Tribe set to bring up barrels Army deep-sixed in Lake Superior

Photo: MPCA

Last summer Tom Elko posted here about barrels containing who-knows-what that U.S. Army contractors sank in Lake Superior 50 years ago. Last night, the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Chippewa told a Duluth audience about its plans to begin bringing those barrels to the surface next summer.

The barrels’ contents remain classified, though two recovered and opened in the early 1990s revealed more or less what had been expected: munitions waste, scrap metal, pieces of timing mechanisms and assemblies for the BLU-3 “pineapple” cluster bomb. In decades of controversy over the possibly toxic Cold War stash, fewer than 10 barrels have been brought to the surface.

The Red Cliff Band will use a $1.2 million grant from the U.S. Department of Defense to exhume 70 barrels from the muck at the bottom of the world’s deepest of the Great Lakes — about 5 percent of the estimated 1,400 barrels dumped from 1959 to 1962. Last summer the Band’s consultants located nearly 600 barrels, twice as many as the State of Minnesota found in the 1990s.