Blood, Trauma, and Biohazard Cleanup in Silver Bay, MN

Silver Bay is a Lake County city on Lake Superior's North Shore, about halfway between Duluth and Grand Marais along Highway 61.

Silver Bay is one of Minnesota's youngest cities: it was founded on May 1, 1954, as a company town first known as the Beaver Bay housing project.

The town was built to process taconite, a low-grade iron ore railed in from Babbitt, 60 miles to the northwest, and Reserve Mining opened one of the first taconite processing plants in Minnesota at Silver Bay in 1956.

Silver Bay has no mines of its own, but its processing plant, now run by Cleveland-Cliffs, turns taconite into pellets shipped out through its Lake Superior port.

In the 1960s Silver Bay became the center of a landmark pollution fight after Reserve Mining was found to be dumping taconite tailings carrying asbestos-like fibers into Lake Superior, where they turned up in drinking water supplies.

The company was forced to stop dumping into the lake in 1972, and after a long court battle a new on-land waste facility known as 'Mile Post 7' was built seven miles inland in 1977.

Silver Bay's Black Beach, its sand darkened by decades of taconite tailings, opened to the public in 2015 and is now a popular North Shore attraction, complete with a municipally owned campground.

Silver Bay is the largest population center in a stretch of North Shore country that includes Tettegouche State Park, the Baptism River and the Split Rock Lighthouse.

Silver Bay boomed with the plant, holding 3,723 people in 1960, but the 2020 census counted 1,857 residents in 833 households.

Silver Bay skews older than most Minnesota towns — the median age at the 2020 census was 50.4, and more than a quarter of its residents were 65 or older.