EPA Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Public Hearing

May 31, 2012

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EPA Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Public Hearing

1 (Pages 1 to 4)

Page 1

 U.S. ENVIRONMENTAL PROTECTION AGENCY - REGION 10

 Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment

 Public Hearing on May 31, 2012

 Seattle, Washington

Page 2

1 REIDAR SOLBERG: This will be in

2 Norwegian.

3 So my name is Reidar Solber and I'm a second4 generation Bristol Bay fisherman. I fished Bristol Bay

5 for 52 years. I started with my dad in 1960 and fished

6 25 years with my brother. In the past twelve years, I've

7 fished with my son.

8 Bristol Bay has had many difficult struggles; one of

9 them being in 1972 with the high seas intercept fishery,

10 we had one twelve-hour period, and in 1973, there was no

11 fishery whatsoever.

12 With the help of the Federal Government and Senator

13 Magnuson and Senator Stevens, we were able to get the

14 200-mile limit into effect and preserve the fishery. And

15 with the management of Alaska Department of Fish and

16 Game, it magnified to runs as high as 60 million a year.

17 This was made possible because of the water quality and

18 the habitat in the region.

19 We're again looking to the Federal Government for

20 help to preserve the most powerful salmon-producing river

21 systems in the world. I will be passing the fishery on

22 to my son, with the hope that he will be able to pass it

23 on, as a third-generation fisherman, on to his son or

24 daughter in generations to come.

25 My thanks to the EPA for looking at the consequences

Page 3

1 of digging a hole of this size in the headwaters of

2 Kvichak and Nushagak River systems. Water quality and

3 habitat is a driving force behind the incredible fishery.

4 I hope we can preserve it.

5 Thank you.

6 DOROTHY LARSON: Thank you. My name

7 is Dorothy Larson, and I come from Snag Point, which is

8 now Dillingham, Alaska. I am of (inaudible) and Filipino

9 descent. I am also a shareholder of the Bristol Bay

10 Native Corporation and a tribal member of the village of

11 Dillingham. I also serve on the Bristol Bay Native

12 Corporation board of directors as its vice chair. And

13 just to tell you a little bit about BBNC, we have three

14 million acres of land and 9,000 shareholders across the

15 United States and internationally.

16 I fished commercially for over 60 years, so I've got

17 a few years on Mr. Reidar here. And my sons and my

18 grandchildren and other family members are still involved

19 in the fishery as commercial and subsistence fishers.

20 They rely upon the economic benefits of the salmon, as

21 well as the cultural and subsistence value of the salmon

22 and other resources from the land and the sea.

23 Bristol Bay Native Corporation's mission statement

24 is very simple and direct: enrich our native way of

25 life. We are proud of our nativeness and we are proud of

Page 4

1 our way of life and we want to maintain and enrich that

2 way of life.

3 Well, how do we do this? We do it by taking care of

4 our land and our resources from the sea, as well as the

5 land, from the abundance of the natural resources that

6 feed us throughout the year. It's not just during the

7 salmon season; it's throughout the year.

8 It also provides an economic base with the

9 commercial fishing and other economic interests we invest

10 in. We want to sustain our subsistence lifestyle, while

11 blending the western way of living, which we must adapt

12 to. We do not want to live in the past, but we can and

13 should have the opportunity to live in the way we are

14 accustomed to by providing a strong economic future for

15 the people of Bristol Bay, responsibly and without risk,

16 by ensuring the continued sustainability of our salmon.

17 BETSY DANIELS: Thanks, Dorothy. I'm

18 going to have to go to the next person. I'm so sorry.

19 Thank you.

20 Anne Mosness, and forgive me --

21 ANNE MOSNESS: It's Norwegian.

22 Mosness.

23 I appreciate that the EPA is looking at the culture

24 and heritage of the region. My family only had a few

25 decades up there, but we have great affection for the
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EPA Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Public Hearing

2 (Pages 5 to 8)

Page 5

1 people who live in that region, that immense landscape

2 that they live in that's ruggedly beautiful, and when you

3 leave the harbors and the diesel engines, there's just

4 timelessness and this quiet that I think is really rare

5 on our planet.

6 When my father first came to Alaska in 1929, he was

7 a gold miner, and he has a mine that's on old mining maps

8 up on the Bering Sea area. And when the government used

9 the gold miners' equipment to build the airstrip out in

10 Aleutian, that put my father basically out of business.

11 But he returned to Bristol Bay for four decades to

12 fish. And as he aged, I started fishing with him. I'm

13 almost as old as Reidar. Probably older. I started in

14 1973 up there.

15 My son started coming on the boat when he was ten,

16 and there was 70 years between the oldest and the

17 youngest on our fishing boat for four summers. And I

18 listened to my father tell my son the story of his life,

19 and I don't remember ever hearing the regret that we were

20 not a gold mining family, although when someone once

21 asked the value of the gold in the mine, it was

22 astoundingly high.

23 But I think my father realized that we were a part

24 of that great cycle of nature. We were harvesting this

25 fabulous fish that was being eaten by people all over the

Page 6

1 world. We had a lot of pride in the family business. It

2 was not short-term wealth, which is what his gold mine

3 would have brought him.

4 So there's a statement in the book that says that

5 the destruction of the common food resource is not a sad

6 by-product of modern industrialization but a necessary

7 prerequisite for its success. And we have too many

8 things happening that are destroying the economy of the

9 fisheries, but I want folks to know that there's many of

10 us here working to keep the value up.

11 Thank you.

12 BOBBY ANDREW: Good afternoon, Dennis

13 and Rick. And before I start on behalf of the Tribal

14 Council of Ekwok, I want to thank Dennis and Tommy for

15 coming to Ekwok about six days after you announced the

16 assessment was going to be released. It gave two

17 different villages the opportunity to review the draft.

18 And on behalf of the two villages, I want to thank you.

19 In addition to that, the six tribes that were

20 involved in sending a letter to you, Dennis, as well as

21 to the EPA, we support the work that you have done.

22 And in addition, in review of the assessment -- or

23 the PowerPoint presentation you just made, I'd like to

24 see you take another look at the subsistence portion

25 where you have 342 pounds of food. I think it's a lot

Page 7

1 more than that, what we fish for the season.

2 In addition, many of the tribes do support the

3 timeline that was given through July 23rd. It will be

4 giving you sufficient time to review, as well as the

5 tribes, and in addition to that, when the peer review is

6 done, we're going to have another opportunity.

7 Thank you.

8 JIM KLUG: My name is Jim Klug. I'm

9 the owner of a well-known travel business that sends

10 hundreds of anglers a year to sport-fish the waters of

11 Bristol Bay.

12 I'm here today not only as an independent business

13 owner concerned about the future of Bristol Bay, but also

14 as the current chairman of the American Fly Fishing Trade

15 Association, the trade group that represents the entire

16 fly fishing industry throughout America.

17 For the record, our industry is completely united in

18 its opposition to the development of the Pebble Mine

19 project, and we believe that Bristol Bay watershed, as

20 the home to the largest salmon runs in North America and

21 the world, is a one-of-a-kind resource that cannot be put

22 at risk.

23 The American Fly Fishing Trade Association agrees

24 with the EPA's scientific review findings that Pebble

25 Mine is a threat to Bristol Bay. A project that proposes

Page 8

1 to spew up to ten billion tons of toxic mining waste that

2 would theoretically be stored behind massive earthen dams

3 up to 50 stories tall, all in a known earthquake zone, is

4 quite simply an environmental disaster that is waiting to

5 happen.

6 To construct and dig one of the world's largest

7 open-pit mines in the heart of such an ecologically

8 sensitive and economically significant area is the worst

9 possible nightmare for the Alaskan wilderness, for the

10 people who live and work throughout the area, and for the

11 countless businesses and jobs that are directly and

12 indirectly linked to the Bristol Bay region.

13 The foreknown consortium that wants to mine the

14 Pebble area would have you believe that opposition to

15 their project comes from the standard no mining, no

16 development, zero extraction attitudes of radical

17 environmentalism.

18 As a business owner and lifelong sportsman, I am

19 here to tell that you nothing could be further from the

20 truth. Watching these slides and reading the report,

21 when you see facts up there that say leakage of acidic

22 drainage likely, failure of road culverts likely --

23 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you.

24 JIM KLUG: -- pipelines failure to

25 release toxic --
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EPA Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Public Hearing

3 (Pages 9 to 12)

Page 9

1 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you.

2 JIM KLUG: Thank you.

3 DENNIS ANDREW, SR.: Good afternoon.

4 My name is Dennis Andrew, Senior. I'm from the village

5 of New Stuyahok, Alaska, on the Nushagak River. And if

6 the mine goes through there, we'll be first affected on

7 the Nushagak River.

8 But I'm the tribal chief, president. I also sit on

9 our (inaudible) board, plus I sit on Bristol Bay Native

10 Association, and plus CSC, Community School Committee for

11 our (inaudible) school.

12 And the population of New Stuyahok is 510, and 110

13 percent is subsistence users. We depend on our land

14 there; the water, the game, the berries. We depend on

15 it. It's just like our dinner table constantly.

16 As I speak right now, they're gathering. It's

17 started. Birds came up. (Inaudible) season is almost

18 wrapped up. Salmon are showing up. There's people from

19 the village that are already going down to Lewis Point to

20 our fish camp, waiting for our King Salmon that they

21 really depend on.

22 This Pebble Mine is very, very unacceptable. It's

23 not acceptable for biggest fishery in the world. Up and

24 down the Nushagak, a lot of villages and stuff, we depend

25 on subsistence, hundred and ten percent or more for

Page 10

1 years, from way back from sailboat fishing days. Now

2 we're improving our salmon (inaudible), cooling our fish

3 down. Market is coming back up. We need that salmon to

4 continue so our grandchildren could --

5 BETSY DANIELS: Thanks, Dennis.

6 DENNIS ANDREW, SR.: Thank you.

7 JOEL WEBSTER: Hi, my name is Joel

8 Webster. I'm with the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation

9 Partnership. We're a national hunting and fishing

10 conservation organization that works in partnership with

11 other sporting organizations and rank and file hunters

12 and anglers.

13 And I came from Missoula, Montana, today because of

14 the importance of the Bristol Bay fishery not only for

15 Alaskans but for sportsmen across America. And, you

16 know, where I come from in Montana, western Montana, is

17 known as the tribal capitol of the west, but all the

18 serious anglers I know in Montana dream of fishing for

19 trophy rainbows and Dollys and salmon in the Bristol Bay

20 area of Alaska. And those who have been there know that

21 this resource is too special to be developed.

22 And Bristol Bay area is also important for big game.

23 This mine poses threats for bear, moose, and caribou

24 hunting. And not only would an industrialized habitat

25 harm this spot, but it paves the way for future

Page 11

1 development that would result in a maze of roads that

2 would fragment important habitat and impact hunting for

3 generations to come.

4 And as pointed out by the Bristol Bay watershed

5 assessment, this mine would do serious harm for this

6 fishery, and it's time for the Obama administration to

7 basically use its authority under the Clean Water Act to

8 protect Bristol Bay.

9 Thank you.

10 JASON METROKIN: Thank you. My name

11 is Jason Metrokin. I'm a shareholder, as well as

12 president and CEO, to Bristol Bay Native Corporation. We

13 appreciate the EPA's efforts to ensure balanced science

14 that is at the forefront of decisions that will determine

15 the immediate and long-term viability of Bristol Bay.

16 Salmon is the lifeblood of our region. In 2009,

17 after several years of information gathering, BBNC took a

18 position to protect the fishery by opposing the Pebble

19 Mine project.

20 The risk associated with the project have estimated

21 as having nearly eleven billion tons of mine waste

22 located at the headwaters of the world's largest and

23 potentially last wild salmon run. This are far too great

24 a risk for us to accept. An overwhelming majority of our

25 shareholders, including residents of Bristol Bay, oppose

Page 12

1 the project, as well. In fact, a study last fall

2 indicated the majority of voting Alaskans oppose this

3 project.

4 In almost any development project, there will be

5 opposition. To my knowledge, this is the first time

6 where the proponents are in the minority.

7 Is it prudent to say that we oppose this project

8 without having seen a final plan? The fact is, we were

9 told by developers from day one the project would be an

10 open-pit mine so large that it could be seen from the

11 moon.

12 We know where the deposit is located, the deposit

13 type, and its potential size. As an Alaskan, I must

14 admit I get leery when the Federal Government involves

15 itself in local decision-making, but the feds do have a

16 role in permitting oversight.

17 In this case, your role is to ensure that dredge and

18 fill material permits are regulated to prohibit discharge

19 into salmon spawning habitat that is toxic to aquatic

20 life and would require perpetual treatment. You have

21 that legal authority, and this draft study supports it.

