The stamp sands of the Keenewaw Pensiula in upper Michigan.  Photo: mlive.com

By Garret Ellison from mlive.com • June 16, 2022

Robert Regis was dumbstruck at the damage Lake Superior had wrought on his property.

On Oct. 24, 2017, 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.

The lake also left behind a present, of sorts.

“It covered my grass with a foot of stamp sands,” said Regis, 66, a retired Northern Michigan University geology professor who owns a cabin on Kuivanen Road near Gay, Mich. “I had to get my tractor in there to remove it all, it was that deep.”

“It was incredible.”

The sand deposited on Regis’ yard wasn’t actually sand at all — at least, not the fine-grained silica sand that beachgoers know. “Stamp sand” is pulverized rock leftover from ore processing; dark, coarse, pebbly basalt chunks dug from the Earth during the Second Industrial Revolution, replete with clay, dust and metal leachate that creates a halo in the lake water.

It is the enduring legacy of historic mining, a vestige of the Keweenaw Peninsula’s heyday as the world’s greatest source of copper. For more than 100 years, roughly 50 billion pounds dumped in a pile so large it once extended a half mile into the lake, has been slowly, inexorably, eroding south. As they move, the stamp sands swallow the coast and smother the lakebed, transforming miles of shoreline into a lifeless, apocalyptic hellscape that people liken to the surface of the Moon. It is a slow-motion ecological disaster unfolding across a century.

Despite the problem’s impressive longevity, active cleanup efforts only began less than 10 years ago. Since 2018, state and federal agencies, and local tribes, have been dredging targeted areas along the coastline to try and save a critical fish spawning reef and keep a federal harbor from being overwhelmed as they develop a long-term plan.

A final cleanup proposal is expected next month — along with a cleanup price tag that state and federal officials are loath to release yet beyond ballpark figures.

Nonetheless, the estimated cost is at least $1 billion.

“It’s less than a stealth bomber, but still a lot of money,” said Jay Parent, a district supervisor with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE).

For comparison, that’s roughly what the long-awaited Soo Locks rebuild was supposed to cost before inflation and supply chain hurdles ballooned estimates.

“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.”

‘Not too late’ to save Buffalo Reef

The sheer volume of stamp sand covering the Keweenaw coastline is difficult to comprehend. Photos don’t quite do it justice, although it helps to get an aerial view. Researchers say that if all the sands were loaded in railroad cars, they would stretch to southern California.

The problem is plainly visible from space. Google Map satellite imagery shows the gray swath of shoreline between Gay, a small community named for one of the mine owners, and the mouth of the Traverse River about five miles southwest.

Unfortunately, what’s visible on land is only half of the problem. The real ecosystem threat is hidden offshore, where about 10 million metric tons are coating the lakebed.

In the path of the sands is Buffalo Reef, a 2,200-acre chunk of boulder-topped bedrock that functions as ideal spawning ground for whitefish and lake trout — two commercially important species for local tribal and state fishermen.

Buffalo Reef is unique. It’s on the leeward side of the peninsula, protected from prevailing winds and nestled into the crook of Grand Traverse Bay (not to be confused with a bay of the same name in northern Lower Michigan). It’s a highly productive spawning ground which accounts for up to a third of all lake trout yield in Michigan’s Lake Superior waters. The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission (GLIFWC) estimates the reef brings about $1.7 million annually in economic benefit to the entire Keweenaw region.

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.

It’s a dire situation, but hope remains.

 Photo: Courtesy | Michigan Tech University Archives and Copper Country Historical Collections

“The reef remains viable as a spawning area,” said Esteban Chiriboga, an environmental specialist at GLIFWC. “That’s what the telemetry data is showing. We have not yet lost the viability of this place as a source for huge amounts of fish in that part of Lake Superior.”

“It’s not too late.”

It is, however, approaching that point.

Michael Peterson, 58, a tribal fisherman for the Red Cliff Band in northern Wisconsin who operates out of Traverse harbor, says the catch has gradually declined over the past 10 years.

Peterson used to stitch together about 1,000 feet of gill nets at the reef, which could bring in almost a ton of fish overnight. “Now, it’s about half,” he said.

The stamp sands essentially suffocate life on the lakebed. Finer particles fill in crevices in which fish lay eggs. The sands also leach residual copper at concentrations which are toxic to aquatic organisms. Researchers have plotted a troubling inverse relationship: As the percentage of stamp sands increase, the density of aquatic life decreases. Should fish find a place to lay eggs, survival chances drop once they hatch because there’s nothing nearby to eat.

“Copper is very toxic to aquatic plants and a lot of aquatic animals and benthic organisms,” Charles Kerfoot, an aquatic biologist at Michigan Tech University in Houghton who has worked on the stamp sands issue for years.

Research shows the stamp sands are indeed squeezing life on the reef. Intensive study using egg traps and acoustic telemetry to track fish movements shows that lake trout fertilization on the reef is impaired and whitefish hatching success has been compromised.

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.

“One of the biggest natural resources in Lake Superior is about to die,” said Check. “That’s the truth of it.”

