Mining Environmental Accidents, Pollution, Tailing Dams and Abandoned Mines – Page 63

Why [B.C. mines minister] Bill Bennett Needs to Resign – by Rafe Mair (TheTyee.ca – August 18, 2014)

August 19, 2014

By well-established precedent, Bill Bennett right about now should be typing his letter of resignation to Premier Clark.

Extreme? Not at all. Here’s a bit of history that, trust me, speaks directly to the mining minister’s duty after the catastrophic breach of the tailings pond at Mount Polley mine.

Just after the the Second World War, the British agricultural minister resigned. During the war, the Royal Air Force had expropriated a lot of farmland for airfields. After the war, this land was resold by the ministry to bidders. A lot of hanky-panky and plain unfairness came with the sales and it became a scandal.

When the scandal broke, the minister, Thomas Dugdale, who knew little of the scheme and had nothing personally to do with it, promptly resigned. When asked why, he explained simply that since he took credit for when things went well in the ministry, he had to bear responsibility when they didn’t. He perhaps was too hard on himself. Many thought so, including Winston Churchill, his prime minister. He, however, felt that his ministry had failed in its duty, which required that he take the fall.

During the Falklands War, Lord Carrington, the defence minister, felt that his ministry had not properly advised the prime minister on the ramifications. The prime minister didn’t think so but Carrington did. Again, in his view, the ministry had failed to do its duty, he was the minister, and so he must go.

Mount Polley inquiry must be independent – by Stephen Hume (Vancouver Sun – August 18, 2014)

August 18, 2014

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

Dam collapse: Government was involved in inspecting structure, so a true arms’-length investigation essential

The engineering firm that designed the Mount Polley tailings pond containment system that collapsed on Aug. 4 also designed a tailings dam that failed catastrophically in South America on Aug. 19, 1995.

Knight Piésold designed the tailings containment facility for the Canadian-owned Omai gold mine in Guyana. Before the accident, it had handed off operational responsibility to the mining company, which then hired another engineering consultant, the Canadian firm Golder Associates.

The Omai tailings dam collapse spilled an estimated 2.9 million cubic metres of toxic waste into the Essequibo River, the country’s biggest and most important watershed. (Some estimates run higher.) Guyana’s President Cheddi Jagan, whose government held a five per cent share of the mining venture — it was the poor country’s largest private sector employer — and had been championing its economic benefits, called it “the country’s worst environmental disaster.”

A subsequent inquiry found no criminal liability and a civil class action suit was later dismissed. It’s worth noting, perhaps, that by comparison the Mount Polley tailings dam failure, which B.C.’s Mines Minister Bill Bennett has equated with a simple natural landslide, spilled 14.5 million cubic metres — about five times as much contaminated waste as at Omai — into the Fraser River system, B.C’s biggest and most economically important watershed.

Oilsands mogul Murray Edwards to help fund Mount Polley mine spill cleanup – by Christopher Donville and Andy Hoffman, (Bloomberg News – August 15, 2014)

August 18, 2014

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

Oilsands mogul Murray Edwards is backing a $100 million bond sale by Imperial Metals Corp. that will help fund the cleanup of a B.C. mine-waste spill, the worst accident of its kind in Canada in 20 years.

Edwards, Imperial’s largest shareholder, agreed to buy $40 million of the 6 percent, 6-year senior unsecured convertible debentures via Edco Capital Corp., a company he controls.

The Fairholme Partnership LP will buy another $40 million. If the issuance fails to raise the full amount sought, Edco will buy non-convertible notes bearing interest at 12 percent to make up the shortfall, Imperial said yesterday in a statement.

Murray, 54, who holds a 36 percent stake in Imperial, has business interests that span energy, engineering and a stake in a National Hockey League team. Buying the bonds isn’t the first time that he’s helped fund development of the Mount Polley copper and gold mine, the scene of last week’s accident, said David Davidson, an analyst at Paradigm Capital Inc.

