http://www.canadianminingjournal.com/
Imperial Metals Mount Polley Mine Remediation & Monitoring Updates: https://bit.ly/2GO6obK
Vice-president ‘Lyn Anglin speaks about the aftermath of the Mount Polley tailings spill
When the Mount Polley tailings storage facility failed in August 2014, it sent 7.3 million cubic metres of fine tailings, 600,000 cubic metres of construction materials and 17 million cubic metres of water into the local watershed, uprooting trees and vegetation in its path and depositing the slurry in Hazeltine Creek, Quesnel Lake, Polley Lake and Edney Creek.
Three and half years later, the mine’s owner Mount Polley Mining Corp., a subsidiary of Imperial Metals, has spent about $70 million on rehabilitation efforts.
It also has 3.5 years’ worth of data from testing of water, aquatic life, soil and plants to assess the effects of the tailings facility breach, contained in thousands of pages of studies including post event environmental impact assessment reports, a human health risk assessment, and an ecological risk assessment, all of which are posted on its website.
So what has it found out from all that testing? “Out of all of those studies what we found was after the initial tailings release, the effect was primarily physical, not chemical,” says Dr. ‘Lyn Anglin, chief scientific officer and vice-president environmental affairs with Imperial Metals. “That’s the bottom line of all of the research that we’ve done.”
Anglin, former president and CEO of Geoscience BC, is a relative newcomer to Imperial, having joined the company in September 2014 as part of Imperial Metals’ support to Mount Polley, just one month after the breach occurred at the operation, about 56 km northeast of Williams Lake, B.C.
“It has been a large, challenging, but very interesting multi-disciplinary research project to look at the impacts of the spill, to design monitoring programs, mitigation and remediation programs and determine what risk if any there is to human health or the environment from the spill,” Anglin says.
For the rest of this article: http://www.canadianminingjournal.com/features/imperials-vp-environment-talks-remediation/