Twitter

Mining Environmental Accidents, Pollution, Tailing Dams and Abandoned Mines

B.C. further rescinds water-use ban near Mount Polley mine spill – by Sunny Dhillon and Andrea Woo (Globe and Mail – August 12, 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province of British Columbia has announced that a ban on water use near the Mount Polley mine spill has been further rescinded and that fish appear to have escaped major harm – but any sense of normalcy has been offset by fear the spill could ultimately cost hundreds of area residents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a ban that at one time left up to 300 people without water to drink, bathe in or give to pets and livestock was further rescinded.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.

Read more

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

Read more

Mount Polley dam breach not an environmental disaster: Mines Minister Bill Bennett – by Gordon Hoekstra (Vancouver Sun – 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.

Read more

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

Read more

Mount Polley Mine — Maybe if we tried putting red tape on the breach – by Pete McMartin (Vancouver Sun – August 11, 2014)

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

It’s quiet out there. Perhaps it’s chagrin. Perhaps it’s the nausea caused by the prospect of a stock plummet. But in the muddy wake of Mount Polley, you don’t hear much noise emanating from the mining industry and its government acolytes.

Yes, Mines Minister Bill Bennett assured us the disaster has caused him to lose sleep. (Poor man! Would that he was awake earlier on his watch.)

And the Mining Association of B.C., in response to Mount Polley, has affected an air of scientific curiosity, as coroners might at an autopsy. It is waiting, as was explained to the public, to see what caused the containment pond breach. Meanwhile, Angela Waterman, the association’s vice-president of environment and technical affairs, endeavoured to dampen the disaster’s impact by referring to it as “an anomaly.” (As in, “Hey, the tsunami was just an anomaly.”)

In the past, the mining industry wasn’t so shy about making noise. For years, it complained loudly and often about government interference. It’s what Jessica Clogg, the executive director and senior counsel of West Coast Environmental Law, called “the steady drumbeat for deregulation.”

Both federal and provincial governments got the message. New regimes of deregulation followed. So, eventually, did “an anomaly.”

Read more

Mining industry at a crossroads – by Bernard von Schulmann (Mining.com – August 10, 2014)

http://www.mining.com/

There was a time not long ago in BC when the main environmental pariah in the province was the forest industry, but that is no longer so. Over the last 15 years the forest industry changed how it worked and forged serious partnerships with First Nations. It saw it had to change and it did. The sub-surface industries are now at a similar crossroads: they have to change or close up shop.

For the mining and fossil fuel energy sectors it is not a good situation to have become the number one environmental enemy, but this is made worse with how the industries deal with the public, rural communities and First Nations.

The industries could be doing a lot to improve their situation but they are acting like the BC forest industry did in the 1980s and early 90s. On top of this we have the recent Tsilhqot’in decision and the Mount Polley mine tailings pond breach.

The Tsilhqot’in decision indicates that a significant part of BC is likely to have aboriginal title and for companies to operate on that land they will need First Nations consent. That consent is much easier to achieve when there is a positive relationship. Overall the mining industry, especially mineral exploration juniors, has not worked hard to build these sorts of relationships.

The New Prosperity gold mine project in the Chilcotin has had a tough time getting approvals to be built. Taseko Mines’s relationship with the Tsilhqot’in is at best awful and this was made no better when on June 26 the company issued a press release that denied the mine site had any aboriginal title issues.

Read more

What the Mount Polley Disaster Means for Mining Companies – by Steve Todoruk (Sprott Global.com – August 11, 2014)

http://sprottglobal.com/

The mining industry can’t give guarantees just as airlines can’t. Over the years we have seen several airplane crashes due to mechanical error that have resulted in many unfortunate deaths and injuries.

Prior to those accidents all of those passengers and all of their extended families knew that once those people boarded those planes that there was a slight chance of an air disaster but because flight travel is considered a necessity, all concerned accepted the chance they were taking.

Similar to the exhaustive engineering that goes into building airplanes to make them as safe as humanly possible, a great deal of engineering goes into designing mines to make them as safe as possible to prevent accidents that may harm people and the environment.

The mining engineering that goes into designing mines is supposed to make them as resistant as possible to accidents that may cost lives or destroy wildlife. But things don’t always go as planned.

Just days ago, a Canadian mining company, Imperial Metals Corp. (III-T), announced that their tailings pond wall had been breached in one area at their Mount Polley copper-gold mine in central British Columbia, Canada.

Read more

Lesson for BC: Mining Politics Can Be Terribly Corrosive – by Kristian Secher (The Tyee.ca – August 11, 2014)

http://thetyee.ca/

Consider Greece, where mistrust of Canadian mine safety helped spark massive revolt.

Friday’s blockade of the Imperial Metals’ Red Chris Mine site by members of the Tahltan Nation brings to mind scenes from another place, where plummeting faith in government safeguards after a rush to profit from resource extraction has fueled not just isolated protests but a full-scale political revolt tinged with violence.

