SCOTUS allows waste dumping in Alaska lake

In a major setback for the people and wildlife of southern Alaska, the Supreme Court ruled 6 to 3 today that the Coeur d'Alene Mines Corporation can legally under the Clean Water Act dump more than 4.5 million tons of “slurry”—a mining waste byproduct that's a mixture of crushed rock and water—in the Lower Slate Lake in Alaska's Tongass National Forest. The ruling overturned a May 2007 decision by a lower appeals court denying Coeur d'Alene's permit, which applies to its Kensington Gold Mine north of Juneau, Alaska's capital city.

But isn't the Clean Water Act supposed to protect our lakes and rivers and other water sources? Well, yes. For nearly 30 years, the CWA expressly prohibited pumping harmful waste materials into waters, allowing only "fill material" for building structures like seawalls and levees to be dumped, and only then with permits from the Army Corps of Engineers. But in 2002, the Bush Administration tweaked the definition of "fill" to include dangerous waste products with an EPA memo that the public never saw. The memo's expansion of the "fill" definition permitted harmful slurry dumping into lakes and other water sources. In making its decision today, the Supreme Court relied on this memo.

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