“Once he invests in something, he supports it through thick and thin,” Davidson, who’s based in Toronto and whose rating on Imperial is under review following the spill, said today in an interview. “Not only is he committed to Mount Polley, but he’s committed at a really tough time.”

B.C. First Nations band evicts mining company that owns Mount Polley tailings pond – by James Keller (Vancouver Province – August 14, 2014)

August 14, 2014

http://www.theprovince.com/index.html

THE CANADIAN PRESS – CHASE, B.C. — A British Columbia First Nation plans to issue an eviction notice to Imperial Metals Corp. (TSX:III) — the company behind a massive tailings pond breach at a gold and copper mine last week — over a separate project in the band’s territory.

The declaration from the Neskonlith Indian Band is the latest sign that last week’s tailings spill at the Mount Polley Mine in central B.C. could ripple across the company’s other projects and possibly the province’s entire mining industry.

The Neskonlith band said the notice, which its chief planned to hand-deliver to Imperial Metals in Vancouver on Thursday, orders the company to stay away from the site of its proposed Ruddock Creek zinc and lead mine, which is located about 150 kilometres northeast of Kamloops.

The mine, which is still in the development phase and has yet to go through the environmental assessment process, would be located near the headwaters of the Adams River, home of an important sockeye salmon run. The Neskonlith band opposed the mine long before the Mount Polley tailings spill.

“We do not want the mine developing or operating in that sacred headwaters,” Neskonlith Chief Judy Wilson said in an interview Wednesday.

Regulate Canadian, Not American Metals Mine, Murkowski Says – by Alan Neuhauser (U.S. News and World Report – August 14, 2014)

August 14, 2014

http://www.usnews.com/

The Alaska senator seeks greater environmental enforcement at a Canadian metals mine, but opposes regs at a similar mine in Alaska.

Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, has called for greater oversight of a Canadian metals mine – even as she lambastes federal regulation of a similar proposed mining project in Alaska.

“It’s an irony, because the risks associated with Pebble Mine are precisely those that we have seen unfolding before our eyes over the past week in British Columbia,” says Joel Reynolds, western director and senior attorney with the Natural Resources Defense Council. “That is to say, a major containment dam failure resulting in significant off-site contamination in salmon habitats.”

Last week, a dam containing the wastewater pond for Canada’s open-pit Mount Polley mine ruptured, sending millions of gallons of potentially contaminated water spilling into a river along the Alaska border (Canadian officials lifted a ban on drinking tap water Tuesday). Later that week, Murkowski dashed off a letter to Secretary of State John Kerry, urging him to impress upon Canadian leaders “the potential impacts that large-scale mining in Canada could hold” for the state’s fishing and tourism industries, as well as its indigenous population.

“The tailings pond breach at Mount Polley on August 4 has renewed the specter of environmental impacts from large-scale hardrock [sic] mineral developments in Canada that are located near transboundary rivers,” Murkowski wrote.

BC’s two-faced approach to regulation – by Doug Firby (Troy Media – August 14, 2014)

August 14, 2014

http://www.troymedia.com/

Doug Firby is Editor-in-Chief and National Affairs columnist for Troy Media.

Doug FirbyCALGARY, AB, Aug. 14, 2014/ Troy Media/ – Several organizations have egg on their faces after the tailings pond disaster in central British Columbia. But no one has more than the government of British Columbia.

Yes, Imperial Metals Corp. looks like a bad corporate citizen for failing to anticipate and prevent the collapse of the dam. The mishap unleashed an estimated 10 million cubic meters of water and 4.5 million cubic meters of ground-up rock. The local folks are still waiting to hear when it will be safe to drink the water.

B.C., however, looks even worse and here’s why. As one recent poll found, citizens trust resource industries because they believe they are highly regulated. That is, they expect their governments to protect their interests. By that measure, the bureaucrats have betrayed that trust.

