Tag along with the fishermen whose livelihood depends on watersheds that cross borders
Roaring at seven knots up the U.S. side of the Stikine River, a grizzly bear of a man named Mark Galla steers our jet boat through a gauntlet of protruding logs, attempting to point out the exact point at which Alaska becomes British Columbia. Against the vastness of the surrounding wilderness, the border is invisible, almost arbitrary. Until recently, most Alaskans couldn’t see it either.
That all changed in August when YouTube video highlights of the Mount Polley mine disaster circulated through panhandle towns like Ketchikan, Petersburg and Wrangell. Media from across the state drew comparisons between Mount Polley and the tailings dams that could one day accompany the half-dozen open pit mines proposed in the wild river watersheds that Alaska and B.C. share — the Unuk, Taku and, more than anywhere else, the Stikine.
The first of these proposed mines will be Red Chris, a copper and gold mine built by Mount Polley-owner Imperial Metals in the B.C. headwaters of the Stikine, scheduled to open later this year. Another is the $5.3 billion Kerr-Suphurets-Mitchell (KSM) project, which could generate two billion tons of waste rock, requiring tailings storage in the Nass River drainage and waste rock dumps in the Unuk watershed.
The grand enabler of these projects is a taxpayer-subsidized power line completed this year, which will bring cheap, rock-grinding electricity to the B.C.-Alaska border region for the first time. With the price tag of about $750 million (BC Hydro’s original estimate was $404 million) comes the electricity required for at least five new northwest mines.
Roused by the Mount Polley accident, a coalition of Alaskan commercial fishermen, First Nations and politicians on August 21 called on the U.S. State Department to pressure Canada for greater environmental scrutiny of the KSM mine.
In a separate letter to U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry, Alaska Democratic Senator Mark Begich warned that an accident similar to the Mount Polley breach would imperil the economic future of southeast Alaska.
“A similar failure at mines proposed near the Unuk, Stikine and Taku rivers would be devastating to fish stocks which Alaska commercial and recreational fishermen depend on,” Begich wrote on August 6, asking Kerry to press his Canadian counterparts for both a thorough investigation of the disaster and a stronger environmental assessment of KSM.
The Alaskan reaction underscores the precarious position of southeast Alaska today. Its forestry industry has gone bust and about 7,000 people now depend on salmon fishing for income. Alaska Panhandle salmon and tourism industries — worth about $630 million together in 2013, according to Begich — could soon be downstream from multiple metal mines each with permanent tailings impoundments and waste rock dumps far larger than Mount Polley’s.
Industrial transformation delayed
The fishing town of Wrangell was my ideal Alaska base. Located just 12 kilometres south of the Stikine mouth, it’s the closest U.S. community to the Stikine and it allowed me to trace the footsteps of the great essayist Edward Hoagland, whose exploration of the Stikine watershed in 1966 provides the context necessary to understand the resource scramble unfolding today.
For the rest of this article, click here: http://thetyee.ca/News/2014/11/01/In_Polley_Wake_Downstream_Alaska_Fears_BC_Mining_Boom/