Transcripts

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Arlene Leto grew up on Lake Superior. Her parents operated a resort near Silver Bay 50 miles up the shore from Duluth.

ARLENE LETO: One of my favorite games was taking different colored pebbles from the beaches, throwing them down off the cliff, and you used to be able to see the huge boulders underneath the water. Some of them may be about 4 or 5 feet under, some of them, 10, 15 feet under. And the game was, if you got your pebble to land on one of those boulders, and stay there, and see, you won.

But I left in 1957, came back in 1968. And I took my son down to show him how to play the game. And we could no longer see the boulders.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Arlene Leto blamed Reserve Mining Company for muddying Lake Superior. Reserve started up in 1955. The company hauled train loads of rock from the mine to the processing plant at Silver Bay. Huge machines crushed the rock and separated the usable iron from the waste. Reserve dumped the waste in Lake Superior.

DENNY WAGNER: We are driving down onto the tailings delta that was created by the discharge of tailings into Lake Superior during the reserve mining company days.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Denny Wagner is a chemist with North Shore Mining, the company that now operates the plant originally built by Reserve Mining. Every now and then, Wagner drives out onto this delta. This used to be part of the lake. But now, it's solid land. You have to drive a third of a mile to get from the plant to the edge of the water. It took 25 years of dumping waste rock to build this stretch of flat land.

The rock poured out of the plant mixed with water. The muddy slurry rumbled toward the lake in two long chutes. They looked like giant playground slides. The waste poured into Lake Superior like a muddy waterfall.

DENNY WAGNER: As the tailings delta grew from the plant out into the lake, these chutes would be extended.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The chutes were built of concrete and steel. They were as wide as a country road. They funneled thousands of tons of rock into the lake every day. They dumped enough to fill a railroad car every two minutes. They did this around the clock for 25 years. Now grasses and wildflowers are poking up through the flinty ground of the delta, slowly turning the waste rock into soil. A local youth group planted pine trees here.

30 years ago, Denny Wagner ran Reserve's environmental lab. It operated 24 hours a day analyzing water samples and studying the plant and animal life of the Western end of Lake Superior. He says the research showed the waste rock wasn't hurting anything in the lake.

DENNY WAGNER: There was no significant adverse impact to Lake Superior. And that's the conclusion I came to at the time being a lab supervisor at the time, going through all the data, reviewing all the reports. That's what it seemed to show to us.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: But that's not the way it seemed to Walter Sve. Sve is a commercial fisherman. His father came from Norway in the 1920s. He lived and fished just down the shore from Silver Bay. Walter started helping as soon as he was old enough to row a boat out to set the nets. Sve says the fishing was good until Reserve Mining started up its processing plant.

Sve says Reserve's ground up waste rock turned to mud and coated the bottom with goo. The herring couldn't lay their eggs anymore. For 25, years the Sves got no herring in their nets.

WALTER SVE: I kept on moving out to get into cleaner water over the years, and finally, by 64, I was seven miles out in the lake. And that's awful stormy to fish that far out in the lake, but I had to try and make a living for my family because I had a wife and two children.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Sve and his father complained for years to the state and federal governments. They wanted reserve to stop dumping in the lake. Finally, the government started to listen. In the early 1970s, the federal Environmental Protection Agency was brand new. One of the first things it did was file a lawsuit against Reserve Mining Company. It asked a judge to force the company to stop dumping in the lake. And that made the people in Silver Bay nervous.

The town of Silver Bay sits on a hill above the processing plant. The shopping center parking lot offers a view of Lake Superior. In the booming 1950s, Reserve Mining Company built the curving streets and the trim houses of Silver Bay and sold them to workers with no down payment needed.

JIM KELLY: This is our high school. Now this school was built by the mines mining company, and given to the school district.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Jim Kelly is proud of Silver Bay. He came here to work at Reserve Mining in 1971. Kelly and his neighbors didn't believe for a minute there was any problem with the waste rock they produced in such huge quantities.

