How to Destroy a River and Create an Environmental Catastrophe in One Fell Swoop
(Trying to understand why every Brazilian mining catastrophe has been blacked-out by the Duluth News-Tribune)
***
The photos and videos in this
supplemental Duty to Warn column need to be viewed by everybody living
downstream from the proposed PolyMet mine tailings lagoon – scheduled to
be built near Hoyt Lakes, Minnesota, a St Louis River river-town in northeast Minnesota.
Hoyt Lakes is the northernmost of the 12 river towns on the St Louis
River estuary which empties into Lake Superior, the least polluted of
the Great Lakes. Superior is the largest freshwater lake in the
world (by surface area) and it contains 10% of the entire world’s
remaining fresh water.
Tens of thousands of people live
and fish and harvest wild rice and depend on the fresh water that is
provided by the St Louis River estuary. If what happened to the
permanently polluted river in Brazil a week ago happens to the proposed
PolyMet tailings lagoon, those 12 towns and their people will be severely – and permanently – impacted. Some of the towns may be destroyed and unknown numbers of people will be drowned, injured or displaced.
As has been described many times in
Duluth’s alternative news-weekly paper (the Duluth Reader but,
significantly, NEVER by the Duluth News-Tribune earthen-walled tailings
lagoon dams always leak but many of them totally collapse with
devastating results. (Please study the photos below and be certain to
click on the links to the 5 important videos below to fully understand
why the PolyMet dam is so dangerous and cannot be allowed to be built.
Last week’s column carried a lot of
text and so only there was only enough room for 4 photos,. and they
were necessarily too small to be appropriately impactful. Therefore this
week’s column will consist of less text and more images that should
alarm even the most unenlightened pro-copper mining legislator, the
co-opted DNR/PCA bureaucrats that have been granting PolyMet every
permit they have asked for up until the Brazil catastrophe and every
other copper mining advocate that has been intentionally deceived by
PolyMet regarding the lethal dangers of soluble earthen wall dams that
are supposed to – but can never – hold back toxic, highly acidic sulfide
slurry for eternity. Disaster in some form or another is inevitable,
and the river towns have not been warned.
Many environmentally-conscious
folks here in Minnesota’s northland have been ashamed of our regional
media outlets (especially the Duluth News-Tribune and the local media
affiliates of CBS. NBC, ABC, PBS. NPR, MPR and WPR) as they have been
black-listing the news of the recent disaster in Brazil’s mining
country. Nobody that I know can think of any reportage of the 2014
copper mine disaster in British Columbia or the 2015 disaster in Brazil
either.
The obviously intentional total
lack of coverage of what happened to Brazil’s “PolyMet-style” earthen
dam-walled tailings lagoons must at least be considered unethical and
could even be considered criminal. One hopes that there will be some
sort of explanation and apology in the future for their intentional lack
of coverage. There surely are ulterior motives involved in the
decisions to black-list what every other news outlet in the world has
deemed urgently newsworthy.
These news outlets – if they have
any honor at all – surely should be apologizing and asking for
forgiveness from the dozen river towns that rely on those media outlets
to keep them informed about lethal threats to their river (and our great
lake!).
***1. A 5 minute video of the 1-25-2019 Brazilian mine waste earthen dam disaster – the day after. Note a few of the surviving mine workers at 1:30; the destroyed high railroad bridge and torn RR tracks at 2 minutes; the doomed emaciated bull stuck in the mud at 3 minutes; the totaled mining company structures at 4 minutes; the CAT stuck in the mud at 4:20; the crumpled boxcars and destroyed train tracks at 5 minutes; and the partially-emptied tailings lagoon at the end.
2. This 5-minute video shows the first horrifying minute of the 1-25-2019 Brazilian earthen dam collapse.
3. A 6-minute video of the 11-15-2015 Samarco mine disaster which
includes a very informative computer simulation of the disaster.4. The first 6 minutes of this 25-minute video by Al Jazeera about the 2015 Samarco mine disaster shows the aftermath of the event 8 months later. The disaster displaced 6,000 residents of downstream villages.
