By Margaret Bauman
Alaska Journal of Commerce

KODIAK — To folks like 27-year-old Lindsey Bloom of Juneau, a second-generation Bristol Bay salmon permit holder, the long-term livelihood of that commercial fishery is an obvious choice over any economic benefits to be accrued from mining.

“I choose the long-term sustainability of fisheries,” said Bloom, a graduate student whose master's thesis will be on improving the value of Bristol Bay salmon. The daughter of a fisheries biologist who has harvested Bristol Bay sockeye salmon for 25 years, Bloom feels that mining, particularly the proposed Pebble project near Iliamna, poses a risk not worth taking for the value of wild salmon habitat critical to commercial, sport and subsistence fishermen, plus myriad tourism ventures.

Bloom was on hand at ComFish 2007, the annual commercial fisheries gathering in Kodiak, to oppose the proposed Pebble mining project in Southwestern Alaska on environmental grounds. She is the commercial fisheries outreach coordinator for Trout Unlimited, an organization that opposes the mine. Bloom is also a member of the Alaska Independent Fishermen's Marketing Association and the Bristol Bay Driftnetters Association.

The agenda for ComFish 2007 included presentations by those favoring and opposed to development of the Pebble project.

“The only fishermen I'm aware of who support the mine live in Bristol Bay and have some kind of connection with Northern Dynasty,” Bloom said. Northern Dynasty Mines is the developer of the Pebble project, a potential mine that could hold the largest gold resource in North America, according to Northern Dynasty.

Tony Gregorio, a seasoned commercial fishermen from Chignik, was there to argue that the mine and Bristol Bay fisheries could potentially co-exist.

“If they do it responsibly, I don't see any problem,” Gregorio said. Gregorio was one of five Bristol Bay stakeholders whose expenses for the Kodiak meeting were paid by Northern Dynasty, along with a $200 honorarium for their time away from home, a spokeswoman for the mining company said.

Neither Trout Unlimited nor the Renewable Resources Coalition paid for stakeholders to attend the session, although both organizations, along with Northern Dynasty, paid expenses for staff and contractors in their employ.

Gregorio, who has been fishing commercially for 48 years, said people should be more worried about rationalization of the fisheries than a mine. Gregorio said if the groundfish fisheries are privatized like the crab fisheries “our permits will be no good, and the prices will drop.” According to Gregorio, most fishermen have to get a second job just to fish.

Scott McGee, vice president of public affairs for Northern Dynasty, said the company had “an environmentally driven design” for the mine, and is using helicopter support to avoid an environmental footprint during exploration. “We want to avoid and minimize direct and indirect effects on fish habitat,” he said. Impacts that can't be avoided will be minimized and mitigated, he said.

McGee said finding the more promising prospects in an area called Pebble East gives the company more options. McGee said that could mean there will be a small open-pit mine in the western section and a larger underground mine for the east. Meanwhile, he said, the company has invested $130 million to date and plans to spend another $70 million this year in developing the mine.

Steve Hodgson, vice president of engineering for Northern Dynasty, discussed in detail infrastructure for the project, including embankments for the proposed dam to hold back a mine tailings impoundment. He said the dam would be overbuilt and highly engineered. Hodgson said it is possible that the tailings embankments would be as high as 700 feet. “They will, in fact, create a new land form, but it is not going to loom over the region,” he said.

All this and other details aside, Northern Dynasty still argues that everyone should wait and see what it proposed in its permit applications before protesting. “We are a couple of years away from a proposed development plan,” McGee said. “We are still defining the extent of mineralization.”

Whether or not the project is eventually approved will rest on the science and whether these issues are manageable, he said.

While Northern Dynasty argues that it is taking every effort to minimize the footprint of its exploration, McGee acknowledged that the actual project would have about a 15-square-mile footprint on the landscape of Southwestern Alaska. “If we can build a project that limits the effects of the project to 15 square miles, that may be a project the people of Bristol Bay and Alaska want to look at,” he said. “It's the most wealth for land disturbed of any resource industry.”

It's not the additional wealth of a mine that impresses some, so much as potential destruction of the existing wealth of fisheries for commercial, sport and subsistence harvests.

Northern Dynasty was asked how well the proposed project design would withstand an earthquake. According to McGee, the proposed dam could withstand an earthquake registering more than 9.2 on the Richter scale. But McGee could not answer questions about how such a quake might affect groundwater and affect materials of concern relative to a groundwater profile.

The Bristol Bay fisheries had a direct economic impact of $330 million plus some 5,500 full-time equivalent jobs in 2005. According to Alaska Department of labor statistics, 74.9 percent of private sector jobs in the bay in 2005 were in harvesting and processing.

In 2006, some 2,276 fishermen and more than 4,500 crew members earned $98 million.

“In the last five years, we have seen more than doubling of wholesale value of Bristol Bay fish, from less than $100 million to over $200 million,” said Scott Brennan of the Renewable Resources Coalition, which opposes development of the mine.

Among the many reasons the Renewable Resources Coalition opposes the mine is the social and economic track record of large mines, he said. While Northern Dynasty argues that people should wait to form an opinion until permit applications are in, Brennan said residents already know more about the Pebble project than about proposed development of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge or the proposed natural gas pipeline. He points to 1,900 pages of detailed material on the project already submitted by Northern Dynasty to the Alaska Department of Natural Resources.

“Companies like Northern Dynasty have gone broke before and left taxpayers to pay the tab,” he said.

Margaret Bauman can be reached at margie.bauman@alaskajournal.com.