The massive tailings pond breach at a gold and copper mine near Likely on Aug. 4 has spurred mine operators around B.C. to examine their handling of waste material.
Gary Gould, vice-president of Hillsborough Resources which runs Quinsam Coal near Campbell River, said the entire industry is dealing with the shadow of environmental issues cast by the breach at the Mount Polley mine.
“It certainly will shed light on the whole industry with respect to tailings management and the operation of tailings facilities and the oversight given by agencies and by operators,” said Gould.
The Mount Polley breach released 10 million cubic metres of water and 4.5 million cubic metres of silt into surrounding lakes, rivers and creeks resulting in orders not to drink or bathe in tap water in the localized area.
Tailings are the finely ground mineral waste products from mining operations, usually stored in a slurry in manufactured ponds.
They may contain processing chemicals.
“It certainly makes us sit back and take a look at our facility, making sure that everything is as it should be, so to speak,” he said.
Quinsam operates a small tailings pond, measuring 200 metres by 400 metres with walls 25 metres high, at its underground mine site. Mount Polley’s pond by comparison was four kilometres long and concerns had been raised by design engineers about its expanding size.
Gould said Quinsam has taken a hard look at its site and made sure “all the boxes have been checked off with respect to what we have to do.”
He said his mine’s pond is visually inspected every day, and each week there is an informal inspection of the instruments on the pond’s banks.
There is also an annual inspection and report filed by the original design engineer, which the province sees.
As a small coal mine, the company deals with a very different kind of waste and significantly less volume of it, Gould said.
“It’s quite a bit different than that generated at a hard rock mine (like Mount Polley). We are an underground mine, so all the material we handle is ore or coal and the percentage that comes out of the ground as coal that would end up as fine tailings is pretty small,” he said, adding the process is “strictly physical,” meaning there is no use of chemicals in processing.
“Our tailings are a slurry of water and fine tailings,” he said. Because it is an underground mine, he added, about two-thirds of the tailings are pumped back underground into mined-out workings.
There is also a tailings pond at the Myra Falls zinc, copper and gold mine near Campbell River.
A representative of Nyrstar, the Switzerland-based company that bought Myra Falls in 2011, could not be reached Wednesday.
Robert Behrendt, general manager of the Myra Falls mine, has told the Campbell River Mirror newspaper that the mine pumps about 50 per cent of its tailings underground and the tailings pond on site is below capacity.
All the talk of industry safe practices and oversight of waste, however, is gaining no traction with the Tla-o-qui-aht First Nation, which has called for a moratorium on mining in the region near Tofino.
The First Nation has told Imperial Metals, the company that operates the Mount Polley mine, it is not welcome to set up shop near Clayoquot Sound.
Imperial has its eye on two sites in the area — the old Fandora mine in the Tranquil Valley and a site on Catface Peninsula, 13 kilometres northwest of Tofino.
“[The breach] just lets me know we are doing the right thing and I know that the people that participated in our land-use planning feel the same way — we won’t be seeing a mine in Clayoquot Sound anytime soon,” said Saya Masso, natural resources director for the Tla-o-qui-aht.
Masso said they are dead against any kind of mining in the region and will do what it takes, be it protest or court challenge, to stop it.
“Some of these things happen on the ground in peaceful protest. We have a long history of victory through peaceful protest,” he said. “We have a plan for 500 years of sustainability not 10 years of jobs and 500 years of impact.”
