Transboundary rivers worth spending the money

A tailings pond and a disused water treatment plant are seen in this 2013 photo at the Tulsequah Chief Mine site about 40 miles northeast of Juneau. (Rivers Without Borders photo)

The following editorial was published by the Wrangell Sentinel.

Federal grants totaling over $650,000 to two Southeast Alaska tribal groups and the state to gather more science on transboundary rivers may seem like a proverbial drop in the bucket compared to the water flows of the Stikine, Taku, Unuk and Salmon rivers.

But it’s money well spent in the ongoing effort to learn more about the rivers, part of the yearslong effort to protect them against harm from mining wastes generated upstream in British Columbia.

The rivers are important for their recreational value, sport and commercial and subsistence fishing value, and cultural heritage value to the Indigenous people of Southeast.

To ensure those values are protected, state and federal wildlife and land managers, municipal and tribal officials and biologists and scientists on both sides of the border between Alaska and British Columbia need to collect — and share — information not only about the fish in the rivers but also what else is in the water, where it’s coming from and what it does to the water quality.

The grants, administered through the Environmental Protection Agency, went to the Central Council of the Tlingit and Haida Indian Tribes of Alaska to support its water quality database and monitoring program. The tribal organization also is working toward a “state of the watersheds” report, summarizing the health of Alaska-B.C. transboundary waters and the risk to their waters posed by mining in British Columbia.

The Ketchikan Indian Community will use its federal grant to conduct four years of water quality monitoring in the Salmon River transboundary watershed in coordination with the U.S. Geological Survey. The river starts in British Columbia, flowing into Alaska and ending at Hyder, northeast of Ketchikan.

The state of Alaska also received funding to collect biological data and sediment element profiles on Southeast transboundary rivers.

It all may seem routine, maybe even boring to some, but managers need to know the details of what’s in the rivers, and Alaskans need to know as much as they can about the rivers as they push British Columbia officials to do their job of regulating the mining industry.

Management of the transboundary rivers is not easy; there are two federal governments, a state and a province, tribes and interest groups, each with its own jurisdiction and constituency. But the one thing everyone should be able to agree on is that more data is as important as strong salmon runs to the health of the waters.