JIM KELLY: We worked there, OK? We work with it every day. And if we thought it was detrimental to ourselves and our families, we wouldn't submit them to that tonight. I know I wouldn't. And I would speak out against it or I would move my family out of here.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Kelly says the lawsuit was hard on the people in Silver Bay.

JIM KELLY: You're worried about your income. You're worried about how you're going to put things away for college, how are you going to-- should you buy a new home, even should you fix up the home you got.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The town fought back. Silver Bay and neighboring cities hired an attorney and intervened in the case on the side of Reserve. They organized bus trips to St. Paul to lobby legislators. They had parties and rallies to keep up their spirits. But in some ways, it was like a civil war. The controversy pitted neighbor against neighbor.

Arlene Leto was the young mother who brought her son back only to discover the lake was too cloudy to toss pebbles at boulders under the waves. She helped start a group called the Save Lake Superior Association. The group joined the government's lawsuit against Reserve. Leto says people ostracized her because of it. She says her church asked her to leave. And so did the local chapter of the League of Women Voters.

ARLENE LETO: I was twice nearly run off the road. But I don't scare easily, and I don't take to the woods easily.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Leto remembers one time when she was nearly run into the Beaver River. She recognized the driver. She says he worked at Reserve.

ARLENE LETO: I'm sure he felt very threatened that he'd lose his employment if the plant shuts down, your house isn't worth anything, and who's going to buy it. And I understood their position.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: While the people in Silver Bay worried about their jobs and argued with critics like Arlene Leto, the battle over Reserve Mining was moving South 200 miles away to a courtroom in Minneapolis. And what had started as a local squabble was about to explode into a national controversy. The Environmental Protection Agency had asked a federal court to force Reserve to stop dumping its waste in Lake Superior.

Scientists on both sides were busy studying the lake's currents trying to learn how far the dirty water was traveling and whether the heavy loads of sediment were affecting fish and other creatures in the lake, then scientists found something that terrified a lot of people living along the big lake. Phil Cook was a chemist with the EPA he discovered microscopic fibers in the cloudy water. He suspected the fibers could cause cancer. The fibers were similar to asbestos. And asbestos was known to cause cancer.

PHIL COOK: This was not found naturally in Lake Superior. In fact, a lot of studies were done trying to find it naturally. The fact that it wasn't found naturally made it an ideal tracer of the tailings.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Cook and his colleagues looked for microscopic fragments of the waste rock, and they found them in the water supplies of Duluth and Two Harbors, both downstream from Silver Bay.

PHIL COOK: At that time, the Duluth water supply was essentially unfiltered because Lake Superior water was very low in suspended solids and was surprised to find that, every day, this material was in the water supply.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The EPA put out an advisory about the asbestos like particles in the water. Soon, a lot of families were looking around for safe drinking water. Cathy Johnson was one of them.

CATHY JOHNSON: We had three children. And there was no question in my mind, in order to live with myself, had to carry water.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Fire halls around the city installed filters to trap the tiny particles. Cathy Johnson got a big bucket from her uncle.

CATHY JOHNSON: A huge, huge stainless steel container, it was quite heavy. And my husband or I every day went and got water. And the schools, eventually, had filtered water.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The discovery of a possible carcinogen in the water supplies of cities along the North Shore of Lake Superior turned the case into a major event. The New York Times and national network television covered it. The trial began in August 1973. Judge Miles Lord was on the bench. Lord had grown up on the Iron Range. His brothers had worked in mines, and his father-in-law had owned them.

Lawyers for both sides regarded him as a fair judge. Scientists for the government said Reserve's discharge was spreading a plume of pollution across the western end of Lake Superior. They said the asbestos-like particles in city water supplies could pose a significant health risk to residents. The mining company's experts disagreed. They said the fibers in the waste rock were not identical to asbestos, and they said people weren't being exposed to enough of the fibers to cause a health concern.

