www.MEPartnership.org Suite 100

546 Rice Street St. Paul, MN 55103

Phone 651.290.0154 Fax 651.290.0167

August 5th, 2015

Governor Mark Dayton

116 Veterans Service Building

20 W 12th Street

St. Paul, MN 55155

Governor Dayton:

One year ago on August 4, 2014, a tailings dam burst at the Mount Polley copper-gold sulfide

mine in British Columbia, releasing over six billion gallons of mine waste and polluted water

into pristine lakes and rivers in the headwaters of the Fraser River system. This has been called

the worst mine disaster in Canadian history.

It is time now for Minnesota, under your leadership, to ensure the proposed PolyMet sulfide mine

doesnt result in a similar disaster in Minnesota.

In the aftermath of the Mount Polley disaster, the British Columbia government created an

independent expert review panel to investigate the causes of the dam collapse and make

recommendations to prevent future dam failures. The Mount Polley Independent Review Panel

report concluded the dam failure resulted from the tailings facility design. The panel

recommended the use of best available technology for new mines, namely filtered, unsaturated, compacted tailings and reduction in the use of water covers. The panel concluded there were no overriding technical barriers to end the practice of storing mine waste mixed with huge quantities

of water.

The Mount Polley Independent Review Panels recommendations should have been a wake-up call for Minnesota. Instead, it seems that Minnesota hit the snooze button. The preliminary

version of the PolyMet final environmental impact statement (PFEIS) doesnt even consider the alternative of best available dry storage technology or of disposing tailings in another location,

rather than on top of the old LTV tailings heap, with its unstable footing of streams, wetlands and

mining slimes.

Minnesota waste spills and near misses at taconite mines demonstrate the risk of a tailings dam

failure in Minnesota is very real. Between April 2013 and May 2014, 850,000 gallons of mine

waste spilled at ArcelorMittals Minorca mine in three separate incidents. In June 2015, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) fined ArcelorMittal for inadequate inspection of

the tailings basin and failure to timely report two of the incidents.

In February 2012, a thousand foot long crack developed suddenly in the Hibbing Taconite

tailings dam, requiring emergency action to shore up the dam. While no mine waste was released

in this incident, it demonstrates that a failure can be sudden and unexpected. In 2000, Northshore

Mining Company was fined more than $250,000 for pollution resulting from an unreported

tailings pipeline break, in addition to $240,000 in costs to remediate the spill.

Many people in Northern Minnesota remember the sudden liquification and collapse of the LTV coal ash

heap at Taconite Harbor in 1993. In order to reduce polluted runoff affecting Lake Superior, LTV opted to

construct a containment and recirculation system, capturing polluted discharge and pumping it back into

the ash heap. When this heap became saturated, it liquefied and a mixture of ash and water flowed

downhill. A court held that recirculation of water through an unstable waste heap was sufficient evidence

to find that LTV had been willfully reckless.

When a tailings waste dam fails, it can spread pollution miles downstream. An April 2013 simulation of a

PolyMet tailings dam breach showed over 25 structures downstream could be inundated within hours of a

dam failure.

Our organizations and thousands of Minnesota citizens have asked you and the

Minnesota Department of Natural Resources (MDNR) to implement the Mount Polley Independent

Review Panels recommendations to protect Minnesota from a similar disaster. To date, we have seen no action to implement them.

Now, on the anniversary of the Mount Polley tailings dam failure, we ask you again to take the following

simple steps to protect Minnesota waters:

Direct the MDNR to conduct a thorough and independent analysis of the alternative of applying best available dry storage technology to store tailings for the proposed PolyMet mine; and

Direct the MDNR to conduct a thorough and independent analysis of an alternative location or locations for storage of tailings for the proposed PolyMet mine that does not place sulfide mine

wastes on top of the unstable footing of the LTV tailings piles.

Thank you for taking these important steps to protect Minnesota and to prevent a catastrophe like the

Mount Polley tailings failure from contaminating our precious clean water.

Sincerely,

Steve Morse, Executive Director

Minnesota Environmental Partnership

Conservation Minnesota

Friends of the Boundary Waters Wilderness

Friends of the Cloquet Valley State Forest

Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy

Protect Our Manoomin*

Save Lake Superior Association

Sierra Club North Star Chapter

Save Our Sky Blue Waters

WaterLegacy

Not a member of the Minnesota Environmental Partnership

cc: Commissioner Tom Landwehr, Minnesota Department of Natural Resources Commissioner John Linc Stine, Minnesota Pollution Control Agency Jaime Tincher, Chief of Staff, Governor Mark Dayton Joanna Dornfeld, Assistant Chief of Staff, Governor Mark Dayton Molly Schultz Pederson, Senior Policy Advisor, Governor Mark Dayton