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Quesnel, B.C. — A tailings pond that breached Monday, releasing a slurry of contaminated water and mine waste into several central British Columbia waterways, had been growing at an unsustainable rate, an environmental consultant says.
Brian Olding, who operates Brian Olding and Associates Ltd., said Imperial Metals Corp. (TSX: III) had been working on fixing the problem with waste water from the mine. Olding said he was hired by the company as well as the Williams Lake and Soda Creek First Nations to review the company’s plans to treat and release water as part of the province’s effluent release permitting process.
“More water was coming in over the year than they could deal with,” Olding said. “They just kept building the walls up higher and higher every year and it got to the point where that was untenable.”
He said the firm was seeking a permit to treat and release some of the water to keep the size of the pond in check at its Mount Polley Mine, an open-pit gold and copper mine about 140 kilometres southeast of Quesnel.
The earthen dam at one end of the four-kilometre-long pond breached early Monday morning, sending a 45-metre-wide wall of water and mining debris into local creeks and lakes.
The release of 10 million cubic metres of water and 4.5 million cubic metres of silt into Polly Lake prompted drinking water warnings for Quesnel Lake, Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek, Cariboo Creek and the Quesnel River up to its intersection with the Fraser River.
Olding described the walls on the tailings pond as “very high.”
No analysis of the dam’s structural integrity was done as part of the review, he said.
“I requested a structural engineering company be involved, and that was nixed. They did not want to deal with that problem at that time.”
B.C. Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett said he was told of an incident a few months ago where the water in the tailings pond got a little high.
“They’ve been monitoring it and reporting to the ministry every since then. Water levels were normal. In fact, they were lower than the level that were regulated, so we’re just not sure yet how this happened.”
Bennett, who was travelling to the area on Tuesday, said government and company officials will get to the bottom of what happened and make sure it doesn’t happen again.
“We don’t know how bad, we don’t know the quality of the water that was in the tailings pond,” he said. “I am advised it was fairly high quality water and I hope that turns out to be the case.”
A summary of material inside the tailings pond filed with Environment Canada said there was over 400,000 kilograms of arsenic, 177,000 kilograms of lead and 18,400 tonnes of copper and its compounds in the pond.
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