Three states and various environmental groups joined the lawsuit against Reserve. During the trial, Reserve said it had no choice but to dump its waste in Lake Superior. Company executives said it wasn't even possible to dispose of the waste, which they called tailings, on land. That claim got them into big trouble. Byron Starns was a young attorney helping to argue the case for Minnesota's brand new pollution control agency.

BYRON STARNS: Ken Haley, who was the director of R&D for Reserve was testifying about whether it was feasible to put the tailings on land. And he testified, it wasn't. And they never studied it.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: But Starns didn't believe it. He thought it was possible to dump the waste on land and that Reserve must have made contingency plans to do it. Starns subpoenaed the company for any documents it might have about any planning for on land disposal. The subpoena forced the company to reveal that it had seriously studied dumping the waste on land.

BYRON STARNS: Then boom, the documents come in, and they're like many, many banker's boxes full of detailed engineering all the way down to bid documents for an on land disposal base. Well, I mean, that you can imagine. That was, I think, a major turning point in how our case looked to Judge Lord or anybody else for that matter.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Newspapers accused the company of covering up evidence. But one of Reserve's lawyers Mac Hyde says it was natural for a company with such a big investment to try to defend itself.

MAC HYDE: Well, the company was trying to survive.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Hyde says the court had issued an order to both sides about what evidence they had to turn over. It was up to Reserve officials and their legal team to interpret the order.

MAC HYDE: And somebody made the call that some of these documents didn't have to be disclosed. I think that turned out to be a mistake.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Certainly, it tried the patience of Judge Miles Lord.

MILES LORD: I couldn't believe a thing they said because they were way out in left field. You have to be there to realize how spacey this thing was, how out of focus some of this testimony was, by the defense. There was no credibility to them at all.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Eight months after the trial began judge Lord instructed both sides to sit down and try to work out a solution but those negotiations failed. Finally, Lord took it on himself to try to arrange a settlement. In April of 1974, he called Reserve's chairman, C. William Verity to the stand. Lord accused Verity of stalling and dragging out the court case in order to squeeze the last dollar of profit out of the operation.

MILES LORD: I said to him, now, can you get this thing out of the water? Can you stop poisoning the people downstream in the air and so forth? Can you figure out a way to not make so much dust?

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Lord was furious with Verity's response.

MILES LORD: He said we don't have to. We won't.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: That afternoon, Lord ordered Reserve to stop dumping its waste into Lake Superior effective immediately. 3,000 people were suddenly out of work. The United States lost 1/12 of its supply of iron ore. The news flashed around the country. It was the first time a judge had shut down a major industrial plant to protect the environment.

But the story wasn't over, the company appealed judge Lord's decision. A federal appeals court allowed Reserve to reopen the plant. The court said the company would have to stop polluting the lake eventually. But Reserve could keep dumping in the lake until it built an alternative. The judges said the fibers weren't dangerous enough to justify putting people out of work.

BYRON STARNS In the early '70s the fact that a lake was green instead of blue wasn't the end of the world to most people.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: Byron Starns, the lawyer for the state of Minnesota, says the judges found themselves doing something that hadn't really been done before, now it's called risk assessment.

BYRON STARNS: There's sort of balancing. Well, look at all the harm that would be caused by shutting it down. You've got 2,000 or 3,000 people working there, plus all the ancillary jobs that depend on it, the socioeconomic strength of the region. And that turned out to be one of the more interesting things from a legal point of view that the Reserve case sort of kicked off was this sort of risk assessment analysis.

STEPHANIE HEMPHILL: The risk is still unclear. Scientists have still not decided once and for all whether the fibers from Reserve Mining could make people sick. But the courts came away from the reserve case with a clear answer. The fight established a new reality for industry. Since the Reserve case, the government gets to decide how much industry can pollute.

Today, everyone accepts the fact that the government sets pollution standards. Industry hardly ever fights those regulations in court. But the battles do go on. Now, we fight over what the standards should be, how much pollution is too much, how much risk should we accept. Stephanie Hemphill at Minnesota Public Radio, Duluth.