22 They have said the EPA can't possibly understand the

23 breadth of development impacts over only one year of

24 study. Conversely, it's hard for me to fathom that

25 foreign companies claim --
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EPA Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Public Hearing

4 (Pages 13 to 16)

Page 13

1 BETSY DANIELS: Thanks, Jason.

2 GASPAR PERRICONE: My name is Gaspar

3 Perricone, and I am the codirector of Bull Moose

4 Sportsman's Alliance based out of Denver, Colorado. We

5 are a national sportsman organization, dedicated to the

6 traditions/opportunities of hunters and anglers

7 throughout the United States.

8 It seems that all too often, we approach the

9 (inaudible) between development and the protection of our

10 national resources, our land, water and wildlife, as

11 (inaudible). And I think in many situations, that

12 decision is a false dichotomy.

13 There's numerous examples of where wildlife and

14 development coexist in a very symbiotic fashion. I'm

15 here today to say, however, though, the Bristol Bay

16 fishery and the proposed Pebble Mine is not one of those

17 areas that can coexist in a manner in which both will

18 flourish.

19 Bristol Bay is obviously one of the largest salmon

20 fisheries in the world. It has been prized by hunters

21 and anglers for over a century and is a truly unique

22 treasure that's part of our American heritage, and it

23 would be a shame to see that go.

24 Unfortunately, the proposed Pebble Mine would put

25 this one-of-a-kind fishery at incredible risk,

Page 14

1 threatening not only the native Alaskans that depend on

2 the livelihood -- depend on it for their livelihood, but

3 also a keystone of the Alaska economy.

4 The fact of the matter is that the EPA's watershed

5 assessment clearly demonstrates that any type of such a

6 development will have a serious impact on the largest

7 Sockeye salmon fishery in the world. Certainly it isn't

8 something that I think is worth bargaining with.

9 So as a result of this release, we as sportsmen and

10 the sportsmen community have come together for a single

11 ask for EPA and Obama administration, and that ask is

12 respectfully this: that you guys implement commonsense

13 solutions that would regulate the proposal of the Bristol

14 Bay mine and utilize your authority under 404(c) of the

15 Clean Water Act.

16 And let me conclude by saying this: if fidelity to

17 land, water, and wildlife is the statutory mission of

18 this agency, then I think surely the guiding philosophy

19 and the guiding thought has got to be that of a faithful

20 devotion to that unwritten statute that we hand down the

21 state of our natural world to our grandchildren improved

22 and not impaired in value.

23 PETER ANDREW: Good afternoon. I

24 don't know if it's on.

25 Good afternoon, Dennis. Thank you for the

Page 15

1 opportunity here on behalf of the shareholders of BBNC.

2 My name is Peter Andrew and I'm a director of BBNC; also

3 a director of one of the local utilities in Dillingham.

4 I thank you for the assessment. Thank you. And it

5 correlates with everything that our people in Bristol Bay

6 feel that would happen to our folks and to our rivers and

7 to our fish. I will be asking the EPA to please do the

8 404(c) on behalf of all the fish, on behalf of the

9 people, on behalf of our culture, on behalf of the people

10 that are not here yet; our kids' kids and their kids.

11 We've had a wonderful commercial fishery that has

12 been happening for at least 135 years, and we've also, my

13 people, have depended on resource for over 10,000 years.

14 So I thank you for your time. We'll probably have

15 some more time later. So thank you.

16 ROB MASONIS: Good afternoon. My name

17 is Rob Masonis. I'm the vice president for Western

18 Conservation at Trout Unlimited.

19 TU is a national conservation organization of

20 concerned anglers who are dedicated to the conservation

21 of North America's salmon and trout and the watersheds

22 where they are found. There are over 150,000 members

23 across the country, including in Alaska, and over 4,000

24 in Washington State. Our members travel to Bristol Bay

25 to fish and enjoy the spectacular experience of Bristol

Page 16

1 Bay's (inaudible).

2 Trout Unlimited commends EPA for the draft watershed

3 assessment, which is a solid scientific analysis that is

4 corroborated by the independent scientific analysis the

5 TU and the Wild Salmon Center released in February. Both

6 analyses show clearly the large-scale mining would

7 destroy salmon travel habitat, water quality, and present

8 a significant risk of catastrophic destruction to Bristol

9 Bay's prolific salmon and trout populations.

10 This population fuel the vibrant sustainable fishing

11 economies of Bristol Bay, which are worth hundreds of

12 millions of dollars annually and provide over 14,000

13 jobs. Because of this great threat, TU has played a lead

14 role in organizing 500 hunting and fishing groups and

15 businesses across the U.S. to put in writing their

16 opposition to large-scale mining in Bristol Bay.

17 Trout Unlimited is not (inaudible) development.

18 With the Bristol Bay Native Corporation, we've developed

19 a detailed proposal that identifies the conditions under

20 which responsible development could occur that does not

21 put Bristol Bay salmon and its salmon-fueled economy at

22 risk. We provided that document to EPA.

23 In closing, if ever there was a case in which EPA

24 should exercise its clear authority under the Clean Water

25 Act to prevent harmful development, this is it. By
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EPA Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Public Hearing

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Page 17

1 acting now to prohibit large-scale mining in Bristol Bay,

2 EPA will protect the environment and a thriving salmon3 based economy, while providing (inaudible) to all

4 interests and saving large sums of private and taxpayer

5 money that would be required to process other

6 applications that would ultimately be denied.

7 BETSY DANIELS: Thanks, Rob.

8 ROB MASONIS: This is good leadership

9 and good government.

10 Thank you.

11 GEORGE KEEFE: My name is George

12 Keefe. I live in Edmonds, Washington, and I'm a

13 backpacker and a retired CPA.

14 I am thrilled by the pristine beauty of the

15 Northwest. Next month, I'm going backpacking along the

16 Olympia Peninsula's Elwha River to celebrate the largest

17 dam removal project in the U.S. That is a triumph for

18 native people and for the environment and for all who

19 want their children and grandchildren to have the same

20 thrills.

21 I am very concerned that the triumph on the Elwha

22 River may be jeopardized by the world's largest earthen

23 steel and concrete dam proposed near Bristol Bay. The

24 tailings dam of 740 feet high, 4.3 miles in length, if

25 built, would be three times larger than the Three Gorges

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1 Dam in China, which is built of steel and concrete, not

2 mere earth.

3 A tailings dam must last forever. Seismic mapping

4 is incomplete in the Pebble Mine region. Two U.S.

5 Geologic Survey publications differ in where they map the

6 fault, but both suggest the Castle Mountain/Lake Clark

7 fault may run within five miles of Pebble Mine. However,

8 the mine developer claims the fault is 18 miles away and

9 the structures are currently designed to withstand an

10 earthquake at that distance.

11 If the fault runs five miles from the mine, the

12 force can be three times greater from the same

13 earthquake. Even the late Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska,

14 usually a strong proponent of resource extraction

15 projects, declared in 2007 his opposition to the Pebble

16 Mine proposal.

17 I urge the EPA to use its power under Section 404(c)

18 of the Clean Water Act to prohibit development of the

19 Pebble Mine as currently proposed.

20 RICARDO RUBY: Well, it had to happen,

21 I have a very different voice.

22 You don't realize it, but all this white hair is a

23 steel (inaudible), so I can stand some (inaudible).

24 I am puzzled that this event is happening now,

25 because the area was identified by the geologic survey

Page 19

1 50, 60 years ago as the largest and most valuable

2 mineralized zone in the United States -- excuse me -- in

3 the North American continent.

4 The State of Alaska has ordered twice to declare the

5 Pebble area a mining zone. Senator Stevens changed his

6 mind. He spoke against it and (inaudible) better and was

7 in favor of it.

8 I think a very significant element for the EPA to

9 consider and everybody to consider is that your study

10 encompasses an enormous area, and the Pebble property is

11 just a fraction of that. There are mining claims outside

12 the Pebble area, and they could multiply things

13 dramatically.

14 The feeling of the company, of which I'm an investor

15 and also a long-term member, Trout Unlimited --

16 BETSY DANIELS: Okay, thanks Ricardo.

17 You can submit your full comments online.

18 RICARDO RUBY: (Inaudible) the

19 company, (inaudible) bar has been set so high, nobody

20 else will be able to do it.

21 BETSY DANIELS: Okay. Thank you.

22 CARL BEVIS: I'm Carl Bevis. Just

23 more a comment along kind of, I guess, a systems line and

24 probability.

25 When you look at the failure rates, the failure

Page 20

1 rates of some of the systems associated with this

2 relative to, say, public transportation, if public

3 transportation had failure rates on this order, you would

4 never get on it. You would never get on the bus or you

5 wouldn't get in your car, let alone get in an airplane.

6 So until such time that failure rates of such

7 enormous systems and structures can be shown to be on the

8 order of magnitudes of public transportation, where human

9 life is definitely at risk, it shouldn't be even be

10 considered.

11 That's all.

12 LARRY BARRETT: Good morning -- or

13 good afternoon, actually.

14 My name is Larry Barrett. I'm the director of

15 operations for Far Bank Enterprises, which is a holding

16 company that owns and operates three popular fly fishing

17 brands; RIO, Redington, and Sage.

18 In aggregate, Far Bank employs 250 people and we

19 manufacture fly rods across the Sound on Bainbridge

20 Island and fly line in Idaho Falls, Idaho. We immensely

21 enjoy the fact that we are able to make our products in

22 the United States, and we realize the direct connection

23 to healthy fisheries and our economy and jobs.

24 We care about Bristol Bay in a number of ways.

25 First, our customers care. Many of them have been able
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EPA Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Public Hearing

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1 to enjoy their (inaudible) sports fishing there. And for

2 those who haven't been, it is a destination that many

3 anglers yearn to go from all over the globe.

4 Most important to us is about 20 percent of the fly

5 rods that we produce on Bainbridge Island and 10 percent

6 of the fly lines that we manufacture make a trip to

7 Bristol Bay.

8 After reviewing the EPA's watershed assessment, we

9 know that salmon streams and habitat will be destroyed.

10 Isn't that enough for us to say no to Pebble Mine?

11 If the Pebble Mine is constructed, my business in

12 the lower 48 and others will be negatively impacted and

13 jobs will be lost.

14 I want to urge our leaders and EPA to protect this

15 one-of-a-kind resource that drives economic value well

16 beyond Alaska. Please keep to the timeline and maintain

17 the July 23rd deadline for public comment. Timely

18 progress towards finalizing the assessment is critical.

19 Thank you.

20 KIM WILLIAMS: Thank you.

21 I'm the executive director of Nunamta Aulukestai,

22 which is a Yupik word that means "Caretakers of Our

23 Land." We have a membership of ten village corporations

24 in Bristol Bay and nine tribal governments. I am also

25 the third chief of the (inaudible) Tribal Council, and

Page 22

1 more importantly, I'm a mother of six.

2 I want to thank the EPA for doing the watershed

3 assessment. I sat in on the EPA technical team for my

4 tribe and watched them participate with EPA's team as

5 they interacted with state, federal, and tribal

6 officials.

7 My tribe is also on record requesting action under

8 the Clean Water Act, Section 404(c) that prevents large9 scale mining in the watershed. We request that you

10 finalize this watershed assessment and move into a 404(c)

11 process.

12 But you want comments on the draft, so I want to

13 give you my comments. And I may have more as I continue

14 reading this Volume 1 and the executive summary.

15 In Section 8, on the integrated risk

16 characterization chapter, tailings dam failure, I guess

17 the question that I have is, you put 28 percent, 30

18 percent impact at the Koktuli River and 10 to 20 percent

19 loss in the Mulchatna, but as the mine life continues --

20 or the mine scenario continues, as you have hydrology

21 (inaudible) to other streams, I think your number is

22 slightly low. It should be a little bit higher, and so I

23 ask that you take a look at that section.

24 Another section on the report, Section 2, Alaska

25 native cultures, where you list 14 communities in 2.2.5,

Page 23

1 I counted 16 communities. And some in Bristol Bay will

2 say Dillingham, of which I live in, is not a part of the

3 watershed, but I am here to tell you, my council believes

4 we are part of this watershed, and we are not going away

5 in giving you our comments.

6 The other final comment that I want to make is, in

7 Bristol Bay, we are very polarized on this issue. And

8 for us, when we have people going out and telling our

9 elders to sign petitions and to extend comments and

10 telling them that they can't throw their fish guts in the

11 water, we believe that that needs to be stopped -- or EPA

12 needs to take that into consideration when you get any

13 kind of a questionnaire coming to you.

14 ELAINE PACKARD: I chair the Water and

15 Salmon Committee for the Washington State chapter of the

16 Sierra Club. And one of our primary concerns is to

17 protect our iconic salmon, their habitat, and the Bristol

18 Bay residents who rely on the salmon for their livelihood

19 and cultural heritage.

