Northlandia: North Shore’s hottest beach is made of mining pollution

SILVER BAY — On a warm summer day, parked cars will line both sides of Mensing Drive to Minnesota Highway 61, nearly a mile away from their destination: Black Beach on Lake Superior.

“You go down there on a weekend, you can’t believe it,” said Silver Bay Mayor Wade LeBlanc.

Established as a park just a few years ago, visitors flock to the black “sand” beach, which is exploding in popularity thanks to photos and articles shared online.

“That’s been the biggest thing,” LeBlanc said. “I mean, I am not a social media guy, but I do realize the importance of it for getting information out to people and so I’m not foolish to think that it doesn’t help us.”

Earlier this month, FamilyDestinationsGuide.com ranked Black Beach No. 61 on a list of

“America’s Favorite 100 Secret Beaches,”

but it incorrectly said the beach was made up of “black volcanic sand.”

That’s true for the black beaches of Hawaii, but Black Beach on Lake Superior is not made of naturally occurring black sand. It’s made of mining pollution disposed of in the lake.

From 1955-1980, Reserve Mining, Northshore Mining’s predecessor, pumped its tailings, or waste rock, directly into Lake Superior.

After taconite is mined near Babbitt, it’s taken by rail to Silver Bay, where it’s crushed into fine pieces. Magnets take out the iron, which is processed into marble-sized pellets and shipped off to make steel. And since 1980, the fine pieces of non-iron leftovers, or tailings, are then taken inland to the Milepost 7 tailings basin and kept behind a dam.

But before a landmark environmental lawsuit required the construction of that basin, the fine pieces of waste rock were dumped into Lake Superior.

From 1955-1980,

Reserve sent up to 67,000 tons of tailings per day

down a chute into Lake Superior. The current took some of the tailings with it, causing the lake to appear green in places. But many of the tailings stayed near the Silver Bay plant, forming a massive delta along the shore.

And Black Beach, sometimes called Onyx Beach, is the northernmost end of that delta.

The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency sued Reserve in 1972 to stop it from dumping its tailings,

and just before the trial began, asbestos-like fibers were discovered in Lake Superior

and in the drinking water of cities that sourced their water from the lake, like Duluth, but had not filtered the water.

Eventually, the fibers were traced back to those tailings, prompting Judge Miles Lord to order Reserve to close. But shortly after, the appeals process kept the mine, processing plant and tailings disposal into Lake Superior to continue until the basin was completed in 1980. (The basin, Milepost 7, is located a few miles inland and still takes the facility’s tailings today.

Plans are underway to expand it)

.

So, given the asbestos-like fibers, is it safe to play, picnic and swim at the beach?

Dr. Jeffrey Mandel, professor emeritus at the University of Minnesota School of Public Health, has studied why so many people who had worked in taconite plants were getting mesothelioma, a lung cancer that is caused by asbestos exposure, as part of the

Minnesota Taconite Workers Health Study.

In 2018, he and Dr. Nnaemeka Odo published

a study

that could not connect taconite workers’ mesothelioma to those asbestos-like fibers (non-asbestiform

amphibole

elongate mineral particles) found in taconite. The fibers occur in taconite mined from the easternmost end of the Iron Range, where ore is sourced for Northshore Mining.

Instead, it was likely caused by asbestos-form material in insulation or other equipment in the plants, Mandel said.

That’s because the fibers found in taconite are non-friable (don’t separate easily), shorter and more easily eliminated by the body’s immune system via white blood cells that engulf or ingest the fibers, Mandel said.

But the longer friable fibers tend to stay in the body. Long fibers are

defined by the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration

“as 5 micrometers or longer, with a length-to-diameter ratio of at least 3 to 1.”

“(Long fibers) tend to migrate out to the periphery of the lung, which is exactly where the mesothelioma occurs, in the periphery,” Mandel said. “(Mesothelioma) occurs actually in the tissue surrounding the lungs, it’s not actually in the lung. (The long fibers) work their way out to the periphery of the lung and cause ongoing irritation of that tissue, which ultimately results in mesothelioma.”

Mandel said his former University of Minnesota colleagues are further studying the short fiber’s health impacts.

So, an afternoon on the beach? Probably fine.

“It’s not likely that there’s any substantial risk with that type of exposure. There might be some risk, but I think that would generally involve a much larger exposure where you’re working or playing there day in and day out for year after year,” Mandel said. “That’s the setting where the exposure may be more pronounced. I think a casual sort of visit to the beach or a weekend at the beach — I guess I wouldn’t be too concerned about that knowing what we know about short fibers.”

Today, the tailings line the beach in a coffee ground or sand-like texture. And trees and other plants are growing out of them.

Besides the tailings, there’s other evidence of the beach’s industrial past.

A fence laden with no trespassing runs along the beach, with the pellet plant and related facilities just on the other side.
And strong waves over the winter uncovered a broken electrical wire, which was jutting out of the ground in two places along the beach’s south shore on a recent visit.

For Silver Bay, Black Beach’s transformation into a usable beach has spurred other developments on the road leading to it, including Black Beach Municipal Campground and Black Beach Mini Golf. And across Highway 61, there’s North Shore Adventure Park.

Combined, visitors are now stopping in Silver Bay rather than just passing through en route to state parks lining the North Shore.

“Being right next to (Lake) Superior is probably 10 to 15 degrees cooler than a mile or two inland,” Leblanc said. “When it’s hot down in the Twin Cities, it drives people up here … it’s a massive body of water and the black sand, it’s unique. It’s unique to our area; it’s unique to our region. So it’s just another attraction to get people to stop in our area.”