Tribal red flags finally addressed

The Gay stamp sands are a legacy of mohawkite, a rare-ish type of copper mixed with arsenic, silver and nickel found only in the nearby Mohawk Mine where it was discovered.

Unfortunately, they’re not the only stamp sands around the Keweenaw Peninsula, which featured numerous stamp mills during the mining era. A much larger pile, roughly 90 billion pounds, was dumped on the western shore, near the towns of Freda and Redridge. Those sands came from a different mine and mill. Virtually nothing has been done there.

“That’s the lumbering elephant in the room,” said Kerfoot. Like in Gay, the Freda and Redridge sands have been moving along the shoreline and are starting to overtop seawalls at the north entry to the Keweenaw Waterway. “Nobody is catching any fish up there anymore.”

On the eastern shore south of Gay, another mill dumped six billion pounds closer to L’Anse and Baraga, at Sand Point, which the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community has been cleaning up with sandy loam caps seeded with native plantings to guard against erosion.

The remoteness and sparse year-round Keweenaw population has hampered broader awareness and action on the stamp sands problem, said Parent.

Among some locals, legacy mining pollution has become an ordinary part of life that raises few eyebrows anymore. Some people even like to ride ATVs on the sands. The Gay sands are getting cleanup attention because of Buffalo Reef.

“We can’t go after it all,” said Parent.

In Gay, the Mohawk Mining Company built a stamp mill in 1901, about 13 miles downhill from the mine, where ore was crushed and copper extracted through a flotation process. The stamps crushed ore from two mines for about 30 years, generating an ever-larger pile of tailing sands on the beach. Today, a 265-foot smokestack towers over the mill ruin.

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.

By the 1980s, they were hitting the Traverse River harbor. In 2005, GLIFWC commissioned a study of the encroachment on fishing grounds which helped get the attention of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency. In 2017, EPA formed the Buffalo Reef Task Force, which includes the Army Corps, state of Michigan and the Keweenaw Bay Indian Community.

The EPA began putting Great Lakes Restoration Initiative (GLRI) money toward stopgap dredging in a bid to buy the reef some time while potential solutions were studied. To date, $14.7 million has been spent since 2010; $11.2 million from GLRI and $3.5 million from the state.

The funds have been a “huge help,” said Chiriboga, but there’s a frustration among some stakeholders that the Gay sands were never identified as a cleanup priority years earlier, when the EPA was developing its list of Great Lakes “Areas of Concern,” or AOCs. The list includes toxic hotspots around the region marked for priority cleanup such as Muskegon Lake, the Detroit River, St. Marys River and, nearby, Torch Lake off the Keweenaw Waterway.

“It absolutely should have been an AOC,” said Chiriboga. “There’s nothing different about Buffalo Reef than Torch Lake. It’s the same issue. It just wasn’t included.”

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 as one of nine AOCs in Michigan benefitting from a $1 billion infrastructure law windfall that will accelerate cleanup efforts.

Because the bulk of the EPA’s infrastructure funding allocated to the GLRI program is going to cleanup AOCs, EPA says money for Buffalo Reef would “likely come from EPA’s annual GLRI appropriation,” which has been about $300 million annually over the past decade.

“EPA and its federal, state and tribal partners are currently exploring a number of funding avenues to gather sufficient funds to take further action to protect and restore this important habitat,” said EPA Region 5 spokeswoman Ann Rowan.

Wall it off? Landfill it? Final plan out soon

Over the past few years, more than a dozen cleanup options for the Gay sands have analyzed. The list included deep water disposal elsewhere in Lake Superior, dumping the sands back into old mine shafts, dumping them into an existing tailings basin at the White Pine Mine, building a new reef, shipping them for use as aggregate material and more.

The list has been winnowed over the past few years to two options: Gathering everything into once place on the beach and building a revetment around them; or building a new landfill nearby and trucking everything there, getting them away from the lake.

The landfill is the favored option among task force members, but the final proposal is expected to be released for public review in July, when a public meeting will be held.

Either plan involves significant dredging and the Army Corps must do it the old-fashioned way, using excavators on a barge. Check said hydraulic dredging using a vacuum to clean the sands off the bottom is a non-starter because of the copper content, which creates toxic effluent which would require treatment when disturbed by vacuum suction.

That wrinkle has added significantly to estimated remedial costs, he said. Although cleanup is expensive, the cost of doing nothing would also be expensive.

“If we do nothing, Grand Traverse Harbor will close,” said Check. “The stamp sands will just fill it right in and it’ll be gone.” Should that happen, the river would find a new path to breach the shoreline, likely causing significant flooding for nearby properties in the process.

“All the people south of the harbor, their beach will turn to stamp sand and it’ll kill all the remaining whitefish juvenile requitement left in this area,” he said.

Although Buffalo Reef is irreversibly damaged, it can be saved.

“The consensus right now from all the biologists involved is, ‘yes’ — based on the telemetry data we’ve seen today the reef is still viable and worth saving,” Check said.

“We’re not just building a bridge to nowhere.”

To see the original report and read related stories, follow this link to the mlive.com website. https://www.mlive.com/public-interest/2022/06/on-lake-superior-a-1-billion-eco-disaster-is-swallowin...