20 Because of this, we are an ally in opposing the

21 proposed mine. We strongly support EPA's protection

22 under 404(c).

23 I will say that I have never been fortunate enough

24 to physically go to Bristol Bay, but I recently showed

25 the documentary "Red Gold" for Sierra Club members and it

Page 24

1 was a -- I heard both sides in this documentary, the pro

2 and the people against the mine. And everyone who was

3 watching that film came away very moved by the beauty of

4 the area and very committed to preserving what exists

5 right now.

6 Thank you.

7 CHRISTINA SALMON: My name is

8 Christina Salmon. I am the granddaughter and John and

9 Mary Olympic. I was born and raised in Igiugig, Alaska.

10 I currently serve on the Igiugig Village Council and the

11 Igiugig Native Corporation.

12 As I stand here in front of you today, my mind isn't

13 really here. It's at home with my children that I've

14 left for the fourth time this month on Pebble-related

15 causes. It's on my subsistence net I was supposed to

16 mend. It's on getting fish ready (inaudible), the birch

17 trees we were supposed to cut, it's on my cabin and boat

18 rentals, it's on my clients I get in seven days for the

19 sport fishing opener. It's on my school board meeting

20 I'll be missing. It's on canning jars, bug spray for the

21 baby, and another toy I'd better get for the quilt trip

22 present.

23 Standing here in front of you today, talking about a

24 mining giant threatening my entire way of life wasn't

25 what I ever could have planned for, but I do know that
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1 being here is where I need to be.

2 We weren't raised with a lot of money. We would

3 technically be labeled by the western society as poor,

4 but never once growing up did that thought ever cross our

5 innocent little minds. We had food in the freezer, we

6 had hand-me-down clothes, and we had the basics for

7 survival. And we were the happiest, dirtiest, most care8 free kids you've ever met.

9 So don't be fooled into thinking that we are poor

10 people who can't exist without Pebble. We have managed

11 just fine for the past 10,000 years without them.

12 In your assessment, you mention ten potential dam

13 failures under the mine scenario. To those of us who

14 have lived there for over 10,000 years, each and every

15 one of those "maybes" is not a risk we are willing to

16 take for future generations and the survival of our

17 culture.

18 I'd like to thank you for taking the time to listen

19 to me today. I'd also like to commend EPA on their

20 dedication, unbiased research, and constant open

21 conversations with people with Bristol Bay.

22 Thank you.

23 TYLER EDGAR: Hi, my name is Tyler

24 Edgar and I am here today representing the National

25 Council of Churches. The National Council of Churches

Page 26

1 (inaudible) 30,000 Christian denominations and more than

2 40 million people around the U.S.

3 First, I bring greetings from his grace, the Right

4 Reverend Benjamin, archbishop of the Diocese of Alaska

5 for the Orthodox Church in America. He'd hoped to be

6 here today but was unable to adjust his travel

7 accordingly.

8 Archbishop Benjamin (inaudible) seminary in Kodiak,

9 Alaska for (inaudible), and has worked closely with the

10 Alaska native community around Bristol Bay, many of who

11 are orthodox. The NCC and its member community are

12 grateful for the work of the EPA to better understand the

13 science and processes that have allowed Bristol Bay to

14 become the most prolific and diverse Sockeye salmon

15 fishery in the world and home to one of the last salmon

16 subsistence cultures.

17 The scientific evidence you have provided reaffirms

18 that protecting Bristol Bay is in keeping with our

19 Christian call to protect creation and seek justice for

20 the most vulnerable and for our neighbors.

21 Your assessment provides conclusive evidence that

22 the proposed Pebble Mine and other large-scale mining in

23 its least intrusive form will devastate significant

24 portions of salmon habitat, significant portions of God's

25 creation that provides jobs and livelihoods for

Page 27

1 thousands.

2 In light of your scientific findings, we urge you to

3 do all that you can to protect Bristol Bay in a quick and

4 timely fashion, using the authority provided to you by

5 the Clean Water Act.

6 I ask Archbishop Benjamin if he had a message he

7 wanted me to share with you. He sent me this: The

8 choices we make today with regard to Pebble will impact

9 generations. We will be blessed or cursed by them. We

10 must do all that we can to protect this beautiful and

11 bountiful part of God's earth.

12 Thanks so much for the opportunity to share

13 comments.

14 BRUCE HAM: I thank you for the

15 opportunity. Dennis, thank you for the science. I would

16 like to suggest that along with the science, that you

17 append the report with a historical understanding of how

18 we've remediated our fishing problems here in the lower

19 48 states.

20 I am a surgeon by trade. I do high-risk surgery and

21 I have to manage benefits and risks every day. And I am

22 also a grandfather, and I also have a Horizon. I love to

23 fish. I've been a former whitewater guide, and I would

24 like my children to be able to enjoy the rivers of

25 Bristol Bay that I have had an opportunity to enjoy, and

Page 28

1 I would like to see that for a longer horizon than a

2 mine.

3 And just a few disclosures. I'm probably one of

4 the few people here that actually owns mining claims

5 (inaudible) Oregon. I grew up in northeastern Oregon,

6 and in northeastern Oregon, we used to have many streams

7 with lots of salmon, lots of steelhead, and now you can

8 count on one hand the number of reds in the Lostine

9 River; maybe more than a couple of hands the number of

10 reds in the (inaudible) River. And these are areas that

11 have had relatively low impact.

12 I don't think that historically we've done a good

13 job of protecting ourselves by government, and I would

14 hope that we could actually put some kind of it into the

15 report that looks at this from a historical perspective.

16 That's what we've been able to do.

17 And I appreciate the opportunity to offer you that

18 suggestion.

19 ROBERT METZGER: Hi, I'm Robert

20 Metzger. I'm a member of the Bellevue/Issaquah,

21 Washington Trout Unlimited.

22 I am here to speak against the proposed Pebble Mine.

23 In my life, I have lived in the mountains of Montana and

24 Colorado for 16 years and have seen firsthand the damage

25 to the environment operating mines have and are still
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1 doing (inaudible).

2 Alaska is our last mostly untouched land, and the

3 Pebble Mine would do irreversible damage to another

4 beautiful state and harming ancient way of life in the

5 Alaska Native American that depends on the clean

6 watershed that Pebble Mine would destroy.

7 Please don't allow the Pebble Mine to open.

8 MICHAEL McDONALD: Hi. I'd first like

9 to start off by saying I find it very ironic that the

10 very first hearing about a proposed mine in Alaska is in

11 Seattle, Washington. I just find it a little fishy.

12 But I'd like to go on from there and say, this is a

13 very valuable mineral deposit, and as we continue to

14 develop our country, we're going to demand these

15 resources, especially as we continue to explore new

16 opportunities of renewal land resources.

17 Wind turbines take a tremendous amount of copper.

18 If we want to keep continuing down the road of exploring

19 those technologies, I think that this would be something

20 we should definitely look into, especially with the track

21 record that other countries have with their environmental

22 track record.

23 I think, you know, as Americans, we hold that very

24 near and dear to our heart, and with all the rules and

25 regulations in place, that this can be done in a safe and

Page 30

1 efficient manner.

2 Thank you very much.

3 MICHAEL O'LEARY: Hi. My name is

4 Michael O'Leary. I just want to thank the administration

5 and staff of the EPA for putting this report together. I

6 had a quick chance to review it this afternoon and

7 appreciate what's in it.

8 I'm going to make a personal biographical story as

9 to why I'm here today, and then I'm also going to connect

10 that to Pages 20 through 25 of the report.

11 35 years ago, my father and grandfather taught me

12 how to fish in the tributaries above the coastal fork of

13 the Willamette River.

14 In 1990, Oregon State University researchers started

15 to connect the idea that fish tissue that was sampled out

16 of that area had elevated levels of arsenic and mercury.

17 A very short period of time later, it was tied

18 specifically up to the Black Butte mine, which, in 2010,

19 was finally declared as an EPA Superfund site, as the

20 owners had abandoned it. Tailings were washed out

21 downstream and were collected.

22 In the year 2000, my grandfather passed away with

23 many years of onset of neurological conditions which were

24 diagnosed as a combination of Alzheimer's and

25 Parkinson's, which are also indicative of periods of

Page 31

1 exposure to mercury -- or associated with that.

2 In the assessment, you describe a great number of

3 potential impacts that are catastrophic -- tailings ponds

4 washing down the stream, pipelines, failing -- at

5 predictable rates, for predictable reasons. It's

6 unacceptable, in my opinion, to put such a beautiful area

7 at risk with such -- risks of such elevated levels.

8 Please protect Bristol Bay. Please say no to the

9 Pebble Mine. Thank you very much.

10 SEAN MAGEE: Thank you. My name is

11 Sean McGee. I'm here today on behalf of Northern Dynasty

12 Minerals, 50 percent owner of the Pebble project. I'm

13 also here representing our shareholders, some three14 quarters of which are residents of the United States.

15 I'd like to begin by saying that when we first

16 learned the EPA was going to conduct a watershed

17 assessment, we welcomed it. We welcomed it because in

18 initiating the study, the EPA had rejected the notion of

19 issuing a preemptive veto of the project, because there

20 simply wasn't enough information to do so. We agreed

21 with that conclusion then and we agree with it today.

22 However, we felt that the watershed assessment also

23 presented a unique opportunity to inject some science

24 into this discussion; one that's been characterized by

25 extremely volatile, politicized, and emotional debate.

Page 32

1 Unfortunately, that hasn't happened. The draft

2 Bristol Bay watershed assessment study is a fundamentally

3 flawed document that reflects more on the state of

4 politics and advocacy than on science, and that's a

5 terrible shame.

6 We're hopeful that the final report will present a

7 more objective and informed review. If not, the EPA will

8 have only succeeded in exacerbating the flames of

9 controversy around Pebble, one that has pitted families

10 against one another, communities against one another, and

11 sectors against one another.

12 Why do we believe the Bristol Bay watershed

13 assessment is flawed? Principally because it is

14 premature. By the EPA's own admission, it has evaluated

15 the ultimate hypothetical project, a project has that not

16 been defined and for which key environmental litigation

17 strategies have not been presented.

18 You don't have to be a scientist to understand that

19 you cannot assess what you do not know. That's why every

20 resource development project in this country is assessed

21 by federal and state regulators after a proponent has

22 finished his studies and presented them.

23 Am I running out of time?

24 BETSY DANIELS: Ten seconds.

25 SEAN MAGEE: We are at a point of
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1 taking a comprehensive review and we will present our

2 science in weeks to come. We're hopeful that the final

3 report will shed light on this issue.

4 We're very concerned --

5 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you.

6 SEAN MAGEE: Thank you for your time.

7 TREFON ANGASAN: Thank you. Thank you

8 for the opportunity to speak today. I represent the

9 Alaska Peninsula Corporation, which is a merger of five

10 village corporations in the Bristol Bay region.

11 I appreciate BBNC coming here today, but I would

12 like to say that they don't speak for the Alaska

13 Peninsula Corporation. We have stated that in the past

14 and will continue to state that.

15 The only reason why we're here today is because we

16 are very concerned that the timelines that you have

17 submitted for public comment are not in sync with the

18 needs that are apparent in Bristol Bay at this point.

19 We know that -- we've heard Dennis talk, Dennis from

20 New Stuyahok, talk about how the salmon and herring is

21 winding up. His people are gathering to go down river,

22 and I appreciate that. I appreciate, you know, the

23 native way of life, and that's always been something that

24 we all aspire to maintaining.

25 But I think that we, as a land representative of an

Page 34

1 organization that owns 400,000 acres of surface land in

2 the Bristol Bay region, 200,000 of those acres that are

3 adjacent to Pebble prospect, we're very concerned that we

4 don't know enough about what the impact is going to be on

5 the holdings of the Alaska Peninsula Corporation.

6 We take no position on Pebble. I mean, Pebble has

7 to meet a whole higher threshold, a standard, that we

8 aren't familiar with at this point because this is a new

9 environment for us -- am I done?

10 BETSY DANIELS: Yes, thank you.

11 TREFON ANGASAN: Thank you.

12 RON ARNOLD: My name is Ron Arnold.

13 You'll have to pardon my voice. I'm recovering from a

14 surgery that wasn't on my voice, but it bungled it up

15 anyway.

16 I'm the executive vice president of a nonprofit

17 group in Bellevue, Washington, just across the lake,

18 called The Center for the Defense of Free Enterprise. We

19 attempt to do what the name says, very simply.

20 One of the comments that we have, and the only one

21 here today, is that we feel that this report -- and you

22 asked for comments about the science -- the science is

23 supposed to be impartial. And a risk/benefit assessment,

24 which your study is, is only half done. We've seen the

25 risks, but I don't recall anything about the benefits. I

Page 35

1 may have missed something, but I don't think so. This is

2 about the five hundredth one of these hearings that I've

3 been at on various things in my unfortunately long

4 career.

