Mining Environmental Accidents, Pollution, Tailing Dams and Abandoned Mines

The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

VANCOUVER — A $100-million treatment plant that is a key piece of Teck Resources Ltd.’s plan to address a selenium pollution problem in British Columbia’s Elk Valley has been taken off line because of a fish kill.

In a statement, Teck says the Line Creek plant, which went into operation in July, temporarily shut down “as a precautionary measure” while technicians try to figure out what went wrong. Teck states a problem was first noticed Oct. 16 when “fish were found deceased in the area of the water-treatment facility.”

A total of 45 fish were found dead near the plant, which was built as part of a $600-million, five-year plan to address the pollution threat to westslope cutthroat trout and other aquatic life in the Elk Valley.

Environment Canada recently reported selenium levels are so high in the Fording River that trout are hatching with deformed gills, fins, jaws, spines and craniums. Teck’s statement says the cause of the Line Creek fish kill isn’t known at this time.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

VICTORIA — The B.C. government appears to have systemically breached its freedom of information law by withholding information related to the collapse of the tailings dam at the Mount Polley mine, environment lawyers say.

The province has refused to provide recent inspection reports related to the tailings pond, saying such information may undermine any one of three investigations to determine why the dam failed on Aug. 4, sending a torrent of toxic waste and debris into surrounding waterways.

But when provincial officials refused to hand over a 22-year-old report on the Mount Polley mine, the legal director for the University of Victoria’s Environmental Law Centre decided the suppression of information had gone too far.

“The provincial government’s refusal to provide timely access is not only highly troubling, but verges on the absurd,” said Calvin Sandborn in a 60-page submission asking B.C.’s Information and Privacy commissioner Elizabeth Denham for a review of the province’s conduct. The 1992 report was sitting on a shelf in the Williams Lake public library and a helpful librarian eventually sent him a copy.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

VICTORIA — The owners of the Mount Polley mine say a crack in their tailings dam found in 2010 was almost a kilometre away from the spot where the dam containing toxic waste failed this summer, and the company “fully complied” with a series of recommendations to improve safety in response to that initial fissure.

But NDP Leader John Horgan is calling for the release of technical documents to show just what the company and the province knew about the safety of the dam prior to the Aug. 4 breach in the dam that flushed 24 million cubic metres of water and mine tailings into Quesnel Lake in central B.C.

The last geotechnical inspection by the ministry of mines at Mount Polley took place in September of 2013 and resulted in no orders related to the tailings storage facility, according to ministry officials.

The government has not opened its inspection files, saying it must “protect the integrity and independence” of an independent engineering investigation and inquiry into the tailings pond breach that is expected to be completed in January.

“The most horrific environmental disaster in B.C.’s history wouldn’t have happened if everything was fine,” Mr. Horgan said Sunday. “They are trying to say everything that could be done, was done, but they won’t release the documents to show what they did.”

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

VICTORIA — When Enbridge Inc. sought approval to build the Northern Gateway oil pipeline, Premier Christy Clark said she would oppose the project so long as the environmental safety regime on land and on the water was in doubt. In its formal rejection letter, her government stated: “‘Trust me’ is not good enough in this case.”

The same could be said in the case of the Mount Polley mine. And the Clark government should be worried that this lack of faith could spill across the resource sector.

It is still not clear why the mine’s tailings dam burst last month. Environment Minister Mary Polak says there is no evidence that her government’s cutbacks to enforcement and inspections were to blame.

The breach in the dam flushed 24 million cubic metres of water and mine tailings into Quesnel Lake. Mining industry and government officials alike tugged their forelocks and promised to review dam design and maintenance. If the public focuses only on the question of dam safety, they will be getting off lightly.

Experts have warned, time and again, that provincial budget cuts to environmental regulation could result in a catastrophe. Here are just two examples:

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Red Chris mine is expected to yield a vast fortune. But how to insure against another catastrophe?

The highest levels of corporate integrity and responsibility should be the standard for any new mine in Canada, and especially for one with as much potential as Imperial Metals’ Red Chris project, situated at the heart of the Sacred Headwaters in remote northwestern British Columbia. Imperial Metals has acknowledged that all exploration, regulation and construction costs will be reclaimed within two years of the mine’s anticipated three decades of active production.

If true this immense and certain profitability ought to allow both the company and the government to push the limits of excellence on every front, assuring the public at every step in the process that costs and/or expediency will never deflect them from their goal of building an exemplary mine. It is in the interests of all of the mining industry and both federal and provincial governments that such high standards be set for Red Chris. Civic and corporate responsibility aside, self-interest alone would suggest that Imperial ought to build a great mine.

