This week I woke to yet another front-page story about a mining company destroying a salmon stream. This time it’s the Australian mining company XS Platinum Inc. that got caught turning the Salmon River in Southwest Alaska into a river of mine waste.
With mining disasters more and more common in the pages of Alaskan newspapers, it’s time to stop blindly trusting Outside mining companies with Alaska’s wild salmon streams. When XS Platinum applied for its permit to mine near the Salmon River, it promised Alaskans a “zero discharge” mine.
Instead, XS Platinum knowingly dumped enough pollution to turn the clear river into a filthy mess — so muddy that fisheries biologists couldn’t count the salmon from above.
But this mine isn’t alone. Another mine — heralded by the mining industry as an example of how mining and salmon can successfully co-exist — failed late this summer, sending billions of gallons of toxic mine waste into one of North America’s premier salmon streams.
The Mount Polley mine along the Fraser River in British Columbia is just the latest example how “state of the art” mining technology cannot stop the harm caused by massive dredging operations in and around sensitive salmon habitat.
That’s why I couldn’t believe it earlier this month when Texas billionaire Herbert Hunt came to the Resource Development Council in Anchorage and reported that his company, PacRim Coal, planned to strip mine more than 25 miles of wild salmon habitat around the Chuitna River on the west side of Cook Inlet so he could send coal to China. Not to worry though, Mr. Hunt promised his coal strip mine would be “environmentally friendly.”
How stupid does Mr. Hunt think we Alaskans are? How many times are we going to fall for the same false promises from Outside mining companies? Many people still remember when the Hunt Brothers tried to corner the world silver market in the 1970s. That greedy money-grab hurt a lot of good people. Now they’re coming after our salmon streams.
For the rest of this column, click here: http://www.adn.com/article/20141127/god-didnt-make-salmon-streams-strip-mining