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Mountain top removal coal mining in the Elk Valley in British Columbia. COURTESY GARTH LENZ
hoved down our throat.”
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prompted by “public concern about the impacts of upstream resource extraction and the impact on the lake itself.”
“The main objective is to protect the uses of Lake Koocanusa by determining water monitoring methods through sci- ence-based research,” Sokal said.
But as researchers try to divine a sci- entific model for determining a numeric water quality standard, industry offi- cials are struggling to treat the water dis- charged from the coal mines.
All five Teck mines are open-pit, truck- and-shovel mines. As part of its water quality plan, Teck opened the first of six water treatment plants, a $120 mil- lion treatment plant called the West Line Creek Water Treatment Facility, to remove selenium and other contaminants from Line Creek.
However, the facility was taken off line last October because of a fish kill down- stream from the plant. Teck officials have since attributed the cause of the fish kill to nitrite, in combination with high oxy- gen levels and “other constituents” in the treatment facility discharge water, including ammonia, hydrogen sulfide and
ALLED THE LAKE KOOCANUSA Monitoring and Research Working Group, the collaboration is meant
to coordinate efforts between the U.S. and Canada, “solicit feedback from inter- ested parties, and gauge the interest and availability of technical experts.” The first meeting will focus on selenium and how to proceed toward the development of selenium criteria for Lake Koocanusa.
The working group, which meets Oct. 29 at Riverstone Family Lodge in Eureka, is made up of a steering committee com- posed of representatives from the EPA, DEQ, the B.C. Ministry of the Environ- ment and Environment Canada; a moni- toring and research committee of repre- sentatives from organizations involved in monitoring and research on Lake Koo- canusa, as well as experts in the field of selenium; and a stakeholder committee that includes “all persons with an inter- est in the lake.”
According to Michael Sokal, a biolo- gist with the Ministry of Environment, the formation of the working group was
carbohydrates that are “normally man- aged within the biological treatment pro- cess,” according to a Teck news release.
The Line Creek facility was the first to open as part of Teck’s $600 million, five- year plan to address the pollution threat to westslope cutthroat trout and other aquatic life in the Elk Valley, and its clo- sure illustrates the challenges of such a large-scale cleanup.
The “aquatic constituents” were released as the result of a problem with the startup of the plant and a total of 74 dead fish were found in the area between Oct. 16 and Nov. 5. The facility was imme- diately shut down following the incident and will not be fully operational until at least this fall.
“We accept responsibility for this unfortunate occurrence and are now working to restart the facility and imple- ment measures to prevent a reoccur- rence,” said Robin Sheremeta, Vice Pres- ident of Coal Operations. “Teck is com- mitted to learning from this incident and implementing the measures necessary to maintain water quality and aquatic
HE WORSENING SITUATION IN the Elk has prompted some envi- ronmental groups to call for the
companies to discontinue mining oper- ations, but researchers say the existing piles of accumulated mining spoil will continue leaching into the transbound- ary waterways regardless of whether the mines are active.
“If you stopped mining in the Elk tomorrow, it’s not that you’d experience decades of problems, it’s that you’d expe- rience centuries of problems,” Naftz, the USGS researcher, said. “Whatever the solution is, it’s going to be much more sig- nificant than what people are admitting to right now.”
Sexton echoed his concerns, saying the most glaring issue with the industry-led plan to mitigate the problem to date – besides the apparent ineffectiveness of the treatment facility – is that it did not include Lake Koocanusa, which remains one of the biggest concerns of U.S. regula- tors and researchers as levels of selenium and other hazardous mining byproducts continue to spike.
If it’s too late to save the Elk, they say, then the broad-based research efforts and funding resources should be diverted to its downstream waterways.
“The Elk River is shot at this point. Its story has been told and it’s now a matter of remediation,” Sexton told the Flathead Basin Commission last November, add- ing that contaminants are causing spinal deformities in westslope cutthroat trout in the Elk River and adversely impacting reproduction. “We need to ensure the same thing doesn’t happen downstream in Montana.”
Jason Gildea, a hydrologist with the state’s EPA office, said new science has already prompted the agency to take a
look at its current selenium standards, which allows water concentrations of 5 micrograms per liter, much higher than the Canadian standard of 2 micrograms per liter, which is again higher than the new proposed standard of 1.2 micro- grams per liter.
But the selenium levels in Koocanusa are already bumping up against and exceeding those levels, while the sele- nium levels in the Elk River below the mines far exceed them, reaching 70 micrograms per liter in some places with a rough average of 45 micrograms per liter.
“It’s a crisis,” Sexton said.
Gildea said the EPA has been working on adopting new numbers for years.
“There has been a ton of new selenium science in the past 10 years spurred by all the coal mines and we just realized that it was a much bigger deal than we initially thought and that the numbers should be quite a bit lower than we ini- tially thought,” he said.
Naftz said the scope of the problem in Koocanusa is even more disturbing because of the dearth of science-based research and the lack of traction in the public purview. In terms of head- line-grabbing aquatic pollutants, sele- nium hasn’t been particularly sexy, he said, pointing to disparity of public reac- tion to the rust-colored acid plume on Col- orado’s Animas River as a recent analogy.
That spill sent 1 million gallons of wastewater from an abandoned mine into the Animas River, turning the river orange, and forcing the EPA to admit that it triggered the spill while investigating pollutants at the Gold King Mine, north of Silverton, Colorado.
“It’s so ironic that here is 3 million gal- lons of colored water spilled in a pristine stream that you can see, yet in Montana we have tens of thousands of pounds of invisi- ble selenium coursing into Koocanusa and nobody bats an eye,” Naftz said.
The trouble with regulating selenium isn’t that it’s difficult to measure, but that its behavior varies wildly depending on whether it’s in a river or lake, freshwater or salt water, while its effects on fish and bird species also depends on a variety of factors.
That means researchers and regula- tors are faced not just with designing and adopting an aquatic standard for sele- nium, but designing that standard based on modeling that accounts for the entire ecological food web to determine how the aquatic levels of selenium translate to the bioaccumulation in the muscle and egg tissue of birds and eggs.
“This is a different approach to regu- lating water quality,” Urban, of the DEQ, said. “It’s more complicated than other water quality standards, and we are try- ing to accommodate all the varying inter- ests of four government agencies.”
He added, “This is a story that will be ongoing for years to come.”
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ealth in the Elk River watershed.”
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SEPTEMBER 30, 2015 // FLATHEADBEACON.COM
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