More than 1,400 steel barrels of military waste lay on the bottom of Lake Superior.
That’s a fact.
How they got there is a story in itself. Why they are still there is another matter altogether.
It’s a subject no one wants to touch. No one wants to think about it and no one wants to do anything about it.
Well, almost no one.
In 2012 the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa pulled 22 barrels from the lake bottom. When analyzed, detected were PCBs (polychlorinated biphenyls), PAHs (polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons), and concentrations of metals that exceed the Minnesota Pollution Control Agencies (MPCA) Sediment Quality Targets.
Also discovered in those metal containers were munitions and slag the U.S. military dumped into Lake Superior from 1959-1962.
The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers dumped barrels in an area from the eastern edge of Duluth to Two Harbors in water ranging from 65 feet deep to 400 feet deep. The waste came from a munitions plant in New Brighton, Minnesota, and was unloaded off of barges under cover of darkness over four years.
No maps were kept of the unwanted material discarded into the lake.
Fisherman discovers barrels
In 1968 a Duluth commercial fisherman found the first barrel in one of his fishing nets about seven miles northeast of Duluth. Contents of that container revealed still potentially explosive ejector cup assemblies used to make BLU-4 cluster bomb devices.
It wasn’t until 1977 that the U.S. Army went searching and found one dumping ground with 20 barrels. A year later, the Army sent divers to relocate and recover the barrels, but none were found.
In 1986 the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) got involved. At the request of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA), the Corps evaluated the dumpsites to see if they would qualify for the Superfund program, and they determined the sites didn’t qualify.
Red Cliff takes interest
Meanwhile, the Red Cliff Band noted the containers were scattered throughout waters ceded to the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in the 1842 Treaty of LaPointe and 1854 Ojibwa Land Cession Treaties.
In the mid-1990’s Red Cliff began researching and conducting investigations on the barrels, trying to determine what type of wastes the Department of Defense (DOD) put into them. The band was told the contents in the barrels had been melted before being moved from their Twin Cities site to the dumping grounds of Lake Superior. That didn’t always prove to be the case.
From July 30 to August 13, 2012, Red Cliff ’s Native American Lands Environmental Mitigation Program (NALEMP) retrieved 25 barrels. Two types of material were discovered: concrete and incinerated metals in three barrels, and intact munition parts in the remaining twenty-two.
Those remaining barrels contained 600 to 700 ejection cup assemblies for BLU-4 cluster bomb devices. Tests on ejection cups assemblies revealed an active ejection charge of M5 propellant and a double base smokeless powder containing nitroglycerine and nitrocellulose. These are commonly used in making military munitions.
To help unravel the entire contents of the barrels, Red Cliff hired Ridolfi Environmental, an environmental consulting and engineering firm specializing in habitat restoration, to examine the contents of the containers.
It was noted in a report from Ridolfi that the level of PCB’s discovered in some containers was 2,500 times over the limit for people.
What about the barrels?
After more than half a century of being tumbled and tossed about the bottom of the lake, the steel barrels, which come in three sizes of thickness and hold a variety of general line-production debris as well as explosives, among other things, are in various stages of decline. When the barrels ultimately erode, and an estimated 400 tons of military waste is fully exposed, the Red Cliff band wants to know what potential dangers these pollutants might pose to fish, aquatic, plant, and human life.
Funding for research
Over the years Red Cliff has worked with a handful of governmental agencies including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA); the U.S. Department of Defense, which provides funding and plan review, the U.S. Corps of Army Engineers— Omaha District, which acts as fiscal agent and reviews the work plans, and the U.S. Coast Guard, who is responsible for establishing and enforcing the restricted project work area.
The band has also cooperated with the Minnesota Department of Transportation, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, as well as Ridolfi Environmental, the contractor helping NALEMP with the investigation report and has assisted in establishing an environmental assessment and potential cleanup plan.
In August 2015, Red Cliff received $256,465 from the Department of Defense to continue working on an Investigation Report that was began in 2012. The band relies on money from the DOD and other governmental agencies to continue their work.
In June 2018, Director Linda Nguyen of the Red Cliff Environmental Department, Treaty Natural Resources Division, said, “The Lake Superior Barrels Project funding under the Department of Defense, Native American Land and Environmental Mitigation Program, was suspended back in December of 2017 until further notice. We have reached out to EPA folks in regards to the St. Louis (Bay) Area of Concern; those conversations are still in progress.”
“Other than that, unfortunately, there seem to be dead ends for funding leads. I have been reviewing several documents the Minnesota Department of Health released back in the early 2000s, and it seems unlikely that the agency feels the need to remove or further investigate the barrels (based on the report).”
On February 21, 2020, Nguyen had much the same response.
“As of current, the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) is looking into archives and records regarding barrel content. The DoD has suspended funding since December of 2018 and will not renew. I have approached several federal agencies, and I keep running into dead-ends for funding regarding any further barrel investigation.”
Meanwhile, those steel barrels continue to erode on the bottom of the biggest freshwater lake in the world, and when they do break open, no one is going to be happy. But for now, it’s a story that no one wants to talk about, no one wants to think about, and no one wants to do anything about.
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