Frank Koehn and Gary Defoe Jr. recently spoke to a group of concerned citizens at the Grand Marais Library about the barrels of military waste that were dumped into Lake Superior by the U.S. Army between 1959-1962. The two work for the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa. The barrels were dumped into treaty waters ceded to the Band in 1842 and 1854, and the Band wants to make sure they pose no harm or are removed.
Lake Superior is noted for pristine, cold, clear water and agate beaches. It is home to 88 species of fish and more than 150 types of birds live along its shoreline or in its estuaries. Its shores and bays are home to beaver, otter, deer, moose, fox, wolves, mice and voles, rabbits, chipmunks and squirrels, among other animals.
But beneath its waters lies a little known secret: Superior is also the dumping ground for almost 1,500 barrels of military waste, placed there between 1959- 62 by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers who used barges to haul out the refuse at night and sink the sealed industrial steel barrels in water anywhere from 65 to 400 feet in an area extending from Duluth to Larsmont.
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 Treaties which gave the tribes the right to hunt, fish, and gather within the protected territory.
The waste came from a munitions plant in New Brighton, Minnesota. It was trucked to Duluth and loaded onto barges by the Corps of Engineers who shipped them out and dumped them in various places. Unfortunately no maps were kept of where the barrels were disposed and no information about what was placed in them was ever recorded.
That, of course, is a problem when you are trying to find and study the containers’ contents, said Frank Koehn to a group of about 20 people on Thursday, November 6 at the Grand Marais Library.
Red Cliff has been involved with recovery efforts since the mid 1990s, investigating and researching the contents of the jettisoned barrels.
Koehn was in Grand Marais with Gary Defoe Jr. Both work for the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa in the Native American Lands Environmental Mitigation Program (NALEMP).
Because munitions waste was dumped into Chippewa Ceded Territory and could affect their fishing grounds and drinking water, the band has taken the lead in recovering and studying the contents of the containers.
Koehn said the band works hand in hand with governmental agencies such as the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). The U.S. Department of Defense provides funding and plan review. The Corps of Engineers-Omaha District acts as fiscal agent and reviews the work plans. The U.S. Coast Guard is responsible for establishing and enforcing the restricted project work area. The band also works with the Minnesota Department of Transportation, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, as well as Ridolfi Environmental, which will be the contractor helping NALEMP with the investigation report.
“We have a good working relationship with the government,” Koehn said. “But it has been a slow process with lots of delays along the way. We have had to be very patient.”
In 1968 a commercial fisherman discovered the first barrel. It wasn’t until 1977 that the Corps of Engineers went searching and found a dumping ground with 20 barrels.
A year later the Corps sent divers to relocate and recover the barrels, but none were found.
Since then the U.S. Corps of Engineers evaluated dumpsites to see if they qualify for the Superfund program at the request of the MPCA, but it was determined that the sites didn’t qualify.
When asked why the military used Lake Superior as a dumping ground, Koehn said, “The theory is they didn’t want the Russians to get ahold of the cluster bomb technology. They had tried to destroy these munitions with a hammer mill and tried to burn them, but were unable to get rid of them. So the easiest way to get rid of them was to dump them into the lake. At least that’s the theory.”
The steel barrels, which come in three sizes of thickness, said Koehn, hold a variety of general line production debris as well as explosives—among other things—and are in various stages of decline.
From July 30 to August 13, 2012, Red Cliff ’s NALEMP retrieved 25 barrels. Two types of material were found: concrete and incinerated metals in three barrels, and intact munitions parts in the remaining 22.
Those 22 barrels contained between 600 and 700 ejection cup assemblies for BLU-4 cluster bomb devices. Explosives experts at the test site conducted tests on the ejection cup assemblies and discovered an active ejection charge composed of M5 propellant. Koehn said the Department of Transportation (DOT) classified these ejection cup assemblies as explosive devices and, as he explained, the DOT wouldn’t allow the materials to be shipped via road or rail until additional permits could be acquired.
“That meant we had to put the ejector cup assemblies into six 85-gallon steel barrels and put them back into Lake Superior until the spring of 2013 when the proper paperwork was completed and they could be retrieved and trucked to the Veolia Environmental disposal in Sauget, Illinois.”
Barrels can be hard to find, said Defoe Jr., because there are also many other things dumped into the lake like crates of unused ammunition, junked vehicles, and other hunks of big trash lying on the lake’s bottom a few miles out of the Duluth Port.
Because of the great expense to find and retrieve the barrels, in 2012 Red Cliff decided to use 70 barrels as a sampling size. A 1990 search recovered two barrels that contained grenade parts. But what else might be discovered? That’s the $10,000 question, said Koehn.
A week after the meeting in Grand Marais, Defoe Jr. said, “We are reassessing the need to retrieve more barrels, which would leave 45 more barrels to be retrieved. The sample size of 70 barrels is to give an overall statistical sample of what is down there out of 1,437 barrels that were dumped. At this time, we do not have any dollar figures drafted. That portion is still being worked on.
“Next, we hope not to find anything unexpected but that did not happen last time around. During the barrel retrieval of 2012, large amounts of BLU-4 ejector cups were retrieved which was unexpected, and was the reason we couldn’t retrieve any more barrels at that time.”
The NALEMP Committee is currently reviewing drafts of a Human Health Risk Assessment (HHRA) and Screening Level Ecological Risk Assessment (SLERA), along with the draft Feasibility Study prepared by Ridolfi Engineering. Once the various reports are finalized a summary report will be prepared. It is hoped those plans will be finalized in August of 2014. If those results suggest potential impacts to the economy or natural resources, Red Cliff will work with the U.S. government to restore and clean up the lands and waters within the Ceded Territory, said Defoe Jr.
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