The US Environmental Protection Agency on Wednesday announced an agreement with US Steel to jointly fund a $75 million cleanup and restoration project at the company's former Duluth steel mill along the St. Louis River in Minnesota.
US Steel will pay for 55 percent of the cost, while the EPA will be responsible for the other 45 percent under the Great Lakes Restoration Act. The site has been on the federal Superfund cleanup list since 1983 due to extensive pollution of coal tar and other toxic contaminants, both on land and in the Spirit Lake area of the St. Louis River estuary off Duluth's Morgan Park neighborhood.
The Spirit Lake project includes dredging 700,000 cubic yards of contaminated sediment and building three on-site confined disposal facilities. The plan also includes the construction of an engineered cap over 100 acres of estuary sediment and creating a new 30-acre sheltered bay. The design work is expected to be finished in December and is being done in close coordination with the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency. Construction is expected to begin in 2019.
Millions of dollars of cleanup work was conducted in the 1980s and 1990s at the former steel mill site, but more pollution was found, leading to drawn-out efforts to reach a cleanup deal.