The owner of the Canadian mine that suffered a disastrous dam breach in August might face sanctions as serious as criminal penalties, British Columbia government officials said on Wednesday.
Decisions on corrective and possibly punitive steps will be made after provincial officials learn the findings of three separate investigations into the Mount Polley Mine dam failure, said Bill Bennett, British Columbia’s minister of energy and mines.
The Aug. 4 dam failure, though unprecedented for British Columbia, undercut confidence in the safety of mining in the province and around the world, Bennett told an audience at the Alaska Miners Association annual convention in Anchorage. “If it could happen there, where else can it happen? And that’s a question that’s on all of our minds, I think,” he said.
The Mount Polley dam breach has been cited by opponents of the controversial Pebble mine as a harbinger of risks that project poses to Alaska’s salmon-rich Bristol Bay region. Mount Polley is considered a moderate-sized mine for British Columbia; the proposed Pebble copper and gold project would be much bigger, with a much bigger tailings dam and much bigger potential damages, critics say.
Mount Polley’s woes also concern fishermen and environmentalists in Southeast Alaska, many of them already on edge because of spreading mine development just over the border in British Columbia. Those mines, upstream from Alaska fisheries, pose risks of pollution that would cross the international border, Southeast Alaska fishing groups claim.
Bennett, who is in Alaska to meet with state officials, Alaska fishermen and others worried about transboundary mining problems, said the Mount Polley dam breach was out of character for the mine’s owner, Imperial Metals Corp.
Although he is not an engineer or miner, “I know enough about it to know good companies and companies that aren’t so good. And this is a good company,” he said. “This company was not a bad actor. This company was not out of compliance on a regular basis or anything. The people care. They were extremely distraught when this happened.”
That is “not an excuse” for the breach, and not an attempt to minimize impacts of the event, which sent water and waste rushing out so fast that some of it swept upstream as well as downstream, he said.
“It’s an ugly sight,” he said. “It’s a huge breach.”
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