Environmental
You don’t have to be a tree-hugging environmentalist to appreciate the disastrous environmental record of mines and the reality of what they will do to the environment. Most people will agree on what will happen. The likelihood of an earthquake is high in the area of the proposed mine. If the tailings break, the effect will be devastating. Pebble Limited Partnership will not take the precautions to prevent a tailings leak from an earthquake. Even without an earthquake, a leak in the tailings is inevitable. The Bingham Canyon Mine is just like Pebble but half its size and the pollution has contaminated 60 square miles of groundwater near Salt Lake City, making the water unusable to thousands. Our area is even more fragile because of our reliance on the salmon, not to mention the rest of the delicate ecosystem. Also, glacial gravel, the soil here, is very permeable. Chemicals travel fast underground through the soil. Chemicals don’t need to travel into the surface water by waterways to contaminate the water where the fish are. The amount of water that Pebble will use to run the mine per year, 35 billion gallons water, is more than the city of Anchorage uses per year. Acid rock drainage is also inevitable and permanent. Most mines that followed water quality standards still contaminated the water with acid rock drainage, which is all is needed to destroy the salmon’s spawning routes. There is also great risk of water contamination. Mine operations use countless amounts of chemicals that are toxic to fish and wildlife, which will be released into local surface and ground water. Block caving mining creates more contamination because over time it causes settling and sinking on the land on the surface and when the water from rain enters the mine it creates acid that seeps into the waterways and becomes toxins to wildlife and fish. On top of all this, countless bridges and culverts will be built to create all the roads necessary around the mine for it to function. Culverts and bridges create water that is too shallow or fast for fish to cross. When fish passages are disrupted, populations will decrease and run the risk of the fish not returning to those areas. For all these reasons and more, there is No Such Thing as a Clean Mine.
