funding for this program is brought to you by the arts and cultural heritage fund and the citizens of minnesota [Music] so restoration and remediation are different activities we take to restore an ecosystem remediation is a technique that we use to address contamination and when we do remediation there are a couple of common options and one if it's in the sediment which is often the case in the st louis river is to simply remove the sediment and so they'll use a some sort of dredging material to just simply take it away and then it gets disposed of in a special facility that can handle uncontaminated sediments in cases where it's not high enough that you could touch it but it does accumulate enough that it's a concern in other ways the term is called capping where we basically apply a material to make sure it can never get exposed to the environment ever again tapping is often used another technique is to apply some kind of activated compound that will lock up that chemical so that nothing else can access it and so those are the really the three main techniques region capping and then adding an activated compound to basically lock it up in place the u.s steel spirit lake project is a huge remediation effort currently taking place with an estimated 75 million dollar price tag the plant used iron ore from the iron range to make steel and in the process released a variety of pollutants for decades into the water and crews are working to bring this section of the estuary back to a healthy state the u.s steel plant was built in the early 1900s ustil plant operated through the late 1970s it was shuttered and officially closed in 1981 they knew then they had a problem i mean it had long been recognized that that facility the waste on site had contributed to pollution in the river and so by 1984 the state of minnesota had listed it under the superfund program which is a federal program to identify contaminated sites that need to be cleaned up because they are a major source of pollution the hard thing to imagine is that there is a large amount of land along the bend in the river it looks like a river delta that river delta was not there originally in 1900 that was not there those materials all came off the land um and when they came off the land they carried the contaminants with them it's hard to imagine excavating an entire you know delta of material but that's what we're talking about in terms of cleanup it's an extensive project the other aquatic portion of it that's received a lot of attention is on the south end it was so closer to the fond du lac dam an area called wire mill creek which is also highly contaminated those are the main areas that require work underwater there's also plans in place to address the contamination on land in the main of the site that's remaining there are plans in place to address the contamination in the river but as of today [Music] we don't know when that might occur there's been ongoing discussions there's been back and forth on plans but the reality is we have yet to come up with an agreeable plan with sufficient funding to address the contamination in the river the cleanups in the st louis river are among the largest being undertaken in the great lakes for this reason the environmental managers and the scientists are really invested in making sure we get the characterization of the site accurate and that the cleanup that we're doing is effective and so we do that by partnering from the very beginning here is the ecological risk there is the human health risk here's how much and here's where it is that's the scientist's role the managers then work together on both you know they could be from um the tribe or the state or the federal government they're often all working together as a partnership they say well here's what we need to do and then we'll come up with that plan and then the scientists will work with them to come up with what we call a monitoring plan they'll take data after the project and probably for many years after the project because it takes many years to get a successful response to tell the managers if those goals are being met and of course if those goals are not being met then we need to come up with a plan to figure out how we get to where we want to be um and if those goals are being met that's great that's great news it means that the the strategy winner took was successful and we've addressed the environmental concerns we had and so these partnerships are very common on the river and really critical making sure we're doing the job well there's always some uncertainty about it you have some contamination that's there and it's hard to predict exactly how that contamination is going to move around or affect things down upstream or downstream from it but we're trying to in some ways predict how how bad the effects will be from the contaminants that are present thereby setting an appropriate limit to say you should clean up to this level and once it's below this level then it probably won't have adverse impact in the future [Music] programming is supported by western lake superior's sanitary district innovating solutions and reducing mercury pollution in the st louis river through research and community programs online at wlssd.com