A late December headline in the Ashland Daily Press declared, “Barrels not a cause for immediate concern.” Since the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency said nearly the same thing 20 years ago, the long-term is here, and concern over the barrels isn’t immediate, it’s permanent.

The Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa has reported “preliminary data” from its ongoing investigation of (at least) 1,457 barrels that were dumped into Lake Superior between 1957 and 1962. The wastes, weighing from 350 to 440 tons, were rolled off of barges at up to 16 different spots along the North Shore, between Duluth and Two Harbors. 

Although hundreds of news accounts and a dozen official reports have identified the principle culprits, the Daily Press (ADP) story neglected the most salient facts. It didn’t mention that the wastes came from Honeywell, Inc., and its Twin Cities Army Ammunition Plant (TCAAP) at the time, and that the company bears some responsibility for the dumping. Honeywell repeatedly made wildly inaccurate or dishonest assurances about what the barrels contained. While Honeywell denied it for 18 years, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission disclosed in 1994 that the company worked with radioactive plutonium, uranium and thorium in the same TCAAP building the barrels came from during the dumping years.

Neither the ADP nor Red Cliff’s spokesperson reported the most startling fact of all: the secret, night-time dumping was done by the US Army Corps of Engineers. The Corps has also repeatedly made grossly inaccurate statements about what is in the barrels and the reasons they were dumped into drinking water at the head of the Great Lakes. The Corps often declared that the wastes were “harmless metal shavings” or “classified grenade parts.” However, the Band has found only Cluster Bomb parts, munitions never mentioned by the Corps, Honeywell or anyone else prior to Red Cliff’s work.

The ADP didn’t note that the Minn. Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) found 17 toxic chemicals, including benzene, chromium, arsenic, lead, cadmium, acetone, barium and PCBs in the nine barrels it recovered in 1994. The Minnesota State “recommended allowable limit” for PCBs in drinking water is 0.04 parts-per-billion; the amount in the barrels was a staggering 590 ppb. The MPCA’s Ron Swenson, said at the time, “I guess we’re most surprised about the PCBs.”

Rather than  declaring that “there were no risks to human health from the barrels they had lifted,” as the Red Cliff spokesman said to the ADP, the MPCA’s Swenson said in 1994, “We don’t believe there’s any short-term threat to human health … what this finding means in the long-term … we still haven’t determined.”

Indeed, MPCA Commissioner Charles Williams said April 27, 1992, “It is the MPCA’s belief that without examination of all the barrel dump sites, we cannot assure that Lake Superior is adequately protected.” Still, Red Cliff’s investigation has deliberately ruled out any barrel retrieval from the Knife River site, where 496 -- over one-third of the total -- were dumped.

The story neglected the fact that in 1990, the US Environmental Protection Agency identified four barrels that had “elevated gamma [radiation] exposure rates.” One report on TCAAP by the Argonne National Laboratory refers to this 1955 document this way: “Radiation Data and Lake Superior Rad Dumping: Note from Honeywell”.

Strangely, the Corps of Engineers is heavily involved with the Red Cliff investigation. It had veto power over a Freedom of Information Act request by me to view some of Red Cliff’s investigative photographs.

With Red Cliff winning grants from the Department of Defense for its investigation, the Band would not want to highlight the Army Corps’ culpability, and I don’t blame the band for that. 

Any mention of the Corps’ lead role in this unconscionable covert pollution -- which endangers fresh water used by the very population it is sworn to protect -- would spotlight the blatant conflict of interest it is being allowed to practice -- i.e., overseeing an investigating of itself.

Of course, you have to hand it to Red Cliff for figuring out how to dig into government wrongdoing using the government’s nickel.

- John LaForge is a Co-Director of Nukewatch, a nuclear watchdog group in Wisconsin, and wrote its Jan. 2013 special report, “Drinking Water at Risk: Toxic Military Waste Haunt Lake Superior.”