Accidents don’t happen when it comes to this sort of thing. Dams don’t just collapse without warning. They do when people aren’t paying close enough attention to them. Clearly, neither Imperial Metals nor the government of B.C. were paying close enough attention to this dam.

Editorial: Who designed the Mount Polley tailings dam? – by John Cumming (Northern Miner – August 13, 2014)

August 14, 2014

The Northern Miner, first published in 1915, during the Cobalt Silver Rush, is considered Canada’s leading authority on the mining industry. Editor John Cumming MSc (Geol) is one of the country’s most well respected mining journalists. jcumming@northernminer.com

It’s a week and a half after the massive tailings spill at Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley copper–gold mine in B.C.’s Cariboo region, and many unclear aspects of the disaster are coming into better focus.

Of immediate concern, the tailings have continued to flow in an uncontrolled manner out of the tailings lagoon all this time, but on Aug. 12, the B.C. government said that the flow had “decreased dramatically,” and that Imperial had begun building a temporary dike to stop the flow. Lake and river water tests outside the contaminant plume show that this water is within safe drinking water guidelines, and so most water-drinking and fishing bans in the region have been lifted, except in the immediate area of the spill.

Engineering firms are usually pretty low-key when it comes to commenting on their clients’ projects, but the extraordinary scale of the Mount Polley breach has prompted both Knight Piésold and AMEC to go public and describe their roles in designing the tailings dam and its later expansions.

Knight Piésold describes itself as the “former engineer of record of the tailings storage facility at Mount Polley,” and said that it informed Imperial that it would no longer continue in that role as of February 2011. Knight Piésold commented that during the time it acted as engineer of record, the tailings storage facility at Mount Polley “operated safely and as it was designed,” and was subjected to multiple third-party reviews.

Following B.C. disaster, Alaskans seek tougher review of Canadian mines – by Pat Forgey (Alaska Dispatch News – August 13, 2014)

August 13, 2014

http://www.adn.com/

JUNEAU — Following a massive mine waste spill in Canada, Alaska state and Canadian federal officials are being asked to do more to protect parts of Alaska downstream of several Canadian mines.

“That water belongs to us, too,” said Rob Sanderson, a Central Council of Tlingit and Haida Indians of Alaska vice-president and co-chair of the United Tribal Transboundary Mining Workshop.

He’s most concerned about the Kerr-Sulphurets-Mitchell mine in Canada east of Ketchikan, which he said is seven times the size of the Mount Polley Mine in interior British Columbia. The breach of the latter mine’s tailings dam contaminated the watershed of Canada’s important Fraser River.

“If that ain’t an eye opener down at Mount Polley, I don’t know what is,” Sanderson said of the KSM mine risks. “Could you imagine if they had a disaster like that at KSM if it was in full production, or even half production, it would be a disaster beyond words,” he said.

But state officials are defending provincial and federal regulators in Canada, and saying their environmental protection measures are as strong as those in Alaska or the United States.

Imperial Metals insurance likely not enough for dam collapse cleanup – by Gordon Hoekstra (Vancouver Sun – August 12, 2014)

August 13, 2014

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

Restoration costs expected to be hundreds of millions of dollars

Imperial Metal’s $15-million property and business interruption insurance coverage is likely to fall short of the cleanup cost of the collapse of its mine waste dam at Mount Polley last week.

The company also has $10 million in third-party liability insurance, triggered if a party other than the company is responsible for damage.

While Imperial Metals says it is too early to provide a cleanup cost, the collapse of the mine waste dam in 1998 of the Los Frailes lead-zinc mine near Seville, Spain, cost hundreds of millions of dollars.

Imperial Metals vice-president of corporate affairs Steve Robertson said Saturday he would be guessing at a cleanup at cost at Mount Polley. The company has, however, vowed to do all it could to “make right” the effects of the dam collapse.

