An environmental consulting firm says it first raised concerns in 2011 about the Mount Polley mine -- whose tailings pond has breached in the B.C. interior and sparked a local state of emergency – but the company operating the mine didn't heed all of the advice.
Brian Olding, president of Brian Olding & Associates, said his company was hired three years ago to review and evaluate a report produced by Imperial Metals, the company that operates the Mount Polley mine, located about 600 kilometres northeast of Vancouver.
The report was seeking permission from the B.C. Ministry of Environment to dispose of water from the mine's tailings pond into the nearby Hazeltine Creek, Olding said.
A tailings pond is an area used to store and collect the byproducts leftover from various mining and extraction procedures.
After reviewing the report, Olding's firm recommended that a separate sedimentation pond be built below the mine's tailings pond in order to protect nearby bodies of water.
"We found that an effluent strategy was needed in order to release the water without harming anything in Hazeltine Creek or Quesnel Lake," Olding told Â鶹´«Ã½ Channel on Wednesday.
"So we advised them to put in a sedimentation pond down below the (tailings) lagoon so that the solids could settle out."
The trout test
Olding's firm said that once the solids were separated out, the left over water would be moved into another pond full of rainbow trout.
And because rainbow trout are sensitive and similar to "canaries in a coal mine," this would serve as a test to see if there were any harmful substances still in the waste water, Olding said.
"If water gets through there without harming the rainbow trout, then it could be released," he explained.
The firm's recommendations were given to Imperial Metals and two First Nations, but Olding said the mining company did not follow all of the recommendations. He added that the company was not under any legal obligation to follow them.
Imperial Metals did get one permit from the B.C. Ministry of Environment to discharge more waste water, but it wasn't enough, Olding said.
"They required an additional permit with water treatment, but they had not received that at the time this event took place," he said, noting that he does not know if the breach is associated with the permits.
The breach released 10 million cubic metres of water and 4.5 million cubic metres of toxic silt into the nearby Polley and Quesnel Lakes. A water ban issued by the Cariboo Regional District remains in place, warning residents against all consumption and recreational use of the Quesnel and Cariboo river systems from the spill site to the Fraser River.
Imperial Metals president apologizes for breach
Meanwhile, Imperial Metals President Brian Kynoch to residents of the nearby town of Likely on Wednesday. He said that the breach had been stabilized and an investigation had been launched into why the dam holding back the pond water had failed.
Kynoch said the dam had never before failed, although there had been some overflow into the Hazeltine Creek in May.
Why did the dam fail?
Bill Bennett, the province's minister of energy and mines, also questioned why the dam had failed.
"That's the question of the day and the question of probably many years," Bennett told Â鶹´«Ã½ Channel on Wednesday. "This sort of thing doesn't happen, certainly not in Canada – it actually doesn't happen in most places in the world."
The minister said there are "several dozen" government officials at the site of the breach, who are looking into why the dam failed. He said he suspects it will take several months before a conclusion is reached.
Olding said that the mining company has a lot of work ahead, as it takes steps to fix the dam, determine the level of toxicity in the region and develop a remediation strategy.
He added that going forward, he'd like to see the province review all the tailings ponds in B.C., and step up monitoring of the water quality around mines.
He stressed that despite the massive breach, the province overall benefits from the mining industry.
"We need the mining industry, we're getting good value for it; it pays for our hospitals," he said. "We need to put a commensurate amount of those benefits into environmental protection."
With files from The Canadian Press
