Federal Authorizations for Alaska’s Donlin Mine Face Legal Scrutiny

SEATTLE (Scrap Monster):  A proposal to build one of the world’s largest gold mines along Alaska’s Kuskokwim River is facing what has now become a legal question: Did the federal government, when it awarded key approvals for the project in 2018, properly consider the environmental, cultural and health risks?

That question is at the heart of a lawsuit filed by tribal organizations that challenges authorizations granted to the Donlin Gold mine by the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the U.S. Bureau of Land Management.

 Tribal governments in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, the Western Alaska region where the mine project is located, last year filed the lawsuit in U.S. District Court in Anchorage challenging the decisions.

Six years after the agencies issued their authorizations, the parties argued their points in a hearing held Monday before Judge Sharon Gleason.

A major flaw in the environmental impact statement process that led to the approvals, the plaintiffs argue in their lawsuit, is the lack of analysis of a spill of mining waste from a catastrophic dam failure.

 That point came up in Monday’s court hearing.

The environmental analysis conceded that there is a 2 percent chance of a dam failure causing a catastrophic spill, said Maile Sinn Fong Tavepholjalern, an Earthjustice attorney representing the six tribal governments that are plaintiffs in the case.

“But a 2% percent chance of a catastrophic spill is not actually that remote. If there was a 2 percent chance that a plane might crash, it wouldn’t be fine,” Tavepholjalern said.

 The agencies’ analysis of dam failures used information from a 2014 dam breach at a mine in the Canadian province of British Columbia, Mount Polley. That dam failure caused a spill of 17 million cubic meters of water and 8 million cubic meters of solid mine waste materials, according to the provincial government.

But the agencies reviewing the Donlin project failed to consider a more recent and much more serious collapse in Brazil in 2015 that killed 17 people and caused two to be missing, Tavepholjalern said.

Other issues argued in the hearing were the impacts of the mine and its associated barge traffic to Kuskokwim River fish and the anticipated effects of development on human health in the region.

 “These areas are serious. They go to the heart of the Y-K Delta and the core of our clients’ concerns for their health and wellbeing, not just for themselves, but for the future generations,” Tavepholjalern said.

Attorneys representing the Corps of Engineers, which issued a Clean Water Act permit for the mine, and the BLM, which approved a right-of-way for a natural gas pipeline needed to power the mine, defended what they said was a lengthy and laborious review process that led to the authorizations.

“A tremendous amount of work has gone into analyzing the potential environmental impact of these agency decisions. And then, the agencies imposed mitigations and special conditions to deal with the adverse impacts of the decisions. The Corps and BLM decisions should be affirmed,” Sara Costello, a U.S. Justice Department attorney, said in the hearing.

Also defending the agencies’ actions at the hearing were attorneys representing Donlin Gold LLC, the partnership developing the mine; the state of Alaska; and a Native corporationa owned by Yup’ik people in the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Calista Corp., the regional corporation established though the Alaska Native Claims Settlement Act, and the Kuskokwim Corp., are also partners in the mine project. Calista owns the subsurface mineral rights at the mine site and the Kuskokwim Corp. owns the surface lands.

Courtesy: www.ictnews.org