In Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, century-old copper mine waste is transforming a stretch of coast and a critical fish spawning reef into an apocalyptic moonscape.
KEWEENAW COUNTY, MI — Robert Regis was dumbstruck at the damage Lake Superior had wrought on his property., a massive storm struck the upper Midwest. Thanks to a coastline heavily altered by mining waste, huge waves from the largest Great Lake mounted the beach with ease, scouring the foundation of his house and removing several feet of topsoil from atop his septic drainage field, which is more than 100 yards from the water.
For comparison, that’s roughly what the long-awaited Soo Locks rebuild was supposed to cost before inflation and supply chain hurdles“This project is going to take a lot of Congressional horsepower,” said Steve Check, project manager with the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, Detroit District. “It is not going to be cheap to clean this up.”The sheer volume of stamp sand covering the Keweenaw coastline is difficult to comprehend.
If the encroaching stamp sands aren’t stopped, the reef will die. In fact, it’s already dying. After decades of filling up an ancient riverbed known as the “trough,” which functioned as a kind of natural moat, the sands are finally encircling and swallowing Buffalo Reef. Today, about 30 percent of the reef is covered.“The reef remains viable as a spawning area,” said Esteban Chiriboga, an environmental specialist at GLIFWC. “That’s what the telemetry data is showing.
Researchers worry that reef whitefish larvae may lack the energetic capacity for sustained swimming. After hatching, whitefish typically move to shallower water to grow before recruitment into the larger bay and lake fisheries. Unfortunately, between Gay and the Traverse River, that nearshore nursery is a bed of stamp sands.
On the eastern shore south of Gay, another mill dumped six billion pounds closer to L’Anse and Baraga, at, which the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community has been cleaning up with sandy loam caps seeded with native plantings to guard against erosion. In the decades after the mine closed in the 1930s, the sands moved farther south. Regis remembers the invasion hitting his stretch of beach north of the Traverse River mouth in the 1960s. Every year, the beach seemed to get about 10 feet wider.
In Torch Lake, mining pollution and stamp sands helped land the waterbody on the AOC list in 1987. The program aims to restore habitat, wetlands and natural areas around the Great Lakes. Earlier this year, the EPA announced Torch Lake asbenefitting from a $1 billion infrastructure law windfall that will accelerate cleanup efforts.
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