That place is Greece, where two years ago I visited to report on the situation. My destination was the northernmost region of Greece, Halkidiki, the birthplace of Aristotle, embroiled in conflict after Vancouver-based Eldorado Gold scooped up most of the local mining industry and unveiled their billion dollar development plan in the austerity stricken region of Europe’s poorest country.

The gold grab made the empty state coffers in Athens rattle with joy but the people of Halkidiki were not as pleased. They had not forgotten the mess left behind by the previous Canadian owner TVX, (later Kinross Gold), nine years earlier and the prospect of renewed mining operations was not encouraging to the inhabitants of the tourism dependent region known for its pristine forests and sandy beaches.

TVX abandoned their properties in 2002 when Greece’s state council ruled that the potential risks of redeveloping the mines would exceed any benefits from the project. In 2003 ownership of the mining area was transferred to the state for a net sum of 11 million euros (C$16 million).

Read more

Tailings pond spill: What happens to effluent over time – by By Matt Kwong (CBC News British Columbia – August 08, 2014)

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

Toxic slurry from mining operations often buried, revegetated after mines close, experts say after B.C. breach

Tailings — the slurry of water, finely ground rock, ore and chemical byproducts washed away during the mining process — never quite go away. The same goes for the risk of failure for even the best-engineered “tailings impoundment” dams, environmental experts say.

A sobering reminder came in the form of an environmental catastrophe this week in B.C. when the tailings pond overseen by Imperial Metals breached, spilling five million cubic metres of effluent into the Quesnel-Cariboo river system.

Asked by CBC’s Chris Hall how long it might take to eventually restore affected areas to their natural state, Ramsey Hart of MiningWatch Canada gave a grim assessment.

“I don’t think it will ever entirely be cleaned up,” said Hart, who researches mining issues, including waste management, the impacts of mining on aquatic ecosystems, and mining and indigenous rights.

Manmade tailings ponds, or reservoirs that use natural geologic features such as valleys or lakes to contain the mine waste, store the tailings solids in water to prevent their exposure to oxygen.

Read more

Canadian mine disaster raises tough questions about Minnesota nonferrous mines – by Aaron Brown (Minneapolis Star Tribune – August 7, 2014)

http://www.startribune.com/

Sometime in the middle of the night on Monday, Aug. 4, the dam holding together a tailings basin at a British Columbian copper and gold mine gave way, sending 1.3 billion gallons of tainted, sludgy water into local streams and lakes.

Officials tell residents in the closest town, Likely, B.C., not to use the water from several lakes and rivers near the Mount Polley Mine, including a precautionary ban stretching all the way to the well-known Fraser River. (And no, “Likely” is not a made-up name from a ham-handed eco-novel. It’s a real town named for an old mining boss named John A. Likely). Mount Polley is operated by Imperial Metals of Vancouver.

The CBC reports that Canadian and provincial officials now assess the full extent of the damage and how something like this even happened. Global News is reporting that Mount Polley Mine employees are saying that tailings pond breaches have happened before, just never to this extent. Meantime, the breach compromises the town’s drinking water and sidelines its tourism economy, which had co-existed with mining, for an indeterminate amount of time. Possibly a very long time.

Already, copper mining critics cite this disaster as Exhibit A that these mines threaten local ecosystems. Many here in Minnesota wonder: if this tailings pond breach can happen at an active mine in Canada, where regulations are similarly stringent to U.S. law, how on earth can we be confident in a tailings pond at a proposed nonferrous mine in northern Minnesota? After all, those tailings basins are supposed to last 500 years, according to PolyMet’s own Environmental Impact Statement estimates.

Read more

Tailings Ponds are the Biggest Environmental Disaster You’ve Never Heard Of – by Peter Moskowitz (Vice News – August 8, 2014)

https://news.vice.com/

The scale is hard to imagine: gray sludge, several feet deep, gushing with the force of a fire hose through streams and forest—coating everything in its path with ashy gunk. What happened on Monday might have been one of North America’s worst environmental disasters in decades, yet the news barely made it past the Canadian border.

Last Monday, a dam holding waste from the Mount Polley gold and copper mine in the remote Cariboo region of British Columbia broke, spilling 2.6 billion gallons of potentially toxic liquid and 1.3 billion gallons of definitely toxic sludge out into pristine lakes and streams. That’s about 6,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools of water and waste containing things like arsenic, mercury, and sulphur. Those substances are now mixed into the water that 300 people rely on for tap, hundreds from First Nations tribes rely on for hunting and fishing, and many others rely on for the tourism business.

“It’s an environmental disaster. It’s huge,” said Chief Ann Louie of the Williams Lake Indian Band, whose members live in the Cariboo region and use the land for hunting and fishing. “The spill has gone down Hazeltine Creek, which was 1.5 meters wide and is 150 meters wide… The damage done to that area, it’ll never come back. This will affect our First Nations for years and years.”