Consider the optics of Imperial’s immediate dilemma. Todagin Mountain, site of the Red Chris mine, is home to the largest concentration of stone sheep in the world, a resident population that attracts remarkable numbers of predators. A wildlife sanctuary in the sky, the massif looks west to Edziza, sacred mountain of the Tahltan; north to the Grand Canyon of the Stikine, internationally known as the K2 of white water challenges; east to the Sacred Headwaters, birthplace of the Stikine, Skeena and Nass Rivers; and beyond to the Spatsizi, widely recognized as the Serengeti of Canada.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

“Check your knives at the bar,” reads a sign inside this village’s only watering hole. In hard times, before the Mount Polley mine opened 17 years ago, there wasn’t much work to be found, and folks sometimes turned as sour as the cheap beer and boxed wine. Things could get rough inside the Likely saloon.

Likely has enjoyed much better days lately, thanks to the mine and the wealth it was generating. But one morning in early August, a section of the tailings pond dam up at the Mount Polley mine crumbled, releasing 10 million cubic metres of dirty mine water and almost five million cubic metres of finely crushed rock, known as tailings.

The water and tailings formed a thick slurry that roared down Hazeltine Creek, knocking down trees and anything else in its way. It poured into Quesnel Lake, one of the largest — and the deepest — fresh water lakes in B.C.

Since that cataclysmic event, the worst of its kind in Canadian mining history, a cloud has hung over little Likely, a village of perhaps 350 huddled at the top of Quesnel Lake, 600 kilometres north of Vancouver. There is anger here, and resentment. Divisions have formed and blame is assigned. But confusion reigns.

Some local residents and First Nations members claim their lake is now fatally toxic, that the water is peeling skin from fish and is even burning human flesh. Others say that’s just wild fear-mongering. The fact is, no one knows what the accident really means for their lake and their town, even four weeks later.

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The Globe and Mail is Canada’s national newspaper with the second largest broadsheet circulation in the country. It has enormous influence on Canada’s political and business elite.

VANCOUVER — Industry and government officials across the country are reviewing dam design, maintenance and oversight in the wake of a tailings dam breach at Mount Polley mine in B.C., says the head of the Mining Association of Canada (MAC).

“No one in the industry, after this incident, didn’t wake up in the morning and go, ‘I better go check’ – even though they had reams of information and assurances that everything was safe,” MAC president Pierre Gratton said Thursday following an address to the Vancouver Board of Trade. “I think every one of them wanted to go out and get that reassurance again.”

On Aug. 4, a tailings dam at the Mount Polley mine – operated by Vancouver-based Imperial Metals – gave way, sending a torrent of mud and debris into neighbouring waterways and resulting in drinking-water bans in affected areas. Most of those advisories have been lifted, but a do-not-use order remains in effect for the “impact zone,” which includes Hazeltine Creek, Polley Lake and part of Quesnel Lake.

The cause of the breach is unknown and an independent investigation is under way.

The incident rattled the mining sector and raised questions about oversight and regulation of tailings dams in British Columbia and elsewhere in the country. Following the Mount Polley breach, the B.C. government moved the deadline for companies to file annual inspection reports for tailings dams from March 31, 2015, to December 1, 2014, and also ordered those inspections to be independently reviewed.

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Provincial failure to properly regulate the design and operations of dams means more failures coming

The failure rate for mine tailings dams like the one at Mount Polley has been consistent worldwide at about one every eight months since 2001.

Lest anyone think that “worldwide” refers mostly to a problem in the developing world where impoverished governments can be co-opted to accept lower safety standards because they are desperate for tax revenue, a United Nations study found that 39 per cent of these failures were in North America.

The reasons for tailings dam failures vary from shoddy construction and use of inappropriate materials to seismic or other unavoidable environmental events. However, according to a 2010 survey of all the known tailings dam failures in the past century, most fail for two reasons.

The first is unusually heavy rains that overwhelm dams’ designed capacities. They account for 40 per cent of failures. The second is poor management and flawed regulatory oversight, responsible for 30 per cent of failures.

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The National Post is Canada’s second largest national paper.

Imperial Metals’ estimate of the size of the spill from its Mount Polley mine tailings dam collapse is nearly 70 per cent greater than the initial estimate.

The B.C. government has estimated that 10 million cubic metres of water and 4.5 million cubic meters of finely ground rock containing potentially-toxic metals was released by the collapse of the dam on Aug. 4.

But Imperial Metals has estimated the size of the spill at 10.6 million cubic metres of water, 7.3 million cubic metres of tailings and 6.5 million cubic metres of “interstitial” water. That’s enough water and material to fill nearly 9,800 Olympic-sized swimming pools.

Interstitial water is the water suspended in the spaces between the finely ground rock of the tailings.

“It’s a bit disconcerting — its speaks to the crudeness of the initial estimate,” said Mining Watch Canada program director Ramsey Hart of the increased spill estimate.

Imperial Metals did not respond to a request Wednesday for comment. Hart said there will need to be a better accounting of the spill’s size, including the volume of tailings deposited in the lake and in the Hazeltine Creek watershed.

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