5 I would hope that EPA will finish this report by

6 turning out a benefits section that is as extensive and

7 hypothetical as the present one.

8 Thank you.

9 MARY ANN PEASE: Good afternoon. My

10 name is Mary Ann Pease. I am a 25-year Alaska resident.

11 I am married to a lifelong native Alaskan and have two

12 sons, ages 21 and 9. Both of our sons were born and

13 raised in Alaska and we all reside there today.

14 I am personally astounded that EPA has chosen

15 Seattle as the starting point for hearings on the draft

16 watershed assessment for an Alaskan project, an Alaskan

17 issue. When I heard that this was taking place in

18 Seattle, I insisted on staying an extra day on a business

19 trip to point this out.

20 The Pebble project, if allowed to go through a

21 rigorous permitting process, is a project based in Alaska

22 that positively impacts our economic future, jobs,

23 revenues to our state, and represents responsible

24 resource development.

25 The draft Bristol Bay watershed assessment process

Page 36

1 and any potential 404(c) actions which may result from it

2 are of concern at this time because not only is the

3 process rushed and premature, but there is not even a

4 single permit application regarding development of Pebble

5 in front of the state or federal governments, nor has the

6 NEPA process been initiated.

7 The design for Pebble, including the very important

8 environmental mitigation strategies, have not been

9 finalized. A preemptive veto of the Pebble project is no

10 different than a preemptive approval.

11 The watershed assessment and potential 404 actions

12 conflict with federal and state laws and represents

13 another unwarranted federal infringement on management of

14 Alaska's lands.

15 The watershed assessment and potential 404(c)

16 actions discourage investment in Alaska resources and

17 takes a just-say-no approach to new economic development,

18 jobs, and our state's future viability for revenue stream

19 diversification.

20 Should the EPA be successful in this effort, it

21 could become a mechanism to squelch large-scale projects

22 in all sectors; projects that are now quite needed for

23 private sector job creation and economic vitality.

24 Unfortunately, the outcome of this meeting and this

25 assessment feels predetermined.
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1 BETSY DANIELS: Thanks, Mary Ann.

2 MARY ANN PEASE: Thank you. That is a

3 conclusion looking for a study.

4 LISA REIMERS: I request that you

5 extend the comment period at least 120 days to give this

6 300-plus page report time to be digested by many people.

7 This report was released less than 12 days ago, and it is

8 still pretty much on my computer as we speak, since it's

9 so long.

10 The impacts we've heard a lot about today on the

11 404(c) from the Clean Water Act, I don't know if

12 everybody understands the long-term impact for

13 development; not just for the Pebble Mine but all

14 developments everywhere in all states.

15 This opens up the potential for the largest land

16 grab in the Federal Government we've ever seen. Or

17 should I say, the EPA is opening this and not elected

18 bodies of officials. This is coming from an agency and

19 not our elected officials.

20 Thank you.

21 MICHAEL McDONALD: Hey, Dennis, when

22 you opened this thing up, your opening statement was an

23 apology for the short notice on for this meeting. To

24 echo what was mentioned earlier, I think it's very

25 important you open the window for this hearing period.

Page 38

1 You stated the people were loading up in the fleet

2 to head up to Alaska to fish. I've heard multiple people

3 talk about their people getting ready to go out and fish,

4 and yet we're going to shut this thing down on July 23rd,

5 I think you said?

6 I think you ought to consider opening that window so

7 that those that are out there fishing don't have to make

8 the choice between working for a living or coming to a

9 hearing like this.

10 Thank you.

11 LISA REIMERS: Dennis, when you opened

12 up the meeting, you failed to mention there are other

13 leaders that are closest to the Pebble project, me being

14 one of them.

15 My name is Lisa Reimers. I'm from Iliamna, Alaska,

16 15 miles away from the proposed Pebble project. I'm here

17 representing a landholder, Iliamna Natives Limited, which

18 owns 90,000 acres, and also the Government Tribal

19 Council, Iliamna Village Council.

20 And a lot of the tribes that are there in the area

21 the own the surface land have not come out opposed to the

22 Pebble project. And so I think that you need to take

23 into consideration they would like this time extended.

24 And what I find very odd is that we're here in

25 Seattle, and a lot of the commercial fisherman from

Page 39

1 Seattle, Oregon, are dictating our lives and they're not

2 thinking about the human factor. There are people that

3 live in these villages that need jobs. How would they

4 like it if we came down and dictated in their lands and

5 their waters?

6 This is very emotional for me because at the end of

7 the day, our people are up there trying to figure out how

8 to survive. We don't depend on commercial fishing,

9 subsistence. It's a choice. We still need a cash

10 economy, and we'd like you to extend the time period.

11 Thank you.

12 MICHAEL SCHUT: Hi. My name is

13 Michael Schut. I'm actually from Seattle, as well. I am

14 the Economic and Environmental Affairs Officer for the

15 Episcopal Church. The Episcopal Church has 2.4 million

16 members and more than 7,000 congregations around the

17 United States.

18 First and foremost, I bring greetings from Bishop

19 Rickel, the Episcopal Bishop of the Diocese of Olympia,

20 which includes Seattle and Western Washington. Bishop

21 Rickel could not be here today but sends his gratitude

22 for the work of the EPA.

23 The presiding bishop of the Episcopal Church,

24 Katharine Jefferts Schori, is both a scientist and a

25 priest and believes that both science and religion are

Page 40

1 critical to our understanding of the world and our goals

2 in it.

3 Bishop Jefferts Schori frequently talks about

4 science and religion providing two ways of knowing/

5 understanding the beauty of creation, and she notes that

6 we have better depth perception when we use both.

7 The scientific assessment conducted by the EPA

8 provides that depth perception that we in the faith

9 community did not have before when it comes to Bristol

10 Bay.

11 As Bishop Rickel and four others noted in the letter

12 to the EPA last year, Bristol Bay is a place of rare

13 beauty and abundance that can only be found in this part

14 of God's creation. Alaska natives have sustainably

15 coexisted with creation for thousands of years.

16 Our faith tells us Bristol Bay is important,

17 important as a part of God's creation, important to

18 Alaska native culture, and important if we are to live

19 out our call as Christians to keep, protect, and care for

20 God's earth and the neighbors.

21 The EPA's assessment is in keeping with biblical

22 teaching that reflect the beauty and bounty of God's

23 earth. However, and maybe more importantly, the

24 scientific assessment also provides us with knowledge of

25 the mechanisms and systems that make Bristol Bay the
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1 place that it is, the place that we believe is worthy of

2 protection.

3 We urge you to use Section 404 of the Clean Water

4 Act, as you travel around Bristol Bay, to preempt,

5 provide protection from inappropriate development in this

6 watershed.

7 Thank you for this opportunity.

8 BOB WALDROP: Thank you very much for

9 holding the hearing. We appreciate it very much.

10 I'm Bob Waldrop. I'm the executive director of the

11 Bristol Bay Regional Seafood Development Association.

12 That's an association of about 1850 permit holders in the

13 drift net fishery of Bristol Bay.

14 Our association was among the first to seek your

15 interest in this issue, and we are sincerely grateful for

16 the work and the science embedded in the draft watershed

17 assessment.

18 The draft validates initial concerns on many levels

19 and on so many points, that they are almost impossible

20 for me to summarize right now. So I'll have to do that

21 in my written comments.

22 In Bristol Bay, the nation's waters include some of

23 the best remaining salmon habitat in the world.

24 Significantly, this is also good habitat for jobs and

25 economic development, supporting an estimated 14,000 jobs

Page 42

1 in Bristol Bay. Holders of 2700 of those jobs reside

2 here in Washington State. So this truly is a national

3 issue by that measure.

4 The natural environment of Bristol Bay is the

5 general topic addressed by the draft watershed

6 assessment, but in Bristol Bay, the natural and the

7 cultural and seafood business environment are the same.

8 You protect one, you protect the other.

9 Good stewardship of the natural environment is

10 necessary to maintaining the existing and thriving

11 fishery.

12 Some say the EPA is the problem. It's not so, I

13 don't believe. The problem stems from the plans to dig

14 American's largest hard rock mine amidst the largest

15 Sockeye salmon fishery in the world.

16 It's our opinion that the science-based EPA process

17 is not the problem but, instead, defines a route to an

18 answer. We urge you to continue along the path started

19 with the watershed assessment and continue to follow the

20 trail laid down by good science and good thoughts.

21 Good science, such as expressed in the watershed

22 assessment, is one of the major reasons we have a healthy

23 salmon fishery in Bristol Bay. Our fisherman have

24 confidence that science will play a dominant role in

25 protecting the businesses and the enterprises.

Page 43

1 Thank you very much.

2 MARK WASHBURN: Hello. My name is

3 Mark Washburn, and I am a journeyman electrician and I

4 work around the Washington area and I've also worked in

5 Oregon.

6 As an electrician, I have greatly seen the effects

7 of copper and other natural resources and their prices in

8 the construction industry, and I'm glad someone from the

9 construction industry can talk about this, because having

10 a mine of this magnitude, mining for copper, will really

11 affect the amount of jobs incoming into our industry.

12 Also, I think the EPA should try and work with the

13 Pebble Mining companies to develop instead of just trying

14 to stonewall them and stop the whole process. It seems

15 really premature and -- yes, that's all I have to say.

16 ABE WILLIAMS: Thank you. My name is

17 Abe Williams. I am from Alaska. I was born and raised

18 in King Salmon. I'm the president of a native

19 corporation there called Paug Vik. I'm also the

20 executive director of Nuna Resources.

21 As I look around the room here, I see some of my

22 fellow commercial fisherman that I fish nearby in Bristol

23 Bay, as well. I've fished there since the young age of

24 nine. Had I known this was going to be an anti-Pebble

25 pep rally, I might have razzled up the guys that were at

Page 44

1 the Microsoft office and brought them over here.

2 But I really would like EPA to focus on putting

3 accurate science into the watershed assessment. And when

4 I read through the executive summary here, it really

5 frightens me that they have taken the steps that we see

6 out there currently in our communities right now that

7 have -- they just monger fear to folks to completely

8 oppose projects like this.

9 And our region is economically challenged, to the

10 point where our people is moving away, our native

11 cultures are moving away. And when your folks in the

12 native communities move away, that is when a culture

13 dies. Okay?

14 And we have this problem currently. We have schools

15 shutting down. We have things taking place that is

16 necessarily bad for our area. So I really want

17 sideboards put back into this process and I want due

18 process to take place here. It's very important, not

19 only for projects in Alaska but projects here in Seattle

20 and abroad the U.S.

21 I cannot stress enough how important it is to get

22 accurate science here. We're commenting on a watershed

23 assessment that is due peer review here. That peer

24 review should have taken place long ago, and then we

25 should be commenting on the materials that came from the
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1 peer review.

2 It's insulting to Alaskans when this happens.

3 JONATHAN YOUNG: Hi. My name is

4 Jonathan.

5 I'm under the impression that the report is not done

6 because it hasn't been peer-reviewed. Is the report

7 going to change when it becomes peer-reviewed? And if it

8 changes, will we again have a chance to comment on it?

9 I would like to talk about it again after you peer10 review it.

11 Thank you.

12 MARK RUTHERFORD: Mark Rutherford

13 here. I'm the owner of Wild River Guide Company, an

14 established fly fishing business in Bristol Bay. I

15 appreciate the opportunity to comment to Dennis and Rick

16 and all the EPA.

17 I've carefully read the findings and believe the

18 overall EPA assessment accurately depicts the effects of

19 a large open-pit mine development in Bristol Bay. I've

20 considered the findings in relation to my experience in

21 the past three decades, where I've surveyed many dozens

22 of mines in Alaska and the Yukon territory and subarctic

23 (inaudible) tundra, and wetland habitats similar to the

24 mine site.

25 I concur with the EPA's findings that there's a high

Page 46

1 likelihood of mine contaminants reaching salmon-bearing

2 streams/rivers/lakes during development and the post3 development in-perpetuity phases.

4 I think you've provided good analysis and

5 documentation for your findings. However, I offer my

6 opinion that the EPA findings significantly underestimate

7 degradation of the mine development on freshwater

8 resources by as much as an order of magnitude. The EPA

9 did not adequately address pipeline construction and

10 management, electrical grid construction, and road

11 construction.

12 My family and I depend upon the Bristol Bay salmon

13 for our livelihood. For more than 30 years, we've

14 depended upon salmon for our personal subsistence,

15 commercial harvest, and today for the sport fish guiding

16 business we own.

17 I want to comment on road and culvert failures in

18 particular. I'm very experienced with road construction

19 across the forest lands, road construction across tundra

20 lands, and roads through wetlands and waterways,

21 including (inaudible) roads.

