Long-standing plans to clean up the headwaters of Lake Superior have been thrown into doubt by Trump administration budget priorities.

​Federal officials have been working for years to address a century’s worth of industrial pollution in more than 40 areas around the Great Lakes.

The St. Louis River estuary, which flows past Duluth, Minn., into Lake Superior, is the second largest of those projects. But the money has been zeroed out in the president’s 2018 budget plan.

One hundred years ago U.S. Steel built a massive mill along the banks of the St. Louis River, about 10 miles southwest of downtown Duluth. It even built an entire neighborhood to house the workers – dubbed Morgan Park, after J.P. Morgan.

For decades the plant provided great jobs. But along with logging mills and other industry that once lined the river, it also left behind a legacy of pollution.

“They pumped all their sludge and stuff from the coke ovens,” says Rob Maas, as he steers his fishing boat upriver to the site of the old Duluth Works.

Maas worked there a half-century ago, making barbed wire that was shipped to Vietnam. He raised his kids just blocks from the river.

“I used to come down here and fish with them off the point just to catch fish, but … if you cooked them, your house stunk,” he recalls. “They just smelled terrible. You could tell they weren’t healthy or clean.”

Since then the river has made a remarkable comeback. Water quality improved tremendously in the 1980s after a sewage treatment plant went online.

Maas, who’s 71 and retired, says he fishes the river more than 200 days a year. He’s even able to eat much of what he catches. 

But toxic contaminants still remain trapped in the river’s sediment.

“And so this whole delta area is contaminated sediment,” says Mike Bares of the Minnesota Pollution Control Agency, pointing out where the steel mill once stood.

One of the byproducts of steelmaking was coal tar, which washed into the river.

“And it’s up to 17 feet thick in some places. … Of contaminated sediment.”

Altogether there’s enough contaminated muck to fill more than 800 Olympic sized swimming pools.