A proposed gold and copper mine at the headwaters of the world’s largest sockeye salmon fishery in Alaska would cause “unavoidable adverse impacts,” the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers said in a letter to the developer released Monday. Under a section of the Clean Water Act, the corps found “factual determinations that discharges at the mine site would cause unavoidable adverse impacts to aquatic resources and, preliminarily, that those adverse impacts would result in significant degradation to those aquatic resources,” the letter to Fueg says.
“The corps lays it out. Thousands of acres of wetlands would be destroyed, 191 miles of streams would be harmed by this project, and the company has done nothing to mitigate that actual harm,” said Joel Reynolds, western director of the Natural Resources Defense Council. The company’s current mitigation plan includes making sewage treatment upgrades, adding culverts and picking up debris along the beach, he said. “None of that has anything to do with the devastation that this project would cause to the wetlands, to the water and to the world’s greatest wild salmon fishery,” Reynolds said.
The mine, long a source of controversy and litigation, was seen by many as getting a second wind under the Trump administration. Under President Obama, the U.S. Environmental Protection had proposed restricting development in southwest Alaska’s Bristol Bay region. But the agency never finalized the restrictions and, under the Trump administration, allowed the Pebble partnership to go through permitting.
Source: Mainichi
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