22 Undertaking road construction across salmonid

23 streams or recharged wetlands in Bristol Bay is

24 extraordinarily shortsighted. I question the scientific

25 data used, which models a 33 to 60 percent chance of

Page 47

1 culvert failure. In my opinion, it is closer to a

2 hundred percent.

3 Thank you.

4 JASON BRUNE: For the record, my name

5 is Jason Brune from Anchorage, Alaska. I serve as the

6 government relations and public affairs manager for

7 Anglo American U.S., a proud partner of the Pebble

8 Partnership.

9 Anglo American is one of the largest mining

10 companies in the world. In every location in which we

11 operate, we strive to generate lasting benefits. We have

12 a strong commitment to safety, operational excellence,

13 and sustainable development.

14 Anglo American's shareholder base is approximately

15 20 percent American, and our CEO, Cynthia Carol, is an

16 American woman who has previously worked as a geologist

17 in Alaska.

18 Anglo American's only major investment in the U.S.

19 today is at Pebble, and at year's end, we will have

20 invested over half a billion dollars on this project.

21 Anglo American is proud to stand with our partner in

22 the Pebble Limited Partnership, Northern Dynasty, today

23 in expressing our significant concerns about the Bristol

24 Bay watershed assessment.

25 I am not here today on behalf of the Pebble Limited

Page 48

1 Partnership itself or on behalf of Northern Dynasty.

2 However, I believe that our partners share the views that

3 I will present to you here today.

4 I should also say at the outset, that Anglo American

5 accepts that the right to develop any mining project must

6 be earned. This is done over the course of the project's

7 development and in particular during the course of

8 permitting. Permitting is, thus, a critical process and

9 should never have any preordained outcome, positive or

10 negative. Anglo American accepts this. We are trying to

11 understand whether the EPA does.

12 As was said in (inaudible) testimony, the

13 combination of mining a hypothetical mine plan to assess

14 project effects, leaning heavily on environmental

15 activists or scientific information, and refusing to

16 consider the scientific work completed by Pebble as a

17 part of its environmental baseline document, has

18 contributed in no small part to the deep flaws inherent

19 in the draft report.

20 Meaningful judgments about Pebble and its effects it

21 may have on fish and water in Alaska cannot be made

22 before the project is fully designed, proposed, and

23 evaluated under NEPA. The EIS that will be prepared for

24 Pebble under NEPA will be fully informed by Pebble's

25 proposed development plan, its mitigation strategy --
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EPA Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Public Hearing

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Page 49

1 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you.

2 JASON BRUNE: I'm almost done.

3 -- the U.S. and Alaska rigorous systems for

4 evaluating (inaudible) --

5 BETSY DANIELS: See, I don't have to

6 be the referee. You are.

7 BENJAMIN BLAKEY: Thank you for coming

8 here today for providing this opportunity to review your

9 assessment.

10 My name is Ben Blakey. I am a Bristol Bay fisherman

11 and a former fleet manager for Snopac Products based here

12 in Seattle. I live and grew up in Seattle, but I've

13 spent every summer in Bristol Bay since I was about five

14 years old.

15 I'm here today to voice my opposition to any large16 scale mining project in the Bristol Bay watershed and

17 voice my full support for the EPA's 404(c) process and

18 the watershed assessment of the potential mining impacts.

19 My family and I have worked in Bristol Bay for my

20 entire life and we hope to for many years to come. And

21 basically, this EPA assessment that we are talking about

22 today is, at its core, a risk assessment. And if we're

23 asking whether or not the potential benefits of mine

24 development in Bristol Bay watershed will outweigh the

25 risks, I just want to make this very clear that on behalf

Page 50

1 of myself, my family, and the hundreds of other Bristol

2 Bay fisherman that could not be here today, we are

3 adamantly opposed to any mine development activity that

4 would put our salmon at risk.

5 So thank you for coming here today and for hearing

6 these comments.

7 JORDEN GREINER: Hello. My name is

8 Jorden Greiner. I was born and raised in Homer, Alaska,

9 and just finished my undergraduate degree in

10 international political economy at the University of

11 Puget Sound in Tacoma, Washington.

12 Like many Alaskans, I was raised in a family that

13 depends on fishing. Working on my Yupik father's charter

14 boat, I have deckhanded for the majority of my existence,

15 as a family tradition and to finance my education.

16 Starting with knowledge gained on the boat and

17 continuing with high school reports and my college senior

18 thesis, the proposed Pebble Mine has influenced my

19 academic and personal life in Alaska and here in

20 Washington. And just last year, Homer's 82 Bristol Bay

21 commercial fishermen contributed nearly $9 million of

22 gross earnings from the Bristol Bay's 2011 season alone.

23 Inevitably, the proposed mine has cast a dominant

24 shadow on my life and has propelled me to passionately

25 take action against it. Earlier this week, when I was

Page 51

1 attempting to organize my testimony, I found it difficult

2 to narrow down the list of scientific and economic data

3 posed against the mine, not to mention the threat it

4 poses my family's way of life.

5 The abundance of negative claims makes it clear

6 that whether the mine should be developed isn't even a

7 question. For those of you involved in the process of

8 the mine, you know how deeply it would affect the people,

9 the land, the economy of Alaska and the rest of the

10 world.

11 As we have heard from the various testimony today,

12 there are endless reasons the Pebble Mine should be

13 stopped, reasons that are not only perilous but are also

14 quite obvious. It is time for the Obama administration

15 to stand up and protect Bristol Bay, American fishing

16 jobs, and the wildlife Alaskans depend on for subsistence

17 fishing and hunting. It can do so by using the authority

18 granted to the EPA under Section 404(c) of the Clean

19 Water Act to halt the development of this mine.

20 Thank you.

21 DAVID HARSILA: Thank you. Good

22 afternoon. My name is David Harsila. I'm here

23 representing fishermen that own and operate businesses

24 and vessels that fish the waters of Bristol Bay. I'm a

25 resident of our association AIFMA, the Alaska Independent

Page 52

1 Fisherman's Marketing Association, which was formed by

2 commercial fishermen in 1966. And I'm here on our

3 fishermen's behalf, since they cannot be here.

4 AIFMA endorses the EPA 404(c) process and the

5 watershed assessment of potential mining impacts on

6 salmon ecosystems of Bristol Bay, Alaska. After

7 reviewing as much of the material, our board has not

8 found inaccuracies in the report so far and does not

9 disagree with the content so far, but we will continue to

10 plow through the material and might have further comments

11 down the road here shortly.

12 Also, approximately 900 permits that fish the waters

13 of Bristol Bay are owned by Washington State residents.

14 The Bristol Bay fishery and related industries

15 substantially contribute to the economy of the state of

16 Washington. The economics of Bristol Bay are well

17 established and have been sustainable over time.

18 We urge the metallic sulfide mining within the

19 watershed of Bristol Bay be prohibited. Clearly the risk

20 of damage by the mining industry to the freshwater

21 habitat that salmon depend upon is too great, as most

22 likely the damage will be certain.

23 Some specific reasons: perpetual care and storage

24 of acid-generating rock waste and tailings; massive

25 dewatering of groundwater affecting streams; and the
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EPA Bristol Bay Watershed Assessment Public Hearing

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Page 53

1 inevitable releases of contamination, including dam

2 failure seepage, slurry, and fuel pipeline failures.

3 Thank you.

4 JOEL REYNOLDS: Thank you very much.

5 My name is Joel Reynolds, senior attorney with the

6 National Resources Defense Council and appearing on

7 behalf of its 1.3 million members and activists.

8 First, we applaud the EPA for exercising its

9 authority in undertaking the watershed assessment, and we

10 applaud Senator Cantwell for her leadership in supporting

11 it.

12 I urge you not to be deterred by claims from Anglo

13 American and Pebble Limited Partnership of an EPA

14 overreach or that this is rushed or that this is

15 premature. One suspects that any science not controlled

16 by PLP will be considered an overreach or fear mongering.

17 And the notion that the 404(c) process or the 104

18 process enacted by Congress does not comply with

19 principles of due process is just not supportable as a

20 matter of law.

21 Second, the watershed assessment is a highly

22 technical document with a great depth of scientific

23 analysis and detail, but in simple terms, it confirms

24 what the residents of the region have long understood:

25 that large-scale mining like the proposed Pebble Mine

Page 54

1 would pose an unacceptable and unavoidable risk of harm

2 to the people, the communities, and the wildlife of the

3 Bristol Bay watershed.

4 Building a massive mine in this location at the top

5 of the watershed of the world's greatest wild salmon

6 fishery is a reckless idea, a dangerous venture for which

7 significant risk to protected resources cannot be

8 eliminated, no matter how extensive the environmental

9 review or comprehensive the mitigation regulators might

10 impose.

11 The only certainty is that eventually the mitigation

12 will fail, eventually contamination will occur,

13 eventually the fisheries will be destroyed.

14 We shouldn't gamble what we can't afford to lose,

15 and we can't afford to lose the Bristol Bay fishery.

16 On behalf of NRDC and its members, we thank you for

17 your critically important work thus far, and we urge you

18 to move forward proactively to protect the people and

19 wildlife of Bristol Bay.

20 BRENDAN FLYNN: Hi. My name is

21 Brendan Flynn. I am a Puget Sound reef net fisherman and

22 gill net fisherman. I was born and raised in the San

23 Juan Islands, Lopez Island, and grew up fishing the

24 Fraser River stock of Sockeye salmon.

25 I had the good fortune to make it to Bristol Bay in

Page 55

1 2003 and have been fishing there since and am a Bristol

2 Bay permit holder.

3 Thank you for undertaking this process. I'm very

4 hopeful that we can come to the point where we all agree

5 that this place needs to be protected.

6 I saw on the pie chart you had there that the

7 southern B.C. and U.S. stocks make up one of the more

8 significant portions of Sockeye salmon in the world other

9 than Bristol Bay.

10 Well, that is the case some years. We've had the

11 misfortune of fishing every other year, every third year

12 here, every fourth year at times. It's immensely

13 inconsistent, and that is the beauty of Bristol Bay. It

14 happens every year. It's a pristine ecosystem. We don't

15 have the good fortune of that here in the southern

16 states.

17 And I just -- I really support you to protect this

18 place under the 404(c). It is a national treasure and

19 there is nothing like it in the world.

20 JENNIFER GISH: Hi. My name is

21 Jennifer Gish, and I'm the marketing manager for

22 Redington. We are a fly fishing company that

23 manufactures fly fishing rods, reels, wares and apparel.

24 The Bristol Bay Pebble Mine is very important topic,

25 as it is the livelihood of our business, it does depend

Page 56

1 on it. The proposed Pebble Mine which would be situated

2 in the heart of Bristol Bay watershed produces an

3 unacceptable risk for the fly fishing industry, which

4 relies on the health and vitality of hunting and fishing

5 ecosystems.

6 Upon learning about the possibility of a massive

7 mine in the heart of this ecosystem in 2007, we've been

8 outspoken in our opposition. Redington has been a

9 leading conservation voice for this campaign, holding

10 true to the ethos that conservation of major fisheries is

11 of paramount importance for protecting the longevity of

12 our industries.

13 Alaska attracts recreational anglers from all over

14 the world. Sports fishing contributes $1.4 billion

15 annually to the Alaska economy and more than $60 billion

16 to Bristol Bay alone. Many visitors spend up to a

17 thousand per week to stay at well-appointed lodges and

18 fly in small planes to some of the most exclusive and

19 celebrated trout and salmon waters in the world.

20 These are our customers. This is who I'm standing

21 up here for today; these customers and for our future

22 customers. Our commitment to save the Bristol Bay

23 campaign has never wavered, and with the recent EPA

24 studies to assess the impact a massive pit mine might

25 have, our commitment is stronger than ever. We want to
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Page 57

1 thank the EPA for shedding more light on the effects of

2 the Bristol Bay Pebble Mine. Our fisheries are more

3 precious than gold.

4 JIM WADDELL: Thank you. My name is

5 Jim Waddell. I'm a professional civil engineer and a

6 taxpayer.

7 And I want to base my comments, though, on my

8 experience of 35 years working for the Army Corps of

9 Engineers in various fields such as designing and

10 constructing earthen dams and levies and so forth. Also,

11 my experience maintaining and operating complex systems

12 like dams and my experience working with EPA Superfund

13 cleanup projects; in particularly, dam reclamation and

14 asset waste problems.

15 One of the problems I find with the report is, you

16 don't go into enough detail explaining the consequences

17 of the -- well, basically the assumptions that you're

18 making about failures and operations and so forth. You

19 give some pretty good examples in there, but you need

20 more of that kind of stuff.

