Cleaner days for Silver Bay
For more than a decade, the pleasant Minnesota community of Silver Bay (pop. 3,500) on the western shore of Lake Superior was the locus of an epic environmental battle. At issue was the Reserve Mining Co.'s taconite plant, whose construction in 1952 had created the town. About 80% of the local labor force is employed at the $350 million facility, which turns trainloads of the flinty rock mined in the Mesabi Range into about 15% of the nation's iron ore supply. But Reserve also dumped 67,000 tons of tailings a day into the world's largest freshwater...
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