The legacy of the Alaska-Juneau Mine, closed in 1944, included a riveted steel tank filled with heavy black petroleum sludge, across Thane Road from what is now Taku Smokeries.
The tank, 115 feet wide and 4 feet high, lay uncovered for many of the last 60 years. Occasionally an unfortunate itinerant camper or Canada goose would fall in, and the tank would get on the radar of the press or a government agency, according to Bill Janes, who handles contaminated sites for the state Department of Environmental Conservation.
Last year the landowner and state finally cleaned up the contaminated sludge, to the tune of $1 million, Janes said.
Thousands of mining claims, prospects, abandoned mine sites and metal deposits dot Southeast Alaska, and some of those sites are known or suspected to be contaminated. Nine are federal Superfund sites, a designation by the federal government for the country's sites most in need of cleanup, though none of these are on the National Priority List. In addition, the state has identified impaired water bodies and contaminated sites related to mining.
Often little is known about how much contamination is leaching into soil or water.
"These mining sites tend to languish for so long," Janes said.
But cleaning up requires knowing where to start. And after more than a century of mining, federal and state agencies are just now talking about making a list of all the contaminated old mine sites in Alaska.
"We really should have an interagency list. It would help us kill them off quicker," said Joe Wehrman, who directs the abandoned mine lands program for the state Department of Natural Resources.
"I'm surprised that some of the sites here haven't received funding to be cleaned up," said Rob Cadmus, mining organizer for the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council, a local environmental group. "People are eating shellfish and fish that frequent those areas, and that's not a good thing."
Juneau's good fortune: Inert rock
Juneau is lucky that the A-J mine's waste rock, upon which much of downtown is built, turned out to be mostly harmless. Downtown's shoreline originally stopped where McDonald's restaurant is; the land beyond that is waste rock from the A-J gold mine.
Federal and state regulations controlling hazardous waste from mine tailings weren't written until the 1960s and 1970s. Tailings are the waste rock produced after the metal is extracted from the ore.
"If the ore body had been different, we'd be sitting on a Superfund site," said mining historian and Juneau Assembly member David Stone.
Around Juneau, however, a few problems do remain. For instance, the lower of two tailings dumps from the Treadwell mine in Douglas was long a barren zone without plants, about a quarter of a mile south of Sandy Beach.
"I used to run down there all the time," said DEC's Janes, who grew up on Douglas Island. It has never been the kind of toxicity that would instantly make someone sick, he said.
But Department of Environmental Conservation documents noted higher levels of zinc, lead, arsenic and mercury there in 1993.
"Obvious stress to vegetation because no vegetation is growing there," an unknown author wrote of the cyanide mill tailings area in 1999.
Sometimes cleaning up is as simple as covering up.
Last summer, landowner AJT Mining Properties, which owns Alaska Electric Light & Power, covered the zone with topsoil, fertilizer and grass seed.
Residual soil contamination remains underneath the topsoil and growth, but the barrier prevents it from being harmful to people, according to DEC documents.
"I suspect they will have to re-hydroseed it every year," said Janes. "You're always balancing out cost with benefit."
The method used is much cheaper than hauling all that material outside Southeast, which could have cost up to six figures, he said.
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