Iron ore supplier Cleveland-Cliffs Inc. is taking the Minnesota Pollution Control agency to court in a dispute over a 32-year-old standard that compares the number of mineral fibers in the air near its Silver Bay processing plant to the number of fibers in downtown St. Paul air.

Cleveland-Cliffs, which owns and operates North-shore Mining Co. in Silver Bay, filed legal documents Monday asking the U.S. District Court in Minnesota to resolve the disagreement.

The two parties have been negotiating unsuccessfully for months to settle the issue, said Ann Foss, MPCA mining director.

“Negotiations have broken down,” Foss said Monday. “The agency has instituted an enforcement action. As always, our goal is that we get immediate mitigation and a return to compliance.”

Compliance would involve reducing the number of fibers in the air in Silver Bay to below the number in St. Paul. The Silver Bay fibers come mostly from iron ore processing, while mineral fibers detected in St. Paul’s air have been largely attributed to commercial asbestos found in places such as brake linings and buildings.
But fiber levels in both places have dropped in recent years, and Cliffs officials say they’re being held to a new and unfair standard.

Taconite mined on the eastern end of the Mesabi Iron Range contains fibers that aren’t found in ore at other Iron Range mining operations. Northshore is the only active taconite operation in that area.

The North Star Chapter of the Sierra Club and the Save Lake Superior Association in May announced their intent to sue Northshore Mining in federal court, saying the higher fiber levels in Silver Bay violate a 1974 federal court order on the issue and of the company’s operating permit that’s based on the Clean Air Act.

Asbestos-like fibers have been an issue on Lake Superior’s North Shore since 1975, when federal Judge Miles Lord ruled that high levels of fibers found in Lake Superior posed a potential health risk and ordered Reserve Mining Co., the taconite plant’s former owner, to stop dumping taconite tailings in the water.
Lord ordered air to be tested in St. Paul as a control site to compare with Silver Bay’s air.

Miners, their wives and retirees say exposure to iron ore dust and asbestos has been a concern on the Range for years. Since 2003, 58 Iron Range miners have died of mesothelioma, a rare type of lung cancer caused by exposure to asbestos. It has not been determined whether they contracted it from commercial forms of asbestos, fibers in iron ore dust or some other cause, although the state Department of Health has said that the first 17 deaths probably caused by exposure to commercial asbestos. Gov. Tim Pawlenty vowed recently to initiate a study by the state and the University of Minnesota to determine the source of the lung disease.

After Reserve installed millions of dollars in pollution control equipment at the taconite plant, the MPCA agreed in writing in 1981 and 1989 that the requirement had been met, Cleveland-Cliffs officials said.

The MPCA stopped monitoring air quality in downtown St. Paul in 1981.

Foss said testing was stopped because the number of mineral fibers in Silver Bay’s air was far below St. Paul’s level. Air tests for mineral fibers in Silver Bay, which are analyzed by the state Department of Health, have been conducted every few weeks since the 1975 ruling, said LaTisha Gietzen, Cleveland-Cliffs district manager of public affairs.

Cliffs officials say the MPCA is now seeking to replace the standard with a “moving target,” based on new monitoring levels in St. Paul. “Legal action was not our preferred route,” said Dana Byrne, Cleveland-Cliffs vice president of public affairs. “Even while we disagreed with this obsolete requirement, we spent several months trying to negotiate a good-faith resolution with the MPCA.”

Foss said the 1975 ruling never included a sunset date.

Before Reserve installed pollution-control equipment, fibers at Silver Bay were in the range of 148,000 to 268,000 fibers per cubic meter, Foss said.

Afterward, fibers levels at a monitoring site in Silver Bay dropped tenfold, averaging 18,800 fibers per cubic meter from 1978 to 1980, she said. During the same years St. Paul averaged 39,000 fibers per meter, she said.

MPCA testing was resumed in March 2006 in St. Paul as the result of public comments on a Northshore plan for an 800,000-ton pellet expansion, Foss said. At that time, fiber levels in Silver Bay were found to be higher than in St. Paul, she said. From March 2006 to March 2007, Silver Bay averaged 5,467 fibers per meter and St. Paul 2,015, Foss said.

“It’s dropped in both locations,” Foss said. “But it’s dropped faster in St. Paul.” Cleveland-Cliffs bought the taconite facility in 1994 and added more pollution controls. In recent negotiations with the MPCA, Cleveland-Cliffs offered to install almost $6 million in equipment to improve environmental performance, Byrne said.

Foss said she could not comment on the nature of the enforcement action being taken against the taconite plant. The 800,000-ton expansion at Northshore is scheduled to begin operation in 2008. Cleveland-Cliffs also has expressed interest in building an iron nugget plant at Silver Bay.

How the ongoing dispute between the MPCA and Cleveland-Cliffs would affect either of those projects is unclear.