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Report calls for systemic (and costly) change that will eliminate possibility of dam failures
VICTORIA — The tailings dam at the Mount Polley mine was “doomed to fail” and the remedies that could have prevented the reckoning were undertaken “too little and too late.”
Such was the depressing, persuasive conclusion of the trio of experts appointed to review last August’s breach of the dam — an environmental catastrophe that need not have happened at all.
The root cause of the failure, they determined, was literally at the root of the dam: an underlying deposit of glacial till that was never fully mapped nor properly understood. We only know about it now because of the forensic engineering work that was part of their review.
But if that were the whole story, their report would not be as troubling as it is. For authors Norbert Morgenstern, Dirk van Zyl and Steven Vick — all experts in engineering — painted a far from flattering portrait of the Mount Polley operation and the constant raising of the dam that preceded the breach.
“Dam-raising proceeded incrementally, one year at a time, driven by impoundment storage requirements for only the next year ahead,” they write. “More reactive than anticipatory, there was little in the way of long-term planning or execution.”