Michigan, Wisconsin Could Face Mining Disaster – by Al Gedicks (Urban Milwaukee – September 18, 2019)

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Regulators allowing open pit mine near Lake Michigan that could release catastrophic amount of toxic waste.

The willingness of top Michigan regulators to ignore their own scientific staff and approve a wetland permit for a controversial open pit mine next to the Menominee River on the Michigan-Wisconsin border has been reported by Urban Milwaukee, but is only the beginning of a dangerous decision-making process. The proposed Back Forty metallic sulfide mine is owned by Aquila Resources, a Canadian exploration company that has no experience with mining.

Despite steadily increasing scientific evidence of the danger of a tailings dam failure next to the Menominee River and the potential catastrophic release of toxic mine waste into Lake Michigan, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy (EGLE) appears ready to approve the dam’s design.

That design is associated with the January 2019 Brazilian tailings dam disaster that killed at least 250 people in Brazil’s deadliest-ever mining accident. Brazil has already banned this design from further use and ordered the decommissioning of 88 existing dams employing this design.

Chile and Peru banned them earlier. The American International Group (AIG) has cut back the vast majority of its mining liability insurance in response to the Brazilian disaster.

The proposed construction method, known as upstream dam design, uses crushed waste rock and sandy soil – not steel and concrete – to build a retention dam for mine tailings, the waste material left over from the crushing and chemical processing of mineral ores like copper, zinc and gold.

For the rest of this article: https://urbanmilwaukee.com/2019/09/18/michigan-wisconsin-could-face-mining-disaster/