Roadless Rule, Galore Creek Mine hot topics during SEACC visit

The Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, SEACC, was founded in 1970 to protect the land and wildlife of the Tongass National Forest. The SEACC board of directors is made up of people who have made this region their home, from Seattle to Yakutat. Current Board President Stephen Todd is a Wrangell resident. SEACC board members and staff all came to Wrangell this past week to hold meetings on topics they felt were of public interest. The main two topics that were brought up were the Roadless Rule and the Galore Creek Mine.

The council held a potluck dinner at at the community gym last Saturday night, March 2. During the meal, Executive Director Meredith Trainor brought up the Roadless Rule. The Roadless Rule was established in 2001, she explained, to protect roadless areas of the country. Currently, according to information passed out at the potluck, the Roadless Rule applies to over 50 million acres of inventoried land. In the Tongass, the rule prohibits the construction of logging roads. However, some projects are allowed for things like mining, hydropower, and even an aerial tram.

"The idea was that international forests all across the country, there are some places that are just a little further away from roads, a little more intact, and as a result have all the benefits that we think of when we think of wild lands," Trainor said. "That could be a really good deer foraging habitat, that could be other values like a great place to go bow hunting, or it could just be that there are some places ... we want to have them set aside."

In 2018, the state of Alaska petitioned the U.S. Department of Agriculture to exempt the Tongass from the Roadless Rule. Other states, such as Colorado and have exempted themselves from the law by creating state-specific Roadless Rules. SEACC's position is that removing the federal Roadless Rule would open up the Tongass to more timbering. In 2017, according to a flyer passed out at the potluck, the logging industry only represented one percent of all jobs in Southeast Alaska. As the Roadless Rule only prohibited logging roads, and not other projects, the council felt that keeping things as they are would be the best course of action for the forest. Trainor added that the majority of public comments the U.S. Forest Service has received as they began their scoping period of this project have been in favor of keeping the national Roadless Rule in place.

"The draft of the environmental impact statement will be coming out, probably, in July. Then there will be a 60 to 90 day review period, so that will give us 60 to 90 days to provide public comments and potentially turn out to public meetings if the Forest Service decides to hold those," said Dan Cannon, with SEACC.

Cannon said that those who are interested in helping SEACC can get involved in several ways. People can sign a pledge in favor of the 2001 Roadless Rule by texting the word "roadless" to 555-888. They will also be organizing people to write letters to the editors of newspapers, "days of action," and contacting state and national politicians as July draws closer.

The Roadless Rule was not the only thing SEACC wanted to bring to Wrangell's attention, however. Another meeting was held on Monday, March 4, at the Nolan Center. Guy Archibald, with SEACC, spoke about the planned Galore Creek Mine and the potential hazards it represented. The mine, he said, sits in the Galore Creek Valley over an area of 294,000 acres. Once it is up and running, it will be capable of mining 65,000 tons of ore per day. The mine is going for economy of size, he said. For all the mining being done, there will not be much by way of useful metals. For every ton of rock mined at Galore Creek, he said, it is estimated that the mine will produce only 12 pounds of copper, 0.01 ounces of gold, and 0.21 ounces of silver. Archibald also said that the real danger comes in the form of the mine's tailings dam. For those unfamiliar with mining, "tailings" are what is left over after valuable minerals are separated from the rest of the ore that is mined. Tailings are commonly dumped into a manmade pond or lake.

"Tailings dam: 900 feet tall, 475 million tons of tailings, about a quarter of which they know is going to be acid generating," Archibald said. "They're going to have to contain that under 53 feet of water, forever, to keep the oxygen away for them to go acidic."

One of the big fears is a tailings dam failure. If the dam were to collapse, Archibald said, all of that tailings, untreated water, and rubble from the dam itself would pour into the Galore Creek, which would then flow into the Stikine River. With a tailings dam of 900 feet tall, which is 345 feet taller than the Washington Monument, that is a lot of dangerous chemicals and materials flowing into the water and poisoning salmon habitats. Archibald pointed to the recent tailings dam failure of the Mt. Polley Mine in 2014, and also showed a video of a tailings dam failure of the Corrego de Feijao mine in Brazil, that killed several people.

"We talk a lot about, with tailings dams, about catastrophic failures, and that is a threat," Archibald said. "But it's the slow incremental buildup of metals and toxins that oftentimes are what will, over time, kill a salmon run."

There were several courses of action Archibald suggested to the audience, about how they could respond to the proposed mine. One was to put pressure on state and federal legislators. At the state level, he said that Governor Mike Dunleavy should re-start sharing information between British Columbia and Alaska, as well as reconvene the Bilateral Work Group. On a federal level, people who do not want the Galore Creek Mine to begin operations should call for action under the Boundary Waters Treaty. Archibald also suggested that people get in contact with Kate Haines, the manager of policy and legislation for the Environmental Assessment Office in British Columbia. The last environmental assessment given to the Galore Creek Mine was in 2007, Archibald said. Demanding a new assessment could only delay construction of the mine and hopefully, he said, scare off investors.