“I don’t know if it’s nowhere near (enough insurance) — it would we way too early to tell,” Robertson said in an interview. A BMO Nesbitt Burns Inc. analysis pegged the cost to the company at $200 million. That does not include legal damages that could double that amount.

Mine in northern Mexico was slow to report huge acid spill: official – by Mark Stevenson (Canadian Manufacturing.com – August 13, 2014)

August 13, 2014

http://www.canadianmanufacturing.com/

Spill at copper mine near Mexico-U.S. border was caused by defects in newly constructed leaching or holding ponds

The Associated Press – MEXICO CITY- A civil defence official says a private mine in northern Mexico did not immediately report a massive acid spill, allowing it to flow into a river that supplies water to tens of thousands of people.

Carlos Arias, director of civil defence for the northern state of Sonora, said the spill at a copper mine near the United States border was caused by defects in newly constructed leaching or holding ponds.

Such ponds hold the overflow of acids used to leach metal out of crushed rock. But Arias said a pipe either blew out or became unseated on Aug. 7, allowing nearly 38 million litres of mining acids to flow downstream into a river.

“Definitely … it was an error” in the design or construction of the retaining pond, Arias said. He said the sulfuric acid spill was detected by residents downstream the next day, and that the mine operators hadn’t notified state authorities.

Arias said tests have revealed the spill contains pollutants like arsenic above acceptable levels. Water supplies from the river have been cut off to about 20,000 people.

Beware Hasty, Unwise Policy Decisions After Mount Polley – by Kenneth P. Green (Huffington Post – August 12, 2014)

August 13, 2014

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/

Kenneth P. Green – Fraser Institute Senior Director, Natural Resource Studies

The pictures coming out of northern British Columbia where the Mount Polley mine tailings pond ruptured on Aug. 4 are painful to see. The fact that the site is remote, and that only a small number of people are likely to be directly affected doesn’t mitigate the visceral pain one feels at seeing images of uprooted trees, and mud-clogged streams and rivers. Humans inherently find healthy ecosystems beautiful and degraded ecosystems painful.

One also has to sympathize with the people near Mount Polley, who have been (temporarily at least) told not to consume water from their local waterways, and who fear damages to salmon and other wildlife, and damages to their livelihoods that partly depend on tourism.

In the aftermath of such incidents, it’s normal to ask what can be done to prevent this from happening again, and indeed, such questions are not only normal, they are at the heart of how we learn as human beings.

But it’s one thing to seek to learn from a disaster and it’s another thing to incite emotional responses to promote hasty, unwise public policy actions. Despite the fact that virtually nothing was known about the cause of the Mount Polley leak, only two days after the spill, the David Suzuki Foundation had set up an automatic petition portal on their website calling on the provincial government to institute a moratorium on new mine approvals, a suggestion that would imperil a substantial part of BC’s economy. This is “ready, fire, aim” policy-making.

B.C. further rescinds water-use ban near Mount Polley mine spill – by Sunny Dhillon and Andrea Woo (Globe and Mail – August 12, 2014)

August 13, 2014

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 — The province of British Columbia has announced that a ban on water use near the Mount Polley mine spill has been further rescinded and that fish appear to have escaped major harm – but any sense of normalcy has been offset by fear the spill could ultimately cost hundreds of area residents their jobs.

On Tuesday, a ban that at one time left up to 300 people without water to drink, bathe in or give to pets and livestock was further rescinded. Acting on positive findings in additional water tests, Interior Health said the do-not-drink order now only remains in effect for the immediate “impact zone” of the spill, where few people live.

Trevor Corneil, a medical health officer with Interior Health, said there is no reason to believe water outside the impact zone was exposed to unsafe levels of contaminants.

Environment Minister Mary Polak said “almost all” contaminants tested in water samples from Polley Lake meet federal and provincial drinking water guidelines, with the exceptions of pH and aluminum, which “slightly exceed” them.

