Canada Mining

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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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 — 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.

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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.”

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