The company overseeing a planned cleanup of the long-abandoned Tulsequah Chief Mine up the Taku River from Juneau is merging with a larger mining company, adding to the already long history of transboundary mining issues as another field season is set to begin next week.

An online briefing about plans at the Tulsequah site on May 6 was followed the next day by an hour-long hearing at the state Capitol focusing on transboundary mining. The legislative hearing featured environmental and Indigenous officials expressing fears of Canada’s mines polluting Southeast Alaska waters versus state officials who said no such contamination has occurred.

Ongoing assessment of the mine and surrounding environment at Tulsequah is tentatively scheduled from May 19 through Sept. 24, said Deborah Read, the project’s site manager for Canada-based minerals company Teck Resources, during the May 6 briefing.

Much of the work involves making decaying or toxic mine areas safe for workers, collecting data about surrounding soil and waters, and improving transport to the site that is currently only accessible by air.

The hope is to complete a draft remediation plan by the end of the year, a final plan by 2028 and, if cleanup begins the following year, complete work a decade from now, according to Read.

However, questions about that timeline were raised after Teck announced last fall a merger with Anglo American, a significantly larger company. The merger won’t affect the scope or timing of the cleanup at Tulsequah, located in British Columbia about 40 miles from Juneau, Read said.

The copper, lead, zinc and gold mine that operated from 1951 to 1957 has been discharging acid mine drainage ever since into the Tulsequah River, a main tributary of the Taku River and a prime Alaska salmon habitat.

Oft-discussed and never-realized cleanup plans involving the bankruptcy of a company that formerly owned the mine site and Canada’s government have been a source of frustration to tribal and other groups that cite the threat the toxins pose to salmon and other natural life in the area.

The persistence of those concerns was acknowledged during a House State Affairs Committee meeting on May 7 at the Capitol.

“Every one of our meetings starts with and ends with the Tulsequah Chief Mine,” Doug Vincent-Lang, commissioner of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, told lawmakers when discussing his meetings with transboundary mining stakeholders. “I can tell you that there has been a lot of frustration by user groups over that mine and the failure to make significant progress.”

However, he said long-standing legal disputes involving the former owner have been resolved and “for the first time I’m actually seeing significant movement for moving forward.”

One statement by Vincent-Lang, the first to testify during the hearing, became a focal point: “We’ve never found violations of water quality in our side of the border from (the Department of Environmental Conservation’s) water quality sampling, and we’ve never seen contamination and fish in our side of the border” from Canadian mines.

He said DEC reviewed more than 15,000 data points on the Taku River this year “and was unable to detect a signature that certain pollutants were present above natural conditions.”

A presentation hosted by Teck and other entities last December stated recent water quality sampling of the Tulsequah River near the mine shows toxins are still seeping into the water, but elevated pollution levels were not detected beyond two miles downstream of the mine site.

Breanna Walker, director of Salmon Beyond Borders, said during the May 7 hearing that the state’s pollution claims “may be true,” but that doesn’t mean contamination in Canada isn’t having impacts in Alaska and doesn’t address the threats posed by new activity. Also, she emphasized, there are other existing as well as several future planned mines that are of high concern.

“And as we all know the fish do not recognize borders and the salmon that we often are relying on downstream in Alaska are swimming potentially into parts of these watersheds where there is pollution occurring,” she said.

Among the main criticisms voiced by Walker and other representatives during the hearing was a lack of diligence by the state in holding Canada responsible for regulating and cleaning up mines at transboundary water sites, and failing to give proper consideration to concerns expressed by tribal governments.