21 What you really need to explain, though, is, the

22 probability of failures is sort of, I think,

23 underestimated, frankly. Having experienced these kind

24 of projects, having dealt with these kind of projects,

25 nothing is ever built like the plan says it's going to

Page 58

1 be. The mitigation plans are rarely followed, and

2 there's various reasons for this. Usually even in

3 the well -- well, semi-well-funded public sector, there's

4 never enough money to pay the engineers or the

5 technicians enough to do what is required to ensure the

6 safety, either ecologically or human, of the project.

7 In a case like this, we're starting off

8 understanding, we've got a limited partnership. Why did

9 they do that? Why isn't it, you know -- you know, why is

10 it limited? Well, there's obvious reasons for that.

11 What we need to be doing is understanding what it

12 takes to manage these projects and explain it to the

13 public in these documents, because without that, they're

14 not -- you're never going to appreciate the complexity

15 and what it takes to actually construct and operate these

16 things safely.

17 JON FRANKLIN: My name is Jon

18 Franklin. I work for Trident Seafoods presently. Our

19 company has approximately 500 permit holders that fish

20 for us in the Bristol Bay area. And I've personally been

21 involved in Bristol Bay for 32 years. Both my sisters

22 are married to Bristol Bay natives. So I have a pretty

23 fair idea of the beauty, and the extent to which this

24 project will impact the Bristol Bay native population.

25 And one thing that I really appreciate is the

Page 59

1 science that you guys have put into this. I do agree

2 that things -- there's things that could be explained

3 better, but you guys have done a very good job of delving

4 into this huge project.

5 And what it really boils down to is not whether I

6 live to see this thing done, or anybody in this room.

7 It's the future generations. There's 10,000 years of

8 history that can go on 78 years of a mine. What's going

9 to happen in 78 years? The jobs are all going to be gone

10 in 78 years, except for the people that have to sit there

11 and look over the toxic landscape and say, "That's my

12 legacy."

13 The Obama administration should follow in the

14 footsteps of Teddy Roosevelt. Be bold. Do not let

15 corporate interests run over the population of Bristol

16 Bay.

17 Thank you.

18 TOBY HALTER: My name is Toby Halter.

19 I was born and raised in Montana about 200 miles from the

20 Butte copper mine.

21 One thing that was in this report that I didn't see

22 anything was the adverse human effects or what would

23 happen to the long-term effects.

24 I have a lot of family members, friends that have

25 grown old, grown up around Butte, that have had some very

Page 60

1 nasty diseases associated with the mining. So I just

2 think that in this assessment, I just -- you know, the

3 adverse effects of mining and what they do to a human

4 population is a (inaudible) native people.

5 There's a lot of native Alaskan people that are

6 going to stay living in that area. Like the gentleman

7 said before, 78 years of mining, you know, and you're

8 looking at maybe five, ten thousand years, if we can even

9 hold on that long, of having to deal the negative effects

10 and the carcinogens and all the nasty chemicals that are

11 associated with mining.

12 So I just didn't see that very clearly in your

13 report.

14 Thank you.

15 LELAND MIYAWAKI: I'm Leland Miyawaki,

16 and I am the fly fishing manager for the Orvis store in

17 Bellevue. And the Orvis company owns about 50 or 60 fly

18 shops across the country. We're 160 years old. We are a

19 retailer and a -- and a manufacturer at the same time.

20 We have endorsed guides, outfitters, lodges

21 throughout the United States and the world, and we send a

22 lot of people to Alaska and to Bristol Bay to go fishing.

23 There's a lot of them that go there, a lot spend a lot of

24 money.

25 I urge you to, under your authority, to -- excuse
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Page 61

1 me -- under your authority to go forth with 404(c) and

2 the Clean Water Act and stop this mine in its tracks.

3 But there's something more important I want to say

4 other than that: my wife, who loves Sockeye salmon. She

5 thinks it's the only thing that swims in the sea. He

6 doesn't care what I bring home and what I catch and what

7 I release. So I urge you, bring peace and harmony to my

8 home.

9 ANDREW BENNETT: Thanks. My name is

10 Andrew Bennett. I grew up in Fairbanks, Alaska, and now

11 I run a sport fishing lodge on the Kanektok and

12 (inaudible) Rivers just northwest of Bristol Bay. I

13 employ 20 people each summer and host 250 guests from

14 all over the world who come to experience the incredible

15 unique fishery in southwest Alaska. I'm also good

16 friends with many residents of the Yupik village of

17 Quinhagak just down river from our camp, who depend on

18 annual salmon runs for subsistence.

19 I'm opposed to large-scale mining in Bristol Bay

20 because I feel that the risks that a large-scale mine has

21 an adverse impact on this healthy, unique fishery is too

22 great. I applaud the content of the draft assessment.

23 I currently live here in Washington, where our

24 deficient balance in development with management of our

25 natural resources have decimated salmon populations, and

Page 62

1 I don't want to see the same thing happen in my great

2 home state of Alaska.

3 Thank you.

4 KAREN REED: Good afternoon. I'm not

5 a commercial fisherman and it's been a long time since

6 I've even caught a fish, but I have been privileged to

7 spend time nearly each of the last 40 summers on the

8 shores of Lake Iliamna on Knutson Bay, at the easternmost

9 end of the lake. That's the beach that's shown on Page

10 19 of the executive summary.

11 I am completely opposed to the idea of the Pebble

12 Mine mine. I think that the ecology there is so fragile

13 and the impacts from the haul road construction and the

14 pipeline construction really need to be looked at more

15 seriously in your 404(c) study.

16 Just imagine a traffic accident of a truck hauling

17 arsenic to do -- the leachate on the minerals on the

18 mine, a pipeline break. We've seen a lot of really

19 serious spring floods in the bay and it will wash down

20 hundreds of yards of material and change the shoreline

21 over night, and trying to built a road that could survive

22 that kind of an environment is difficult to imagine.

23 So I really appreciate the work that you've done in

24 this assessment. The findings are very alarming. It's

25 hard to imagine, if these findings hold, that this

Page 63

1 project should go forward.

2 What I was young, we would speak frequently with

3 fisheries research people that had a base on Porcupine

4 Island in Lake Iliamna, and they told us that the beach

5 on Knutson Bay was the largest Sockeye spawning salmon

6 ground in the world. And right now there's no roads in

7 that area, there's no other cabins, there's no power

8 lines. There's nothing. And to think about putting the

9 haul road right past the most prolific Sockeye spawning

10 beach in the world is sort of incomprehensible.

11 Thank you very much for the work you've done and I

12 appreciate your thoughts. Thanks.

13 RON RICHARDS: My name is Ron

14 Richards. I'm an Alaska salmon fisherman. A lot of us

15 live here. All of us get our equipment here. And the

16 Seattle area is a largest market for Alaska Sockeye

17 salmon. It's a natural place to have the first hearing.

18 I applaud the EPA for embarking on this study.

19 History here does not bode well for us, except in this

20 case it appears we're off to a good start.

21 All of the arguments I've heard today in support of

22 this mine are arguments that have been advanced over the

23 course of history time and again; there's never anything

24 that's going to go wrong with their project, everything's

25 going to work out great.

Page 64

1 If you read Malcolm McLeod's "Salmon King of Fish,"

2 "A River Lost," "Golden Spruce," and (inaudible), you'll

3 get a good historical context of how these natural

4 resources decisions are usually made, and it's usually

5 not right. You guys are off to a good start.

6 One suggestion in your economic analysis. The

7 Valdez oil spill showed us that not only will an adverse

8 environmental impact in a certain area affect the income

9 of the people that are impacted directly, but it will

10 impact all of the Alaska fish market.

11 We Alaska fisherman who were not directly impacted

12 by the oil spill saw the value of our catch plummet. The

13 same thing will happen in a Bristol Bay disaster, where

14 some pollutant affects the fish. It will tarnish the

15 reputation of all of us.

16 Finally, as an attorney in the past, I struggle with

17 the definition of "insanity" from time to time, but I'll

18 tell you, I've never seen a better example of insanity

19 than the Pebble Mine application.

20 Thank you.

21 THOMAS QUINN: I'm here to speak as an

22 academic and a researcher. I got my Ph.D. in fisheries

23 over 30 years ago, have been studying ecology and

24 conservation of salmon and trout ever since, including

25 the last 25 years in the Kvichak watershed.
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Page 65

1 The research has taught me two things about

2 conservation and salmon and natural resources. Two

3 pillars.

4 The first is the restoration of that which is

5 damaged but salvageable, and the second is the

6 preservation of that which is valuable and still

7 functioning.

8 We saw the removal of the dams on the Elwha River,

9 and that's a wonderful, wonderful example, but at a cost

10 of hundreds of millions of dollars, and in truth, the

11 total numbers (inaudible) estimates in the populations

12 we're talking about in Bristol Bay. Not that it's not a

13 good thing to do. We need to keep in perspective what

14 our mothers taught us: an ounce of prevention is worth a

15 pound of cure.

16 And in Bristol Bay, we have the opportunity to

17 prevent destruction of something which is already

18 functioning perfectly as it is.

19 As a scientist -- I see a number of current and

20 former students out here in the audience -- we commend

21 EPA for their scientific approach. We're happy to

22 contribute all the data that we have. In fact, we'd be

23 happy to examine data presented by the Pebble

24 Partnership.

25 The more data you see, the farther you proceed with

Page 66

1 the science, the more certain you'll become that this is

2 not something that you should allow.

3 You're the Environmental Protection Agency. We're

4 counting on you to live up to your name: protect our

5 environment.

6 Thank you.

7 CHARLES TREINEN: Thank you very much.

8 Charles Treinen. I thank you for the opportunity to

9 testify.

10 I want to thank the EPA Region 10 for the political

11 fortitude that it took to undertake this study to begin

12 with, and then also to release this study and give us the

13 opportunity to speak about what we've seen so far from

14 that report.

15 To me, as a commercial fisherman for 35 years in

16 Alaska and ten of the last -- last ten years in Bristol

17 Bay, I want to say that I believe that you've done a good

18 job of expressing something that seems, to me,

19 intuitively obvious, and that I want to encourage you to

20 continue to bring that scientific evidence to light so

21 that we can have the same sheet of music to read off of,

22 so to speak, in determining what's real and what's not,

23 outside of the public relations environment.

24 And just in terms of something that you may want to

25 look at a little further is to reevaluate or to continue

Page 67

1 to evaluate the value of commercial fishing to people

2 throughout your Region 10, because I'm here doing

3 business and I hadn't planned to testify but just

4 happened to be here on a day when you were having this

5 hearing and appreciate the fact that you can do it here

6 in Seattle, because this is a place that also has some of

7 the benefits from this resource that is in Bristol Bay.

8 Thank you.

9 EDWARD DAVIS: Thank you. The EPA is

10 to be congratulated -- am I on? The EPA is to be

11 congratulated for their assessment that they've done to

12 date.

13 Suppose you finally get to the point to where you

14 actually go by your instructions as an Environmental

15 Protection Agency and veto and don't let the mine go

16 through.

17 You really should be looking at a further study, a

18 larger one. Look at the boundaries of the watershed

19 area. Maybe you should be looking at the totality of the

20 watershed area, and maybe, like the gentleman mentioned

21 earlier, a Teddy Roosevelt kind of action. Maybe a

22 wilderness area for the entire watershed, with the

23 existing developments that are there to be able to remain

24 and expand in the manner in which they have in the last

25 200 years.

Page 68

1 That's all I really have to say. Thank you.

2 FRED HARNISCH: Hello. My name is

3 Fred Michael Harnisch of Homer, Alaska. I thank you for

4 the opportunity to express my thoughts concerning the

5 proposed Pebble Mine, Alaska.

6 I was born and raised in Slag Valley on the south

7 side of Chicago, within a large industrial area. It was

8 here that I began my education on large industry, seeing

9 how many were driven by greed and without much concern

10 for their employees or for the natural environment.

11 My calling then was the natural environment in the

12 west, and after completing my four-year degree in forest

13 management at Purdue University, I began my permanent

14 work with the United States Forest Service, which lasted

15 for 31 years, until I took early retirement in 1994 to

16 spend more time with my family and friends.

17 I have worked with the United States Forest Service

18 in Idaho, Montana, Washington State, Oregon, and Alaska,

19 spending 19 of these years on the Tongass and Chugach

20 National Forest in Alaska, along with fighting forest

21 fires and other activities throughout the state.

22 I retired as district ranger for the Darrington

23 Ranger District in Washington State and moved back to my

24 363-square-foot cabin in Homer, including an outhouse.

25 I also continue to spend time in Washington in order
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Page 69

1 to be close to my family, where I have a cabin also, a

2 small one, near Darrington. I have fished for Four

3 Seasons commercially in Bristol Bay, three for red salmon

4 and one for herring, and have friends in Alaska,

5 Washington State, and Oregon that commercial and sport

6 fish throughout Alaska.

