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Feds advance Alaska’s Pebble gold and copper project with release of draft environmental review.
https://www.adn.com/business-economy...-gold-project/
EIS can be found here: https://www.pebbleprojecteis.com/
Even though we thought Pebble was dead. Looks like its still chugging along. The USACE has released a draft EIS for the Pebble project. Public comments are open now.
That thing just keep coming back! I’ve filed comments of concern, again. This would be a real tragedy if it ever comes to pass.
Turning into a "cash cow" for all parties concerned it seems. Just keep milking it....these are the good ole days.
What would you expect from a president and administration that are overturning all the protections for our lands. They don't give a sh*t about our planet, it is all about making a damn buck. When the newly appointed person in charge of the EPA is the same guy that had record amount of lawsuits against the EPA, What more would you expect. This has nothing to do with party, but our current president and administration are freaking morons!
I’m guessing lots of you received this email too, but I thought I’d post it here for anyone who missed it. I added emphasis in a couple of key points:
Dear Jason,
The Army Corps of Engineers didn’t do its job, so the fishermen of Bristol Bay had to pay to do it for them. The results are frightening: if Pebble Mine’s tailings dam fails, it could kill a pristine river.
The single-greatest risk involved in an open-pit mine is the tailings dam holding Billions of tons of mine waste. Tailings dams are not stout concrete structures like water dams. They are mounds of earth and too often, they fail. In its EIS the Army Corps examined only a tiny discharge from the tailings storage facility. Independent expert analysis suggests a realistic dam failure scenario would involve 10,000 times more material flowing downstream than the Army Corps studied.
This is yet another example of how incoherent and incomplete this permitting process has been. Studying one ten-thousandth of the danger just doesn’t cut it for a place as special as Bristol Bay. In this fatally-flawed document, the Army Corps is cutting corners in ways that seem calculated to get the Pebble permitted as quickly as possible and get executives their million-dollar bonuses. Science is supposed to drive this process, not lies of omission and political motivations.
Because the Army Corps didn’t do their job, Bristol Bay fishermen had to hire a scientist to take a hard look at a catastrophic tailings dam failure in Bristol Bay like those that have recently occurred in British Columbia and Brazil. Dr. Cam Wobus is an MIT-educated earth scientist specializing in hydrology and geomorphology. He is a peer-reviewed expert on this subject. What he found was horrifying. If the Pebble tailings dam fails, the Nushagak River basin downstream of the mine is going to be coated with a layer of mine waste. Summer or winter, wet or frozen, it doesn’t matter: nothing will stop the flood of debris.
What happens once all that waste is on the landscape? It will stay there for decades, leaching heavy metals and acid into the watershed every time it rains, every breakup flood. Salmon eggs will be coated in a layer of sediment, killing a generation of salmon. These are not transitory effects. This is a decades-long disaster.
In addition to the magnitude of the consequences, Dr. Wobus concluded the likelihood of a dam failure is significant. According to his analysis, the probability of failure is 20% or greater over the expected life of Pebble.
The only reasonable option is to tell the Army Corps no. Tell them their EIS is incomplete and the process needs to be halted now. No credible permitting process would ignore this kind of lurking nightmare. Tell the Army Corps to stop and put this deadly mine back on the shelf where it belongs.
-Save Bristol Bay
PS. Can you throw in $15 to help us employ a team of leading scientists to help us stop Pebble?
Thanks for posting that email Jason.
Remember the Mount Polley mine disaster a few years ago up in BC? You know the one where the dam failed and spilled mine waste into the headwaters of the Fraser River? Well, guess what? That mine is now closing supposedly because of the "decline in copper prices". I'm sure that's it.
What's even worse is the engineers that designed the dam at Mount Polley (and had to pay out $108 m CDN) are also designing the tailing facility at Pebble. Ridiculous.
Please comment and say no to Pebble. This project has the potential to wipe out all of Bristol Bay.
https://action.savebristolbay.org/pa...ubmission-form