https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia/
Barkerville Gold Mines’ penalty reduced in part because of COVID restrictions on business: report
A gold mining company that discharged contaminants into a B.C. creek more than a thousand times since 2017 has now been fined over $275,000 for its most recent violations of environmental rules, according to a March 2024 report from the Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy.
Barkerville Gold Mines, owned by Osisko Development since 2019, operates two gold mines and a processing mill east of Quesnel, B.C., in the mountainous Cariboo region about 440 kilometres north of Vancouver. The environmental violations took place at its underground Bonanza Ledge gold mine.
The ministry’s Determination of Administrative Penalty report documents the “discharge of effluent from an underground mine, rock dump drainage, site runoff and open pit effluent from a Sediment Control Pond” into Lowhee Creek.
The concentration and composition of effluents were in higher concentrations than permitted, the report says. The report documented 417 separate violations on 68 different days in 2020 and 2021. It also noted previous violations, including 215 incidents in 2017, and 463 between 2018 and 2019.
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