BOVEY — Bovey residents can finally rest easy, as a permanent water outlet for the Canisteo Mine Pit is under construction.
The Department of Natural Resources is building a natural gravity outflow that will send water to the Prairie River and have a sand filtration mechanism that will capture invasive species from the pit, like zebra mussels and smelt.
The Legislature approved $8.875 million to fund the permanent fix to the Canisteo’s rising water levels in 2023.
The Canisteo is really a series of legacy mine pits, snaking 5 miles from northwest of Coleraine to just north of Taconite.
The pit predates the state’s reclamation rules, so it’s the state’s responsibility to manage.
Mike Liljegren, assistant director of the DNR Land and Minerals Division, said the agency has been monitoring water levels in the pit for three decades, beginning not long after regular mining there ended.
Without any management, groundwater, rain and snowmelt would slowly fill the pit, eventually leading to overflow. Modeling shows that if water levels reached an elevation of 1,324 feet, water would flow under an old railroad trestle near Bovey, travel along the Mesabi Trail and eventually run down First Avenue.
“All of those homes in there would have been, you know, not flooded and washed away, but they would have been inundated,” Liljegren said.
Water would’ve also likely overflowed on the east end of the pit into Holman Lake.
A drain tile system was installed along Bovey’s First Avenue in 2011 to direct groundwater seepage, and over the last three years, the DNR has pumped out nearly 5 million gallons of water, funded by the Department of Iron Range Resources and Rehabilitation.
The new outlet will keep the water levels at an elevation of 1,310 feet, providing a buffer in the event of a major storm or spring snowmelt.
“This will hardly even be a blip in the overall Prairie River flow because it's designed to only take a maximum of 2,000 gallons a minute,” Liljegren said.
The water will flow into an inlet structure, then through essentially a sand bed that will capture invasive species and finally into a piping system that carries it to the river.
“Ultimately, that will have to have to be observed, and you’ll have to have some [operations and maintenance] as that sand bed gets filled,” Liljegren said. “You may have to remove the top six inches if it starts to get clogged and can’t do its job, then you remove that and just replace it with six inches of new sand.”
But the system will be much more hands-off than annual pumping.
This winter, crews worked near County Road 61, removing trees, moving an iron ore stockpile and clearing land along the outlet path. They’re now working on ditching and installing culverts, moving west to east. Construction is expected to be mostly finished by August.
The DNR does not plan to open public access to the Canisteo. Liljegren said the previous public access was managed by Itasca County on state land.
“The potential for mining and stuff in the future and talks of other companies coming in, I don’t think right now the DNR would be looking to open that back up,” he said.
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