities, but they can provide information for determining long term trends to the environment.”

So again, they’re taking tissue samples of lower level benthic worm muscles, in there extrapolating that the entire biological community and Hawk inlet is being protected. And then again, just not taking the data required to show that, and the statements within the EIS state that very clearly, and I don’t know what else to say about it.

You know, I do realize that the contaminated area, they talk about the impaired water body from the 1989 Spill.

Because the objective of our study was to determine where the lead was coming from, whether it was manmade, or natural sources, we didn’t actually include that contaminated site, because we know where that came from, that came from a spill of concentrate back in 1989. And the DECC will tell you, rightfully so, that the concentrations of lead there are decreasing. From that spill, it’s attenuating. 

Well, lead is an element, just like gold cannot be created nor destroyed. So if it’s decreasing in one area, it’s just going somewhere else. It’s no different than gold coming down a river at very low concentrations. And then due to the characteristics of the general area and some gravity, it really concentrates itself into placer deposits, such as the deposits right above Haines here, and then people can go in and mine it. When it comes down to the river, it’s very dilute that it can really concentrate itself. So that lead coming from the contaminated area can really concentrate itself somewhere else.

They read the report and they came to their conclusions and they fall back on this idea that, you know, because they’re meeting water quality standards designed for an effluent pipe. And that a single point of tissue analysis, even no matter how often it’s repeated, is giving somehow information on the overall health of a very large and complex biological community.”