7 In fact, I was quite surprised to find ranchers in

8 eastern Oregon that also fished in Bristol Bay.

9 The experience I've gained over the years in various

10 areas of the world concerning large industry, and of what

11 I've read --

12 BETSY DANIELS: Fred, you're going to

13 have to wrap it up.

14 FRED HARNISCH: I'm strongly against

15 the proposed Pebble Mine.

16 ERIC FORRER: My name is Eric Forrer.

17 I have 50 years in the state of Alaska.

18 The genie in a bottle of the Pebble proposal is the

19 chemistry and the physics of open-pit mining. Once the

20 land is broken, no technology and no litany of corporate

21 promises can halt the destruction of Bristol Bay's river

22 ecology.

23 With a level tone and in clean expository English,

24 the EPA draft watershed assessment puts flesh on the

25 bones of this development dilemma. It also touches on

Page 70

1 the secondary issue, which is the unpredictability of

2 corporate behavior.

3 In 1963, '64, and '65, it was my privilege to be the

4 only Caucasian in the King salmon fishery on the lower

5 Yukon. There were some days from those years on the

6 river that were so full of light, that they still sparkle

7 through the mist of 50 years of memory. And from those

8 days, I formed the values I have lived by and wrote the

9 rules of my own road.

10 Although it was the waning years of a world class

11 system, it was still healthy enough to understand what it

12 had been before, and the young adults who taught me to

13 fish still had a sense of their culture and their place.

14 The collapse of the fishery there has been

15 accompanied by a relentless economic and social stress

16 that foreshadows the fate of Bristol Bay under the

17 influence of a generations-long mine.

18 I make three arguments regarding Bristol Bay.

19 First, I join those and see that culture and place

20 will be destroyed by the mine. Basically, Pebble

21 developers will push everything I know and love right out

22 of the frame.

23 Second, given the destruction or massive damage to

24 every salmon system from the Sacramento to the Yukon, I

25 argue that this last reasonably healthy system should

Page 71

1 have the benefit of a sense of cumulative protection that

2 has not been applied --

3 BETSY DANIELS: You can submit the

4 rest of your comments. Thank you.

5 RICHARD LEEDS: My name is Richard

6 Leeds. Thank you for holding this meeting today.

7 As the co-president of the Wildlife Forever Fund

8 located in Washington State, we've been active in the

9 conservation of estuaries and coastal wetlands along the

10 connected habitats of the Pacific Coast, from Oregon to

11 Alaska.

12 I visited the proposed mine site in the Bristol Bay

13 watershed, as well as Bristol Bay and large sections of

14 the Alaskan coast, including the Prince William Sound.

15 The Prince William Sound, unanticipated remaining damage

16 has been discovered 20 years after the Exxon Valdez oil

17 spill. We can't expect otherwise in any other

18 development.

19 Based on my experience, I believe that the hydrology

20 and air interconnections within and outside the proposed

21 mine site have potential poisonous flows with their

22 susceptibility to seismic events and the resulting

23 catastrophic long-term damage are understated in the

24 report.

25 Let me repeat: I've been up there and I think it

Page 72

1 understates the level of interconnectivity.

2 Large-scale mining is too risky to be permitted in

3 this important natural resource, as has been identified

4 in this EPA assessment. Please continue to study the

5 risks presented by development and large-scale mining in

6 particular.

7 Thank you for holding these hearings and thank you

8 for protecting indigenous people and wildlife nationwide

9 and worldwide.

10 SALLY SHORT: I'm Sally Short and I'm

11 a retired microbiologist. I spent 22 years working in

12 fish pathology lab for the state of Alaska. Our primary

13 job was to monitor the health of salmon stocks in both

14 wild systems and in hatcheries.

15 Basically my professional life was concerned with

16 understanding and supporting Alaska's salmon runs, while

17 learning natural risks of disease and habitat. We did

18 this to defend Alaska at a basic biological level of

19 health, life, and a sense of pace for Alaska's human

20 population, as well as for all of the species connected

21 to salmon.

22 It breaks my heart to see that any people or any

23 industry would woefully threaten to destroy what I spent

24 my life defending. It makes me angry to think that a

25 lifetime of effort by myself and many others would be
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Page 73

1 swept away by some industrial disaster, when all we have

2 to do is say no.

3 Thank you.

4 ANN KROEKER: Ann Kroeker. You had

5 asked what needs to be changed away from the (inaudible).

6 I would actually --

7 THE REPORTER: Could you speak up a

8 little bit?

9 ANN KROEKER: Besides the cultures who

10 live close, salmon of course travel far and wide, which

11 is why we in Seattle are just as important as the ones in

12 Bristol Bay. The health of the salmon is particularly

13 important to our health here, whether we get to eat it or

14 not or -- and whether it's nutritionally damaged.

15 Historically and culturally, it does affect more

16 than the close-by cultures who are affected most, but it

17 certainly should be considered in its entirety.

18 I also want to ask you, please don't add economic

19 values or job values or other disputed trade-offs to your

20 study, which, if you can keep it as factual and

21 bio/eco/regional as possible, we would absolutely

22 appreciate that.

23 Thank you very much.

24 STU SMITH: Good afternoon. My name

25 is Stuart Smith, individual citizen from Olympia,

Page 74

1 Washington. Thanks for the time to speak with you, and

2 also thanks for your efforts on this assessment.

3 I am in agreement with it. I believe, however, it

4 misses one point within my interest (inaudible); that

5 misses the impact on the human soul.

6 The people that are proposing mining in this part of

7 the world, such as the Pebble Mine, they don't see their

8 purpose as providing human kind or mankind with a useful

9 product like iron and gold. Their interest is in money.

10 They see money in the ground. And these people have a

11 black stain upon our soul called greed. They're already

12 super billionaire, trillionaire, millionaire kind of

13 people, and for some reason, that isn't rich enough.

14 They've got to have more. That's an illness with them.

15 With them, it's about extracting as much money as they

16 can to become even richer than they were before.

17 They weren't happy with just being stupendously

18 rich. They've got to be fantastically super rich. And I

19 see that's the problem with Pebble and mining in that

20 part of the world.

21 I had the opportunity in the fall of 2010 to travel

22 to this part of the world and spend some time at the

23 Pebble site. And it was on the shore of Lincoln Lake, I

24 talked to a helicopter pilot who had landed at a fueling

25 station there and was eating lunch. And we had a nice

Page 75

1 little chat. And the pilot was part of a group of maybe

2 a half a dozen or a dozen helicopters that were operating

3 in the area, doing sampling for the proposed mine.

4 The helicopter pilot was against the mine, but she

5 said, "The money is so good, I can't pass it up." And it

6 got me thinking that now she's got a little bit of this

7 black stain on her soul.

8 And I just see these large industrial developments

9 come about because lots of little people end up with --

10 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you for your

11 comments.

12 ROBERT WISSMAN: I'm Robert Wissman.

13 I'm a retired professor at the University of Washington.

14 And I congratulate EPA on their assessment, but it's

15 required by law. Usually these bureaucratic assessments

16 are a mile wide, and science, they're a millimeter deep,

17 they're not there.

18 And I have studied systems all over the world, and I

19 think what we need is a simultaneous scientific

20 assessment funded by EPA and industry, because I know how

21 long it takes these systems to show their resilience to

22 recovery. I've studied Mt. St. Helens. I've studied

23 Coeur d'Alene mining district, effects on the river and

24 the lake. I've studied with Tom in Alaska in the Bristol

25 Bay area, as far as wetlands, streams and lakes. And

Page 76

1 these systems, we know how fragile they are, but we do

2 not know how resilient they are, but I'm afraid they do

3 not have the resilience to take the insult that the

4 industry is proposing in these landscapes. We don't know

5 really what's going to happen.

6 So I encourage a scientific assessment, not a

7 government-funded bureaucratic assessment. Science

8 usually gets short-circuited in these arenas.

9 Thank you.

10 DAVID KERLICK: David Kerlick.

11 Thanks. I am a theoretical physicist and a taxpayer.

12 One of the things that seems weak about your

13 executive summary really is probability of failure. I

14 think one of my mentors, Richard Feynman, who was

15 assigned the space shuttle disaster, and all of the

16 senior guys at NASA were saying, oh, one in a million,

17 and the engineers on the ground were saying one in

18 twenty-five, and then the shuttle blew up. It was one in

19 twenty-five.

20 So I'm very, very distrustful of dam failure once in

21 2,000 years. That's not very good failure analysis.

22 Okay. Your guys' expertise is not in civil

23 engineering. You need to have some civil engineers

24 onboard, as well as the fisheries people, when you're

25 trying to make estimates of failure analysis.
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1 That's it.

2 JUANITA CARLSON: Hello. My name is

3 Juanita Carlson.

4 This is emotional.

5 First, I want you to know who I am. My husband for

6 40 years was John Francis Smith, until he passed in

7 February 2004. My husband was Yupik Eskimo, born and

8 raised in Dillingham, Alaska, although we made our home

9 in Buckley, Washington. He worked for Boeing for 42

10 years.

11 His father, George Smith, was long-time manager of

12 the Felder and Gale General Store in Dillingham. His

13 brothers, William, Tennyson, and George Smith and sister

14 Liz Flores are all Yupik. Many of our relatives and

15 friends are residents of Dillingham. In fact, I think

16 we're related to half of the town.

17 We're also members of the (inaudible) Corporation.

18 My three children are also Yupik and shareholders of

19 BBNC, a legacy from my husband to his children,

20 grandchildren, and me. In fact, my oldest daughter, Erin

21 Smith, teaches math at the Eagle River High School and

22 her husband is on the executive board of BBNC.

23 I am so proud of my family's connection to Bristol

24 Bay and our heritage. I love my visits to Dillingham,

25 the people; the culture, the fishing, the pristine, quiet

Page 78

1 beauty. Everything about the area. I don't want a

2 large-scale mine to affect adversely this area.

3 My fear is that salmon fishing in the Bristol Bay

4 region will change and disappear. I want the EPA to stop

5 the development of large-scale mining.

6 Thank you.

7 AMY GULICK: Amy Gulick. I live here

8 in Washington State.

9 The Columbia, the Skagit, the Nisqually, the

10 Duwamish, these are just a few of the many river systems

11 right here in Washington State that once had incredible

12 runs of wild salmon.

13 Gig Harbor, Anacortes, Westport, these are just a

14 few of the many communities that salmon used to support

15 in Washington State.

16 In Oregon and Northern California, it's the same

17 story.

18 Today, the lower 48 has just 2 percent of its

19 historic wild salmon runs. 2 percent. That's it.

20 How did this happen? Like most losses, it happened

21 gradually, one river at a time, one stream at a time, one

22 community at the time, one fishing boat at a time. We

23 dammed, dredged, logged, developed, and polluted salmon

24 habitat; in some cases out of ignorance, others out of

25 greed, and others we just fight in the name of progress.

Page 79

1 Some salmon systems we lost long ago; a hundred,

2 hundred and fifty years ago. Others we have lost just in

3 my lifetime.

4 So we are here today sitting in Seattle, where

5 salmon are a cultural icon, and yet almost all of the

6 wild salmon that makes it to our dinner tables comes from

7 Alaska. It has come to this.

8 So I ask you, are we really going to repeat the same

9 mistakes we made here in the lower 48 and destroy Bristol

10 Bay, a place with some of the last and most productive

11 wild salmon habitat in the world? Are we going to

12 destroy the entire Bristol Bay ecosystem? Are we going

13 to destroy the way of life for the communities and

14 economies that Bristol Bay salmon support?

15 And we know what wild salmon need: unobstructed

16 spawning ground, clean water, clean gravel to spawn, the

17 right amount of water at the right time, the right water

18 temperature at the right time.

19 The Environmental Protection Agency's own scientific

20 review on this issue concludes that large-scale mining in

21 Bristol Bay would result in adverse impacts to wild

22 salmon populations. So this time in Alaska, if we are to

23 go ahead and mine in the world's largest Sockeye salmon

24 producing system, we can't claim ignorance, because we

25 know what salmon need and we know the impacts --

Page 80

1 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you, Amy.

2 PETER MARSHALL: Good afternoon.

3 Peter Marshall. I live now in Bellevue, Washington. I

4 no longer hold a commercial salmon license, but I did

5 years ago, 40 years ago. And like the previous speaker,

6 I've been alarmed by what's happened to salmon in this

7 area. That's why I took a big interest in what may

8 happen north of us.

9 I'm speaking now as a long-term member of National

10 Resources Defense Council and their position that was

11 stated very well earlier. But my own particular concern

12 is over the long-term fate of wild salmon on the earth as

13 a whole. And such a big portion of it originates in

14 these watersheds and is so precious, that I think there's

15 no chance to even imagine having a large-scale mine

16 there.

