by Jessica VanEgeren
Laura Gauger had concerns about the environmental impacts of the Flambeau copper mine ever since it opened in 1993.
The roughly 32-acre mine located in north-central Wisconsin’s Rusk County had a short lifespan, sending out its last shipments of copper in 1997. It was around that time Gauger, a pharmacist with a degree from UW-Madison, started requesting environmental impact data from the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources.
Within the next decade, the long-time Wisconsin resident who recently moved to Minnesota, would amass enough surface water and groundwater data on a small creek referred to only as “stream C” on site diagrams for the Flambeau Mine that she would co-author “The Buzzards Have Landed” with the late Roscoe Churchill and go on to file a lawsuit.