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.”