17 I got a good sense of the significance of the

18 Bristol Bay salmon fishery. I've done projects up in

19 Naknek and King Salmon up in Bristol Bay Borough, and I

20 got a good sense of the pride that people who fish in

21 that area are about the wild salmon, especially and more

22 recently in contrast to the farmed salmon in Canada. And

23 we read nowadays about the risks to the wild salmon

24 stocks.

25 And so I think that the EPA watershed assessment
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Page 81

1 dramatizes the unique conditions that support the Bristol

2 Bay fishery, and I believe EPA should use its authority

3 to protect those conditions in perpetuity.

4 Thank you very much.

5 PATRICIA SUMPTION: My name is

6 Patricia Sumption. I have been an activist with Sierra

7 Club and also with an organization that works on issues

8 related to salmon on the Green River, Green-Duwamish

9 here. And I have not had time -- this meeting came up

10 too fast for me to read any documents. I'm lucky to be

11 here. But I -- so these are preliminary comments, and I

12 will try to do some written comments when I have had time

13 to get the scientific aspects. So I'm going to be

14 emotional, I guess.

15 I wanted to say that I've had -- I think some salmon

16 was talking to me. I've been protecting environmental

17 issues for a long time, but not salmon necessarily, and

18 yet there they were. And they need to be protected. And

19 so somehow I work on that on the Green River. And some

20 of you know that there was a problem with a dam a couple

21 of years ago. And I'm on conference calls every other

22 week with the Corps of Engineers, the fish people,

23 et cetera, and we try to keep our eye on what's going on

24 there and we try to build the salmon runs.

25 As you just heard, salmon runs in Washington and the

Page 82

1 rest of the lower 48 are in very deep trouble. So it is

2 insane to put a mine in the headwaters of Bristol Bay,

3 considering that it is a huge gift that we are given and

4 that we need to protect.

5 I have a strong affinity for Alaska. I haven't been

6 to Bristol Bay, but I have hiked there. I've been there

7 with fellow fisher -- or not fellow fishermen, because I

8 don't even go fishing, but a fisherman who has fished in

9 Alaska, and my uncle during --

10 BETSY DANIELS: I'm going to have to

11 ask you to submit your full comments. Sorry. Thank you.

12 PATRICIA SUMPTION: I didn't get to be

13 emotional enough.

14 HEATHER LOWE: Hi. I'm Heather Lowe.

15 I am really pleased that we got to this part of the list,

16 because I didn't expect that we'd have an opportunity to

17 hear so many comments.

18 I'll make it short.

19 I am a Seattle resident, born in New York, but I've

20 lived here for 15 years. And your job, to me, is the

21 most important thing on earth, so I commend you for being

22 part of a really influential piece of government.

23 And I'd like to say that in years past, people

24 didn't care what other people did, because it was on my

25 block or my city or my state. And I'm hoping that we're

Page 83

1 entering this time of enlightenment where we know we're

2 connected.

3 So I don't live in Alaska, but what Alaska does

4 connects to me in my daily life. And so it's important

5 that I speak out against billboards in Fife, because I

6 have to look at them even though they're on tribal lands.

7 So what I'm saying here is, you're charged with a

8 really important job. And I'm the daughter of one of the

9 world's -- he just passed -- geotechnical engineers who

10 was involved with building the world's largest earth dam

11 in Pakistan, three miles wide. My father was brilliant

12 and the plans were brilliant, and it was funded by the

13 World Bank, and the best engineers in the world were

14 commissioned to be part of this project.

15 They had gotten the entire thing completed and they

16 were testing the intake tunnels, and somebody forgot a

17 bolt and the doors didn't shut and the tunnel failed.

18 And the dam was taken off course for the next five years.

19 So what I'm saying to you is, in your assessment --

20 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you for your

21 comments. Sorry we have to cut you off.

22 HEATHER LOWE: I will write to you.

23 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you. Please

24 submit the rest of your comments. I apologize.

25 JANNA TREISMAN: My name is Janna

Page 84

1 Treisman, and I went to Alaska in the early '70s with my

2 husband, Eric, who has since passed away, who worked for

3 Alaska Legal Services and then was general counsel for

4 Bristol Bay Native Corporation. And so that's how I got

5 to Dillingham.

6 I worked for the schools, and so a lot of the places

7 that you're naming are places where I worked in the

8 schools. I was a federal programs coordinator, so it was

9 (incomprehensible) Portage Creek, and all the way there.

10 I was absolutely astounded by Alaska, having grown

11 up in western New York State. It was just marvelous.

12 And I would like to say that the pristine beauty of the

13 land and the richness of the resource made a lifelong

14 impression upon me and the way that the people would

15 share being able to participate in the subsistence way of

16 life. (Inaudible) didn't have a set net, 25 (inaudible)

17 set net. I learned how to cut fish. I actually, after a

18 while, got kind of good at it.

19 I'd like to congratulate the EPA on your good

20 science in the -- in this draft that I read. I'm very

21 pleased to see this agency taking a proactive stance and

22 setting the bar for the issues that we will be working at

23 later.

24 And as a taxpayer, I am concerned about what I might

25 have to pay for or my children might have to pay for when
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1 things go wrong.

2 Specifically, I'd like to talk about your provisions

3 on water collection and treatment operations, where we

4 have a high probability of possible failure; water

5 collection and treatment post closure, where we have a

6 high probability of failure; and the leaching and the

7 amount of water. There's a big range there, 2,000 to

8 almost 60,000 gallons. I'd like to see, you know, more

9 work on that.

10 I found that absolutely terrifying --

11 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you.

12 JANNA TREISMAN: Thank you.

13 THEO ROE: Hello. I'm Theo Roe. I've

14 had the privilege of running a Bristol Bay fishing boat

15 for each of the last 30 years. I am strongly opposed to

16 the Pebble Mine for many reasons: social, economic,

17 scientific, moral, spiritual, and even patriotic.

18 I'll share just a couple of my objections.

19 Bristol Bay has served as a coming of agery for

20 generations of young people. It certainly helped me.

21 I've watched two of my nephews start fishing as young

22 teenagers. I saw them rise to the challenges of the

23 fishery to build self-confidence and self-worth. They

24 helped feed the world and it felt good. I watched them

25 turn from silly kids into good men.

Page 86

1 My daughter started fishing with me when she was 15.

2 Presently, she is attending college full-time and working

3 a part-time retail job. Yesterday on her 19th birthday,

4 she lamented the fact that her present job had no

5 meaning. She wasn't producing anything. She wasn't

6 contributing enough to society. I think that's pretty

7 good for a 19-year-old.

8 Bristol Bay provides the priceless opportunity for

9 young people to be humbled by the sea, to rise to the

10 challenges, to persevere and ultimately put food in

11 people's bellies. It's a special feeling. It builds

12 character. It instills the need and the confidence to be

13 productive. It creates good people.

14 I've had the honor of spreading the remains of close

15 friends in the waters of Bristol Bay. They weren't from

16 the region, but the impact the area made on their lives

17 made it the right place to lay their bodies to rest.

18 The thought of intentionally building a gigantic

19 cesspool of poisons at their final resting area is just

20 sickening.

21 I'm proud to have spent my life providing such a

22 healthy food for the people of the world. I'm proud to

23 be associated with the people of Bristol Bay, past and

24 present. Don't let Pebble Mine steal the opportunity for

25 future generations to build character, to become

Page 87

1 confident and productive members of society.

2 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you.

3 THEO ROE: Thank you.

4 PETE MODOFF: Hi, I'm Pete Modoff. I

5 work for Senator Maria Cantwell.

6 And first of all, I want to thank the EPA for

7 holding this hearing in Seattle in a timely manner. I

8 know that this was one of the major requests, though,

9 Senator Cantwell and folks would have the opportunity to

10 participate.

11 The draft assessment, the watershed assessment, I

12 think, has confirmed many of the concerns that have

13 been -- that Senator Cantwell has on the threat to the

14 fishing industry operating off in Bristol Bay, and

15 just -- I'll be brief, but I just want to read a couple

16 things that she put in a letter she wrote yesterday to

17 Lisa Jackson, the administrator of the EPA.

18 And the first thing that she said was -- besides

19 expressing her concerns and the fact that this draft

20 assessment seems to confirm these concerns -- was that it

21 is important that the EPA continues to adhere to science22 based decision-making, and also she wants to make sure

23 that the EPA continues to work on this -- you know, this

24 draft assessment is a positive first step and, you know,

25 she just wants to make sure that the concerns of the

Page 88

1 fishing industry, much of which is based here in

2 Washington State, is continued to be listened to by the

3 EPA and the other federal regulators as they consider

4 this mine proposal.

5 So thank you very much. And thank you all for

6 coming.

7 SHANNON FORD: Hello. My name is

8 Shannon, and I am a limited government conservative who

9 favors state's rights and generally votes for things that

10 favor business and economic development. I am not

11 opposing resources and mining and all those kinds of

12 things, but this is the wrong mine in the wrong place.

13 I'm a fourth-generation fisherman. I've been

14 fishing up there my whole life. When this issue first

15 came up, I was on the fence because it sounded good; lots

16 of money, lots of jobs, we're in an economic downturn,

17 people need things. And I started doing some research,

18 and the more that I found out, the more horrified I

19 became.

20 I started reading case studies of other states.

21 Jared Diamond's "Collapse" is a wonderful resource of

22 finding out what happens to areas when things like this

23 go in.

24 And this does affect outside of Alaska. The economy

25 spreads all over the entire country. If people from
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1 Alaska don't come out here and promote the fish and the

2 area, the economy doesn't develop. You have to be able

3 to sell the fish and have the tourism and all those kinds

4 of things bringing from the rest of the country. So it

5 is a nationwide issue.

6 Right now, we're in an economic downturn, and when

7 that happens, food rules. I am surviving right now by

8 selling my salmon as a personal business. And as fish

9 supplies dry up worldwide, our salmon from Alaska is

10 going to have increasing value. Right now, they're

11 coming back in record numbers. If we keep it that way,

12 we're going to have an incredible resource that's going

13 to be there long beyond any mine.

14 You've heard all the different facts and figures

15 about enough containment pond spillage to bury Seattle.

16 What I want to say, that nobody has said, is: even if

17 nothing happens, there's no spills, nothing ever happens,

18 merely building the mine changes the perception of the

19 area forever.

20 The Exxon Valdez settlement was for --

21 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you for your

22 comments. Sorry no interrupt.

23 DAVID ROWE: Wow. We've heard a lot

24 of theory and horror stories this evening -- or this

25 afternoon.

Page 90

1 I am from Anglo American's hometown, Johannesburg,

2 South Africa. It's not theory.

3 Johannesburg now has rivers of radioactive mine

4 acid. In a few years, the mine acid is going to be 10

5 percent of the quantity of the rivers right now. Some of

6 the acidity that comes out of these mines is the

7 equivalent of battery acid, something like a pH of two.

8 It is bad stuff.

9 Anglo, before this happened, sold their mines, moved

10 to London, and is now London company. If you ask them

11 what happened to their mines in Johannesburg, they were

12 minority owners, they didn't own these mines. But there

13 are books written about Anglo American, books called

14 "South Africa, Inc." Anglo owned about more than 50

15 percent of the stock equity in the South Africa stock

16 exchange. They pretty much owned the mines, but they did

17 it in clever ways.

18 What could happen in Pebble Mine?

19 When Pebble Mine fails -- not if; when. In

20 perpetuity, this is guaranteed. It's not a possibility.

21 That's one big error in your study. In perpetuity, this

22 is guaranteed to fail. They will pack their bags and

23 wash their hands, and Alaska will be left with the

24 results of this disaster.

25 There have been some people saying, what about the

Page 91

1 business value of this?

2 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you.

3 DAVID ROWE: But also include the cost

4 of remediation in perpetuity.

5 BETSY DANIELS: Thank you.

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7 (Proceedings concluded at 5:00 p.m.)

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1 STATE OF WASHINGTON ) I, Karmen M. Knudson, CCR, RPR, CRR,

 ) ss a certified court reporter in

2 County of Pierce ) the State of Washington, do hereby

 certify:

3

4

 That the foregoing public hearing was taken before

5 me and completed on May 31, 2012, and thereafter was

 transcribed under my direction; that the transcript is an

6 excerpted transcript, prepared per instructions;

7 That I am not a relative, employee, attorney or

 counsel of any party to this action or relative or employee

8 of any such attorney or counsel and that I am not

 financially interested in the said action or the outcome

9 thereof;

10 That I am herewith delivering the said transcript

 to the Environmental Protection Agency, attention Judy

11 Smith.

12 IN WITNESS WHEREOF, I have hereunto set my

 signature on June 19, 2012.

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22 ____________________________________

 Karmen M. Knudson, CCR, RPR, CRR

23 Certified Court Reporter No. 1935.

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