The Supreme Court recently upheld a permit issued under the Bush administration by the Army Corps of Engineers to allow a mining company to dump tailings from an Alaskan gold mining operation into Lower Slate Lake, which is located in the Tongass National Forest. The Clean Water Act is supposed to prevent such discharges into natural waters, which is essentially what the appeals court had said in its previous ruling that the Supreme Court has now overturned. Instead, the mining company, Coeur d’Alene Mines Corp, argued that the lake was the most practical and environmentally sound method of disposal. Though this is likely to kill all aquatic life in the lake, it was argued that the lake could always be restocked with fish and restored once mining operations had ceased. This claim seems suspicious to me, however, as gold mining operations have usually been associated with arsenic and I would suspect that such high levels would persist for some indefinitely long period of time. Nonetheless, the 6-member court majority had said that deference must be paid to the “reasonable” decision made by the Corps of Engineers. Unfortunately, what I read into this description is that one can get away with whatever the regulator can be convinced into allowing, however that might be accomplished.
Tags: Army Corps of Engineers, civil engineering, Clean Water Act, pollution, Reuters, water
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