It's now a third of a mile from the plant to the edge of the water. Over the years, the waste rock spread out into a flat expanse of land at the edge of the lake. Reserve dumped the waste in Lake Superior. Huge machines crushed the rock, and separated the useable iron from the waste. The company hauled trainloads of rock from the mine to the processing plant at Silver Bay.
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"But I left in 1957, came back 1968, took my son down to show him how to play the game, and we could no longer see the boulders."Īrlene Lehto blamed Reserve Mining Co. "And the game was, if you got your pebble to land on one of those boulders and stay there, you won," Lehto says. "You used to be able to see the huge boulders under the water." Lehto says the boulders were visible as much as 15 feet under the surface. "One of my favorite games was taking different colored pebbles from beaches, and throwing them down off the cliff," Lehto says. Her parents operated a resort near Silver Bay, 50 miles up the shore from Duluth. A court ultimately forced Reserve to stop the dumping, laying down the principle that the government can force industry to clean up its pollution.Īrlene Lehto grew up on Lake Superior. Duluth's drinking water, 50 miles away, was contaminated with a fiber that might cause cancer. For 25 years, the water near the plant was gray-green and muddy. Tons of sediment poured into the lake every day. Reserve Mining Company used to dump its waste rock into the lake. But Lake Superior was once a battleground.
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People visit Lake Superior to feel the power of nature or the peace of a quiet walk on the beach. The court case that forced Reserve to stop the pollution was an early battle in the environmental movement. The Reserve processing plant at Silver Bay dumped 47 tons of waste rock into Lake Superior every minute. Join the conversation with other MPR listeners in the News Forum.īy Stephanie Hemphill, Minnesota Public Radio