Turnagain Marine Construction’s crane and clamshell dredging device in Skagway’s Ore Basin. (Mike Swasey Photo)
Heavy metals have polluted Skagway’s harbor since at least the late 1980s when lead and zinc ore concentrates being loaded onto ships ended up in the water. The initial phase of cleanup began a few weeks ago using a clamshell dredging process. But Skagway’s tribe and environmentalists question whether the methods used will just stir up contaminants and spread them around.
It’s Thursday afternoon at Skagway’s harbor. A crane guides a rust-colored bucket that opens at the bottom to drop its payload onto a waiting barge. Over and over again it shovels dark sediment from the seafloor full of toxic heavy metals brought to Skagway from mines in Canada’s Yukon Territory.
The project uses a clamshell-type device that drops open-mouthed into the sediment on the harbor floor, closes then comes to the surface. There it pauses for a few moments while water pours out of the side of the clamshell, and it swings onto a filtration section of a barge.
Water flows through that filtration system and back into the harbor. The collected toxic sediment is mixed with concrete, put into Super Sacks for containment, and will eventually be landfilled in Washington State.
The Skagway Traditional Council’s Environmental Coordinator Reuben Cash has been watching the dredging process from shore.
“So the dredge clamshells, bringing up material from the bottom, it sits there and de-waters and then they load that onto the barge. But if you look at the back of that barge, you can see just a stream of black sludgy water pouring off of it,” said Cash. See the video of the clamshell in action and the dark water pouring off the barge here.
Anchorage’s Turnagain Marine Construction is the contractor doing the work. The company’s President Jason Davis admits it’s not a perfect process.
“There’s some drainage water that’s going to come off the side of that barge before it gets into our contained area where we filter it and mix it with cement and stabilize it,” said Davis.
When asked what the dust is that sometimes flies off the barge on windy days, Davis claimed he hadn’t heard of it.
His firm is responsible for removing at least 3,000 cubic yards of sediment. Initial DEC projections suggested that up to 200,000 cubic yards of sediment might eventually have to be removed before the cleanup is complete.
It’s suspected that there are significant amounts of contaminated sediment underneath the existing wooden ore dock that houses the ore loader. The leaseholder, White Pass & Yukon Route Railroad, has said testing cannot be done underneath the ore dock, which has been accepted by state regulators overseeing the project.
Turnagain Marine’s Jason Davis says, as someone who builds docks, that he doesn’t expect river sediment or currents to force the contaminated material that likely remains underneath the ore dock into the area they have dredged.
“The sedimentation from the river at that site has been very minimal. There’s not a regular need for navigational dredging. So I think that it would be really unlikely that you’re going to get sedimentation developing underneath the dock at a significant rate,” said Davis.
He says he expects that the project area will be contaminant-free upon completion. After the clamshell scoop process is finished the seafloor will be covered with a layer of clean sand.
Officials with the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation say turbidity levels have not been reported by the contractor that exceed state standards. Turbidity can happen during dredging as the contaminated sediment mixes with water and disperses. Nobody from the state regulatory agency is in Skagway monitoring the work.
But DEC’s Nick Waldo is the project manager for the cleanup, he says the monitoring is left up to the operators.
“There are contractors on site who are doing that monitoring and then they report back to us,” said Waldo.
He says that sediment can take hours or days to settle back to the bottom of the harbor after being introduced to the surface, depending on the size of the particles.
DEC’s 2018 Risk Assessment showed that the toxins from the harbor have been shown to bioaccumulate in sea life. That means when one small organism consumes a toxin and is then eaten by a bigger animal, that toxin is then absorbed by the bigger animal, and so on up the food chain.
To date, however, DEC says not enough data has been collected to determine whether or not seafood in the Skagway Harbor is safe to eat.
Guy Archibald is an environmental watchdog with Juneau-based Rivers Without Borders, he says there are more than just heavy metals to be worried about in the water in the Skagway Harbor.
“There’s not only a wide variety of metals beyond lead and zinc, but there’s PAH’s, you know, polyaromatic hydrocarbons those tend to be fuel constituents, and semi-volatiles and volatile organic compounds. There’s a lot of it there,” said Archibald.
According to the EPA’s Approved List of Impaired Waters from 2020, the harbor is also contaminated with Petroleum Hydrocarbons, oils, and grease.
“Personally, I would not eat any seafood, especially, you know, sessile meaning attached organisms, or, you know, like gumboots or any of the mollusks, you know, that live there constantly. I certainly wouldn’t eat anything at Skagway Harbor. You know, if there’s a salmon that’s just migrating through temporarily, that may be a different story,” said Archibald.
STC’s Reuben Cash says no place in the harbor is likely to be immune from bioaccumulated toxins.
“These are all mobile organisms, you know, they’re, they’re moving around. So, you know, someone that’s looking for crab off of the breakwater might be catching a crab that likes to cruise around in the Ore Terminal Basin,” said Cash.
There are signs advising residents to not consume raw seafood out of the Skagway Harbor because of the gray water released near the ferry peninsula from the wastewater treatment facility. Bathing in the area is also discouraged. But DEC says the data on bioaccumulation of heavy metals in the area is incomplete and it won’t make any further restrictions until further studies are done. Waldo says they have no plans to conduct such studies.
The Skagway Traditional Council is designing a long-term study of its own to investigate heavy metal bioaccumulation in sea life in the Skagway harbor but is awaiting certain EPA approvals.
Management of White Pass, whose partners include Carnival Corporation and Ketchikan-based Survey Point Holdings, says the project is going well and they expect to be finished in early April.
“It’s going well, it’s going well, we’re almost complete with the dredging portion of the operation,” said White Pass executive Tyler Rose.
He says the company hasn’t designed or committed to further cleanup work in the harbor.
“As far as future plans, you know, that is something that would require future planning and processes, etc.,” said Rose.
In addition to White Pass and Yukon Route Railroad, the Municipality of Skagway and the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority also known as AIDEA (Here’s AIDEA’s 2021 Ore Terminal Evaluation) are also named as potentially responsible parties for the cleanup of the Skagway harbor.
