Photo provided by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency This photo from the EPA shows barrel removal work conducted on Torch Lake last summer

HUBBELL — Last fall, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency completed a Drum Removal Pilot Study in the Hubbell Processing Area (HPA), which is the former site of the Calumet and Hecla copper processing facility. The area is contaminated primarily by high levels of copper, heavy metals, PCBs, and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons in the sediments and shoreline. The EPA refers to the location as a Torch Lake Area of Concern (AOC).

Last September, EPA contractors removed 100 drums, debris and sediment from three areas at different water depths and performed extensive monitoring and sample collection. Contaminated sediment and other debris were removed from the three target areas. The removed drums, sediment and debris were temporarily staged at the former Mineral Building property before being transported to a disposal facility. Barges, a crane, construction equipment and small vessels were present on the lake until early October.

As part of past evaluations and work performed by EPA and Honeywell, the EPA reported more than 400 metal 55-gallon drums have been located on the lakebed of Torch Lake in the HPA at various water depths, ranging from approximately 20 feet to over 70 feet in depth, according to a Nov. 13, 2024 report by Great Lakes Restoration. Drums noted during underwater video surveys appear in various stages of deterioration with contaminated sediment present in the area of the drums.

Franklin Township Supervisor and Torch Lake Public Action Council (TLPAC) board member Mary Sears said the removal program has been in the making for 40 years and is long overdue.

“The barrels themselves are degraded to a point where they’re just shells of what they used to be,” Sears said. “It’s the sediment underneath the barrels and surrounding the barrels that contained whatever was in the barrels, are all sorts of different contaminants.”

According to Great Lakes Restoration, the work was performed as part of the Great Lakes Legacy Act sediment and drum remediation as a partnership between EPA and Honeywell International, in close coordination with the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy (EGLE) and other community organizations.

The Torch Lake Public Action Council (TLPAC) reported in its Spring 2025 Newsletter that the Michigan DNR conducted a survey of fish in Torch and Portage Lakes in 2024. The last survey in the lake was performed in 2008. The single most important finding from the recent survey was a much lower walleye population (1,000) than was estimated in 2008 (4,000-7,000), the Newsletter reports. “Right now, it’s so contaminated that we don’t have any kind of an aquatic atmosphere to have fish repopulate themselves.,” Sears said. “It doesn’t happen there.”

According to the EPA, the site’s long-term cleanup plan includes covering over 600 acres of slag piles and tailings with soil and vegetation, operation and maintenance of soil and vegetation covers, and controls on groundwater use. Construction of the soil and vegetative cover started in 1998 and was completed in 2005.

“The whole darned thing was filled in with stamp sand, and that doesn’t make sense,” Sears said. “Stamp sand doesn’t just stay stagnant and let sediments form on top of it, but it moves, it’s constantly flowing with the water. So it excoriates everything underneath it, so nothing grows there.”

That, said Sears, is the ongoing challenge.

“That’s always the biggest problem. If we can remove the problem, and let nature take its course, or fill it in with something that’s more agreeable to aquatic life, then the fishing is going to be amazing through there, because (fishing) is amazing throughout the U.P.”

Operation and maintenance activities around Torch Lake started in 1999 and are ongoing, including working with individual property owners on land-use deed restrictions.

“It needs some help,” said Sears, “and that’s all we’re trying to do.”