WC136 MayJune 2024 - Magazine - Page 24
MINING
Orphaned and Abandoned
Mines a Giant Problem
First Nation importing water due to high arsenic
trioxide levels in the environment.
N JANUARY, Water Canada explored the 2014
failure of the tailings dam at Mount Polley in
British Columbia and its ongoing impact on
nearby lakes and rivers. While there’s no clean
consensus about the risks and viability of containing contaminants in perpetuity at the bottom
of nearby Quesnel Lake, the mine has an owner to
finance and shepherd much of the process. Across
the country, however, a considerable number of mine
sites lie abandoned, effectively orphaned by bankruptcy or neglect, even as impacts remain ongoing,
with responsibility for care and management falling
to government and, ultimately, the public purse.
When Giant Mine opened in 1948 in Yellowknife,
NWT, any notion that people living nearby would
lose access to potable water and endure other catastrophic, long-term environmental harms might have
seemed otherworldly. The Far North had long been
revered as gold-bearing and Giant Mine delivered
generously. Over the course of more than 50 years
of production, the property offered up more than
7,000,000 troy ounces (220,000kg) of the precious
metal, with successive owners reaping more than $1
billion in profits over the years.
By the late 1990s, however, gold prices were
plummeting and the bonanza was coming to an end.
Despite the mine’s lucrative history, its owner at the
time, Royal Oak Mines, was in debt and in 1999 declared bankruptcy. The federal Department of Indian
Affairs and Northern Development, as it was then
called, took over the 1,100-hectare site with a view to
organizing its closure. DIAND sold mining rights to
the remaining residual ore, with environmental liabilities severed, to Miramar Mining Corporation, and
when Miramar ended production in 2004, DIAND
reassumed responsibility for the site, which included
eight open pits, four tailing ponds, more than a million cubic metres of soil with high arsenic levels, and
237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust secured and
stored underground.
I
Saul
Chernos
Saul Chernos is a
freelance writer
for Water Canada.
24
WATER C AN ADA • M AY/JUNE 2024
It’s the arsenic trioxide that presents
the biggest challenge. The deadly gas
by-product from the industrial roasting
process used to extract gold from raw
arsenopyrite ore transforms into water-soluble dust at lower temperatures.
So, even while mine operators captured
considerable volumes of dust and placed
it inside mined-out, concrete-sealed
chambers and purpose-built slopes,
additional dust spread off-site, leaving
its mark on the area, including the communities of Ndilǫ and Dettah of the
Yellowknives Dene First Nation.
“This used to be a pristine, healthy,
beautiful place where my tribe would go
to get a moose or to fish,” Ndilǫ chief
Fred Sangris said, describing the wilds
of Great Slave Lake’s Yellowknife Bay.
“The arsenic trioxide blew around the
area for many, many years, poisoning
the berries and the other plants. All
the resources the Yellowknives Dene
First Nation used in the past, it was all
arsenic and poison now.”
The Yellowknives Dene, established in the area for
more than 7,000 years, began experiencing acute and
long-term poisoning soon after the mine opened.
“The old people used to tell me the snow was the
shade of black ashes,” Sangris said, relating the deaths
of two children after ingesting melted snow, as well
as other documented cases of arsenic poisoning of
people and livestock. “One man lost his cow and got
$20,000, and the Indigenous man who lost his two
sons didn’t even get that amount,” Sangris added,
noting that appeals to multiple levels of government
went nowhere. “The golden goose of bringing that
gold out of the ground was much more important
than human life.”
With the mine’s prior owners absolved of respon-
WAT E R C A N A D A . N E T
Getty Images
BY SAUL CHERNOS
