Lake Superior Day is this Sunday and it’s always the third Sunday in July. We might all take some time to consider the greatest of the Great Lakes and recommit ourselves to its protection.
Most Duluthians know of the 1,457 barrels of Honeywell’s hazardous military waste that were secretly dumped between 1957 and 1962 by the Army Corps of Engineers along the North Shore not that far from the city’s drinking water intake. The covert operation created 6 to 16 underwater dumps and has been big news ever since Sivertson’s accidentally snagged 6 of the drums in fishing nets.
What many don’t realize is that the Army Corps’ attitude was so reckless that, as if throwing toxic waste into fresh water weren’t stupid enough, when barrels floated away from a barge, “they were shot so that they would leak and sink.”
Unfortunately for those who drank Duluth water since then, this “would have caused a larger dispersal pattern for dumped barrels than would otherwise be expected,” according to a 2008 Minn. Dept. of Health report. The report went on to say incoherently that “… the risks of detrimental exposures to people from these barrels are unquantifiable, but low.”
After a couple underfunded and short-lived efforts to find some of the barrels in the early 1990s, about 215 were identified by the state and the Army Corps, and 9 were recovered. All of them had a mix of deadly, carcinogenic chemicals inside, contrary to Army Corps and Honeywell assurances that they only held grenade parts — which were also there. It seems the authorities had been lying.
They were caught lying again in 1994. After Honeywell and the Corps denied for 20 years that radioactive materials were used at the Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant, the government disclosed that the company worked with plutonium, uranium and thorium in Building 502 (source of all but 6 of the barrels). Even the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency has a web site article that says nothing hazardous was ever found in the barrels.

Bad faith spurns
renewed investigation

All this dishonesty from the polluters and regulators moved the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa to take up its own investigation. The Band has announced (for the third time) that it will retrieve a sampling of 70 barrels. Its hired help, EMR of Duluth, says it has identified 591 barrels, but the Band’s project is being curtailed in ways that are as mysterious as they are frustrating. Complaints by of all people the Army Corps have forced Red Cliff to repeatedly postpone its barrel retrieval and to limit its scope.
The Band says barrels will be taken from only three of the six well-known dumps — Lester River, Talmadge River and Sucker River. Other sites off of Knife River/Knife Island, Shoreview Road and French River, all documented in tug boat logs, have been eliminated. The reason, according to EMR, is because its 2008 “Sonar and visual scans in these locations identified no barrels,” even though the Knife River site is probably the most well documented.

At least 496 barrels
at Knife River

Seven government reports identify Knife River/Knife Island, as a significant dump, including a June 23, 1985 Army Corps chart that says 206 barrels — weighing a total of 200,000 pounds — were disposed of there.
In addition to those 206 barrels, a June 28, 1985 memo by the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency’s Duluth Director John Pegors says, “The fourth, fifth, and sixth dumps were made at deeper depths in the vicinity of Knife Island near the mouth of the Knife River.” A Sept. 16, 1976 MPCA memo specifies that the tug boat “Marquette had done the towing and the barrels had been disposed of in 300 feet of water at a point approximately 18 miles distant in the vicinity of Knife River.” The tug boat log reads: “25-26 Sep 1962 — 496 Barrels disposed using tug Marquette off Knife River approximately 18 miles from Duluth Harbor.”
Army Corps employee Bob Dempsey, who supervised its earlier searches, wrote to the Minn. Health Dept. in 2008, “…496 barrels were disposed of off Knife Island. The 496/1437 (34.5%) represents a large portion of the total disposals.”

What happened
to tug boat logs?

The Health Department’s report mysteriously notes that, “…the 1959-1962 log of the Marquette no longer exists. The U.S. ACE recommended that ‘Logs for the tug Barlow and Ashland should be located if additional search efforts are attempted in the future.’ (U.S. Army Corps of Engineers 1994)”.
The log kept by the tug Lake Superior for May 25, 1962 says it was, “Towing BK-8380 [a barge] loaded with Army Ordnance scrap to dump off Knife Island & return to Duluth….” and that they “Dumped Army Ordnance material off Knife Island at 8:30 AM…”
The MPCA’s 2008 “Facts about the Lake Superior Barrels,” says the Knife River dump was found in 1993, “about three miles east of Knife Island at a depth of 400 feet.” The agency’s “Google earth” website map shows that dozens of the barrels it located are at Knife River.
Although the barrels dumped at Knife River may have degraded into what EMR now calls a “debris field,” the question remains: Has the Army Corps pressured EMR and Red Cliff not to look more closely into what’s there?
— John LaForge works for the nuclear watchdog group Nukewatch in Wisconsin which has launched a paper and online petition to the Army Corps calling for the recovery of all 496 barrels at Knife River.