The waste came from a “tailings pond,” an open-air pit that mines use to store the leftovers of mining things like gold, copper, and, perhaps most notably in Canada, the tar sands—the oil-laden bitumen composites that have made the Keystone XL Pipeline so controversial.

Read more

Mount Polley spill could affect whole mining industry – by Sunny Dhillon (Globe and Mail – August 8, 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 — B.C.’s mining association says the Mount Polley spill could lead to changes for the industry, even as First Nations leaders predicted the disaster will affect other resource projects and vowed to push for a public inquiry if they do not get the answers they are seeking.

Millions of cubic metres of waste spewed from a tailings pond into central B.C. waterways on Monday at the Mount Polley copper and gold mine, which is owned by Imperial Metals Corp.

Angela Waterman, vice-president of environment and technical affairs for the Mining Association of B.C., said much about the spill is unknown, but it could have consequences for other mining outfits when the results of investigations come out.

“We’ll have to wait for the report to find out what the underlying cause was, and everybody’s very interested in the findings. And from the findings there will always be learnings, and from that may come new recommendations for industry,” she said in an interview on Thursday.

Ms. Waterman called the spill “an anomaly,” and said she remains optimistic about the industry long-term. She also defended current regulations on how often mines must have inspections, which First Nations and conservation groups have decried as inadequate.

Read more

Water meets drinking criteria, but long-term effects unknown – by Andrea Woo (Globe and Mail – August 8, 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 water quality near the site of the massive tailings-pond breach this week meets drinking-water standards, according to preliminary test results, but the long-term impact on fish habitats and other wildlife remains unknown.

A water-usage ban will remain in place until additional testing is completed.

Jennifer McGuire, executive director of regional operations at the B.C. Ministry of Environment, delivered the news Thursday afternoon at a public meeting in the rural community of Likely. With her were Premier Christy Clark, Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett and Interior Health medical health officer Trevor Corneil.

Medical health officers and water specialists collected samples from three sites at Quesnel Lake and looked at pH levels, turbidity, suspended and dissolved solids, E.coli, dissolved metals and more, Ms. McGuire said.

“All results came back meeting the requirements for Canadian and B.C. drinking-water standards,” she said to applause from residents. “This is very good news.”

Read more

Now Showing: Pebble Mine’s Disastrous Future at BC’s Mount Polley Mine – by Joel Reynolds (Huffington Post – August 7, 2014)

http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/

Joel Reynolds is the Western Director and a senior attorney in the Los Angeles office of NRDC.

In the early morning of August 4, 2014, a major breach occurred in an earthen dam built to contain millions of tons of mining waste — called “tailings” — at the Mount Polley copper and gold mine in central British Columbia. Now, three days later, an estimated 1.3 billion gallons of contaminated tailings have spilled from the breached pond, sweeping untold volumes of waste and debris into the salmon stream and lake systems in the region and potentially threatening the Fraser River system to the west.

Previously pristine fishing, swimming, and summer vacation destinations like Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek, and Quesnel Lake — including drinking water sources for the surrounding communities and residents — are now ground zero for toxicity, government health warnings, and “clean-up” – if indeed such a thing is actually possible.

Right now, before our very eyes through horrifying YouTube video, we are witnessing the mine disaster that the communities of Bristol Bay have feared — their “worst nightmare” — from the massive Pebble Mine. It is the toxic time bomb explosion that all of us who’ve fought the Pebble Mine have predicted could happen.

It is the catastrophic impact that, in its Bristol Bay watershed assessment, the EPA described as foreseeable in the event of a “tailings storage facility failure” — in layman’s terms, a dam breach — a finding the Pebble Limited Partnership (and its sole remaining company Northern Dynasty Minerals) have resoundingly and repeatedly challenged as groundless, as bad science, as a violation of their “right to due process.”

Read more

Group calls for government inspections of Sask. mine ponds (CBC News Saskatchewan – August 07, 2014)

http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/saskatchewan

Mining companies currently hire independent consultants and present those reports to government

On the heels of one the the worst spill disasters in Canadian history, some people in Saskatchewan are worried about how this province protects and regulates tailings ponds.

It comes after the Mount Polley Mine tailings pond wall collapsed in B.C. Water, contaminated from years of mining, is flowing into nearby lakes and rivers.

In Saskatchewan, mining companies hire consultants for tailings pond inspections. Those reports are passed on to the Ministry of Environment for review.

Peter Prebble of the Saskatchewan Environmental Society said he would prefer the government do its own inspections of the tailings ponds and not rely solely on the company’s reports.

“There’s been a real tendency in Saskatchewan to encourage self regulation by companies, in other words, to encourage them to take more responsibility for ensuring that regulations are met. I’m worried that we’re moving too far in that direction,” he said.

In B.C., a total of 10 billion litres of water and 4.5 million cubic metres of metal-laden sand has leaked out of the tailings ponds.

Read more