From behind a screen of trees, it comes as a dull roar: A gray churn of water and debris that overtops roads, snaps trunks, carves chunks of earth from banks as if they were butter. It looks like a flash flood, something you’d see coursing from the mouth of a redrock wash in Utah, a desert arroyo in New Mexico. But this is central British Columbia, with plenty of vegetation and porous soil to catch and slow rain.
Rise into the air in a helicopter, though, and the source creeps into view: A massive earthen-walled pond full of waste from the adjacent Mount Polley copper and gold strip mine, operated by Imperial Metals. The containment dam is rent by a steep new canyon where, sometime in the dark morning hours of August 4, a viscous slurry of pulverized rock vomited free across the dark conifer forest into adjacent Polley Lake and roared down Hazeltine Creek, widening it from 4 feet to 150 in places, before settling in Quesnal Lake.
All told, some 2.6 billion gallons of water and 5.9 million cubic yards of potentially toxic silt escaped. Combined, that’s nearly three times as much waste as flowed from a Tennessee Valley Authority coal ash containment pond near Knoxville in a now (in)famous 2008 disaster that buried hundreds of acres, destroyed a handful of homes, mucked up the Emory River, and cost over a billion dollars to clean up.
Though preliminary water quality tests came back within the safe range, officials continue to advise residents of Likely, BC, population 300, and the surrounding area not to drink, swim or bathe in it until further testing is conducted, necessitating the delivery of nearly 20,000 bottles of water. And given that the tailings held in the pond were known to contain hundreds of thousands of pounds of heavy metals including arsenic, lead and cadmium, concerns remain for local residents, as well as for wildlife that may consume or be exposed to the metals – particularly the region’s salmon.
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That’s because the spill occurred in the headwaters of the Fraser River, prime spawning grounds for one of the most prolific sockeye runs on Earth, which will peak in just a couple of weeks as the bulk of the expected 1.52 million fish pass through. The metals could kill the salmon or taint their meat, passing poisons up the food chain, or the silt could smother their gills and bury the gravel they need to spawn. “Mount Polley Mines think of how many millions they can make, that’s their economy,” Bev Sellers, chief of the Xatsull First Nation, told Maclean’s magazine. “Our economy, the First Nations’ economy, swims by in the river. Our economy walks on the land.”
The disaster also does little to stoke confidence that a bevy of mines planned for northwestern British Columbia, including another massive Imperial Metals project called Red Chris set to begin operation this year, won’t have similar disasters in store for river systems that cross into Alaska and host important U.S. salmon runs. As High Country News reported in 2012, the Canadian government has systematically gutted key environmental laws and fish protections to fast-track projects in the remote region. At Mount Polley, there were several incidents leading up to the breach – including a government finding in May that wastewater was too close to the top of the dam, and evidence that the company rejected a consultant’s request for a review of its structural integrity – that suggest it could have been prevented with more vigilant oversight and regulation.
Alarmingly, according to the Natural Resources Defense Council, the company that designed the tailings dam is the same that has been working on those that would hold back waste from the proposed Pebble Mine, a much larger open pit operation that many environmentalists and fishermen fear would devastate rich salmon fisheries in Bristol Bay. This is unlikely to be lost on salmon advocates queuing up to testify at an August 12 -15 public hearing on the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency’s proposal to steeply restrict mining in that area. Ironically, the mine developer, the Pebble Limited Partnership, in 2010 claimed the Fraser system as a shining example of how heavy mining and healthy salmon runs can coexist in harmony. Fortunately for the company, the ad has vanished from its website. But scrubbing embarrassing things from the Interwebs is pretty hard, so here it is on someone’s Facebook page for your viewing pleasure.
Update: As of Friday Aug. 9, the drinking water ban was partially lifted.
Sarah Gilman is a High Country News contributing editor. She tweets @Sarah_Gilman
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