5. A 5-minute-long video of what happens when earthen dams liquify and burst.
***
Futilely
digging and searching for the missing bodies of mine employees and
others buried in the sludge after the earthen tailings dam dissolved and
destroyed everything downstream. This shows what was once a relatively
narrow river.
Fish cannot survive such catastrophes, especially if highly toxic mine waste is involved.
More casualties of the breach.
More dead fish – died of asphyxiation. Any fish that managed to survive will be inedible due to ingested poison.
Farm animals didn’t fare well either. This animal survived but is still doomed.
Exhausted rescue workers.
Rescue
workers futilely searching for bodies buried in the soon-to-harden
sludge. Note the worker to the left unable to escape from his waist-deep
predicament.
An
overview of the massive partially emptied-out tailings lagoon (upper
left). Note the slightly smaller, still-intact, water/sludge-filled
tailings lagoon (lower left). The downstream devastation is represented
in of the photo
What’s left of the upper section of the massive tailings lagoon after it liquified and collapsed
Toxic sludge overflowing a highway farther downstream. Note the damaged farm field (lower right)
What’s
left of the Vale mining company’s administrative buildings, its
processing plant and assorted missing company structures, including the
cafeteria and the barracks where hundreds of miners were once housed
Destroyed downstream home
A sludge-demolished river-town home lies in ruins after the dam failure
Doomed vehicle soon to be entrapped when the toxic sludge dries into a brick-like consistency
The kitchen of a river town home. The water is poisonous.
Downstream
from the tailings dam. Note the tributary to the right that flows into
the main river was heavily contaminated when the flow reversed.
The open
pit mine at Brumadinho, Brazil as it appeared in 2008. The waste
generated at this mine was stored in nearby tailings lagoons, two of
which burst on Jan 25, 2019 after 4 years of dormancy.
The mine
waste-contaminated Atlantic Ocean (poisoned by mercur, arsenic, etc) at
the mouth of Brazil’s Rio Doce, once a healthy fishery, as it entered
the Atlantic Ocean days after the breach. The river and the ocean area
both remain polluted after 3 years. (This is what could happen to the St
Louis River and Lake Superior if the proposed PolyMet tailings lagoon
collapsed for any reason (including heavy rain deluge, over-topping,
liquification, earthquake or quiver, etc.)
Before and
after satellite photos of the Mount Polley copper mine area 2014. Note
that in the lower photo the tailings lagoon is empty, the 6 foot wide
Hazeltine Creek is visible from space, the freshly-poisoned Polley Lake
is no longer dark blue and there is floating debris in Quesnel Lake that
is visible from space!
Aerial
view of the 100 foot-tall earthen dam-wall of the Mount Polley gold and
copper mine tailings lagoon after it dissolved in 2014 and spewed highly
toxic sludge into Lake Quesnel, a world-famous salmon and trout
fishery. The narrow, tree-lined Hazeltine Creek that emptied into the
lake was 6 feet wide at its widest prior to the catastrophe (which was
the worst environmental disaster in the history of British Columbia)
Thousands of downstream trees were up-rooted and wound up in the lake,
which empties into the Fraser River and ultimately into the Pacific
Ocean. PolyMet’s tailings dam is projected to reach 250 feet in height.
A photo
taken 18 years after a 1974 tailings dam ruptured in Australia. Any
humans or animals that are buried in such disasters can never be
expected to be recovered in the dried, brick-like residue.
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Since his retirement from his holistic mental health practice, Dr Kohls
has been writing the weekly Duty to Warn column for the Duluth Reader,
Minnesota’s premier alternative newsweekly magazine. His columns, which
have been re-published all around the world for the last decade, deal
with a variety of justice issues, including the dangers of copper/nickel
sulfide mining in water-rich northeast Minnesota and the realities of
pro-corporate “Friendly” Fascism in America, militarism, racism,
malnutrition, Big Pharma’s over-drugging, Big Vaccine’s
over-vaccinating, Big Medicine’s over-screening and over-treating
agendas, as well as other movements that threaten human health, the
environment, democracy, civility and the sustainability of the planet
and the populace. Many of his columns have been archived at a number of
websites, including the following four:
All images in this article are from the author
The original source of this article is Global Research
Copyright © Dr. Gary G. Kohls, Global Research, 2019
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