[B.C. tailing dam failure] Mt Polley: Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – by Jack Caldwell (I Think Mining – August 12, 2014)

August 12, 2014

http://ithinkmining.com/

Jack Caldwell, P.E. has a B.Sc. in Civil Engineering, an M.Sc. (Eng.) in Geotechnical Engineering and a post-graduate law degree. He has over 35 years engineering experience on mining, civil, geotechnical and site remediation projects. He has worked on numerous projects throughout southern Africa, Europe, Canada and the United States.

Here are the stories of the seven dam failures that have occurred since the beginning of 2012. Six are failures of tailings facilities. The seventh is a rockfill dam. The following are extracts from technical papers that I wrote well before the Mt Polley failure. Details of the first three are available at this link: Tailings Facility Failures in 2012. Details of the remaining four are in a paper that I will present at the Tailings and Mine Waste 2014 conference in Colorado in October of this year.

There is no common thread, except possibly a failure by those responsible to understand the beast, the Wicked Stepmother, they were dealing with. If you see other common threads, then please comment.

GULLBRIDGE MINE, NEWFOUNDLAND, CANADA

The old Gullbridge mine tailings facility in Newfoundland is the responsibility of local government. Observations indicate potential problems. A respected consulting firm, Stantec, issues a report on the safety of the facility and concludes they cannot tell what is going on because of poor construction records, copious vegetation, and a lack of geotechnical data. They recommend a full investigation. But the local authorities delay, preferring to spend money on inexpensive reports in preference to expensive physical action, do nothing. The dam fails and tailings spill into the downgradient wetland. Now they are fixing the failure.

Mount Polley dam breach not an environmental disaster: Mines Minister Bill Bennett – by Gordon Hoekstra (Vancouver Sun – August 12, 2014)

August 12, 2014

http://www.vancouversun.com/index.html

But First Nations, residents and environmentalists have ongoing concerns

B.C. Mines Minister Bill Bennett says the Mount Polley tailings dam collapse is not an environmental disaster, equating it to the “thousands” of avalanches that happen annually in B.C. Bennett, pointing to initial positive water readings, asserted his contention will be proven in the next several weeks.

Central B.C. First Nations, some area residents and Williams Lake mayor Kerry Cook have described the collapse of the dam as an “environmental disaster.”

The Aug. 4 collapse of a 300-metre section of the gravel and earth dam spewed 10 million cubic metres of water and 4.5 million cubic metres of finely ground up rock containing potentially toxic metals into Hazeltine Creek, Polley Lake and Quesnel Lake.

While the water readings in Quesnel Lake and Quesnel River have been positive, some residents, First Nations and environmentalists have raised concerns over the long-term effects of the sludge that poured into Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake. It will also take longer to determine the environmental effects of the spill, including on salmon, they say.

Bennett acknowledged the dam collapse may be a mining industry, a geotechnical and a political disaster. But he said that has to be separated from the environmental effects.

First Nations worry Mount Polley impact not as benign as claimed (CBC News British Columbia – August 11, 2014)

August 12, 2014

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/british-columbia

Aboriginal and environmental groups seek independent testing of lakes, rivers

First Nations whose traditional territories have been spoiled by the Mount Polley tailings pond failure are seeking independent reviews of environmental testing already underway.

“We are going to be looking at getting independent scientists and people to help us determine whether if the disaster is as benign as they say, said Bev Sellars, Chief of the Xatsull First Nation, or Soda Creek Indian Band. “We don’t believe it is.”

The Chief of the Williams Lake Indian Band is taking also exception to the controlled release of water in Polley Lake into Hazeltine Creek. The runoff was approved after tests confirmed water quality close to historically safe levels.

“I don’t know that anybody knows the safety of the water testing that they’re doing right now is surface,” said Chief Ann Louie. “What about the sediments? I keep saying the plug that’s sitting in front of Polley Lake is huge.”