The BWCAW on a clear day
The BWCAW on a clear day
The BWCAW on a hazy day
The BWCAW on a hazy day

On a good day, visibility in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness is 130 miles. On a bad day, it can be as low as 33 miles.

See what the air quality currently is,
with an automatically-updated image.

Haze in the BWCAW is the effect of pollution from power plants, taconite processing facilities, cars and trucks and other sources around the region. The Clean Air Act requires states to eliminate such negative impacts on air quality in Wildernesses, National Parks, and other jewels of our country’s public lands.

As mandated by the Environmental Protection Agency, the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency (MPCA) is developing a plan to eliminate human-caused contributions to haze in the BWCAW and its neighbor to the west, Voyageurs National Park.

The Friends is working closely with the MPCA, as well as the Superior National Forest and Voyageurs National Park and our partner organizations Voyageurs National Park Association, the Minnesota Center for Environmental Advocacy and the National Parks Conservation Association, to develop and implement the best plan possible to improve air quality in the Boundary Waters.

In meetings with MPCA staff, as well as in comment letters, we have provided science-based advocacy to help identify the complex contributors to regional haze and identify solutions that will have the greatest impact. In May 2008 and July 2009, we submitted comments to the MPCA with our partner organizations. You can read the 2008 comments here and the 2009 comments here.

There are serious concerns about the quality of the plan the MPCA has come up with so far. For instance, the plan acknowledges that it won’t even meet its own reduction goals for 2018, much less further milestones to put the state on a reduction glide path for decades to come.

In September 2009, Friends joined its partners in petitioning the Interior Department and the Department of Agriculture to urge the MPCA to require stronger pollution controls on Xcel Energy’s Sherco power plant in Becker, Minnesota. The plant is the biggest emitter in the state of the pollutants that contribute to visibility impairment in Voyageurs and the BWCAW.

The Sherco plant ranked number 101 out of 1,228 power plants in the country in 2008 on sulfur dioxide emissions and number 33 in nitrogen oxides emissions. These high levels of emissions can be directly linked to poor visibility in Voyageurs National Park on up to 80 days a year, the Department of the Interior stated in its certification letter.

In October, the Interior Department’s assistant secretary for Fish and Wildlife and Parks agreed with our petition and, in October, certified that Xcel Energy’s Sherco power plants in Becker is a significant contributor to haze over Voyageurs and the MPCA ought to do more to regulate the plant’s emmissions and reduce its impacts on the Park.

Then, at the MPCA’s Citizens Board October meeting, the board declined to approve the state implementation plan for cutting the haze, which blocked the plan from being forward on to the Environmental Protection Agency.

At the meeting, Mike Ward, superintendent of Voyageurs National Park, and Jim Sanders, supervisor of the Superior National Forest, which contains the BWCAW, testified on the need for reductions in haze and a better plan to achieve that goal.

In his testimony, Sanders said the agency’s haze plan fails to require taconite plants to measure their pollution emissions and doesn’t set standards for how much they need to cut.

In the news:

Additional resources:

More information:

Switch to our mobile site