In the eleventh year since the 2014 Mount Polley tailings breach, the Mount Polley Mining Corporation (MPMC) is gearing up for another eight to ten years of operations.
In December 2024, 15 charges were approved against the mine in relation to the breach which saw the release of approximately 25 million cubic metres of water and tailings into the surrounding environment. Since the breach, MPMC has spent over $70 million on clean-up, assessment and remediation efforts. This work included restoring fish habitat in Hazeltine Creek as well as removing some of the tailings from the environment.
“The focus of the remediation effort at Mount Polley has been to repair and rehabilitate Hazeltine Creek so that it becomes a self-sustaining, productive fish habitat,” said Brian Kynoch in an article on the Mount Polley website.
No tailings were removed from Quesnel Lake as it was deemed safer to leave them untouched and to recover naturally.
However, researchers at the UNBC Quesnel River Research Centre aren’t sure leaving the tailings in the lake is the right choice. Dr. Phil Owens and Dr. Ellen Petticrew are professors and research chairs in landscape ecology in the Department of Geography, Earth and Environmental Sciences at UNBC, and have been monitoring the affected bodies of water since the spill and continue to find evidence of contamination.
“I’m not saying that it has to be managed, but...there's been no measure of mitigation of the tailings at the bottom of the of the lake,” Dr. Owens said. He explained the tailings are being left in the lake based on the idea that a natural barrier will form between the tailings and the lake water. While this can work in some cases, Owens said the lake’s natural sedimentation rate, or the rate at which the lake will produce a barrier, is so low that it will take decades to do so.
Meanwhile, any particulates which might be disturbed during spring and fall overturn events may continue to contaminate the water. A main concern, Owens said, is phosphorus, which continues to be present at levels higher than seen prior to the spill.
“It’s really hard to reverse phosphorus levels in a lake once they start to go up,” Owens said, explaining that phosphorus can lead to algae blooms on the water’s surface. “We’re not at that point yet,” he said, but if it gets there it could be problematic.
Owens and Petticrew also feel the effluent produced by the mine could be better managed by sending it to Quesnel River rather than the lake so any remaining particles and dissolved chemicals in the effluent can be quickly diluted by the fast-flowing water.
MPMC’s consultants in the design, however, said the discharge was not at a high enough amount to require release into fast flowing water. Owens and Petticrew were surprised by this, but the details of the mine consultants mixing models were not provided. They do know the mine is producing very large amounts of effluent, greater than the amount of material released during the spill, though much less contaminated.
“They presented a cost benefit analysis from their perspective, but we were pointing out the fact that the costs and the benefits didn't include the cost of the environment and cultural considerations,” Petticrew recalled from the time MPMC presented their design to the community.
Owens and Petticrew said everything could very well be OK, but they are concerned because they do not know what kind of follow-up is being done when MPMC does discover contaminants in its water samples.
"Not everything that they sample is high, but when you get a high value, you can either throw it out and say it's an outlier,” or, Petticrew said, you can look into whether there’s more to the source of the contaminants.
If MPMC is investigating the source of contaminants, there remains the problem that, by the time MPMC receives results from their water samples from an off-site lab, effluent which may be introducing contaminants would have continued to enter the lake.
In an interview with Efteen, president of Imperial Mines Corporation – of which MPMC is a subsidiary – Bryan Kynoch said often the water which is sent to the treatment facility before being discharged already meets provincial guidelines.
"After the breach a study was done, and this was the recommended treatment site...it was studied, and the treatment plant is what came out of that study,” Kynoch said.
Most of the water that gets discharged, he added, is simply runoff from the site rather than treated tailings water.
Now back in full operation, Mount Polley is looking to extend the mine's life. In March, it received a permit to raise its tailings dam by four metres to allow room for the spring freshet and ongoing operations.
“As you can imagine, the Mount Polley dam is a highly engineered, highly reviewed dam so there’s a lot of energy and time been put into this design and permitting,” Kynoch said. MPMC has been planning this raise for three years, working with design engineers, “environmental people” and local First Nations in its design.
“There’s always risk but we certainly put huge effort into mitigating them and have been communicating transparently,” Kynoch added. He also said the dam has a “much more substantial buttress,” which is used to reinforce the dam.
Community members continue to express concern over the mine’s operations out of a desire to see resource management done responsibly.
“I’m not against mining,” said Doug Watt who lives on the shores of Quesnel Lake, and is a member of the Concerned Citizens of Quesnel Lake group and retired from a career in the mining industry.
“I’m very concerned...because of a lack of consultation,” said Watt. He wants to see both the province and MPMC actively engage with members of the public and provide them with opportunities for meaningful consultation in the permitting process.
Watt is a member of the mine’s Public Liaison Committee (PLC) which holds quarterly meetings chaired by Gabriel Holmes, an environmental technician at the mine. Watt feels there is not enough time in the meetings to discuss the public's concerns, and not all pertinent information makes it to the meetings. His most recent example of this is an Environmental Protection Notice (EPN), published by the company on July 22, 11 days following the committee’s third quarter meeting during which Watt said it was not discussed. The notice, related to the mine’s application to expand, gave the public 30 days to comment on a nine-part application to amend its mining permit.
Thirty days is the minimum time the Ministry of Environment and Parks' required the Imperial Metals to post the notice for review and comment from the public. The Ministry of Mining and Critical Minerals told Black Press that a draft of the final application package including the technical assessment report was shared with the PLC.
Holmes acknowledged there are, periodically, concerns from the public wanting “more traction in the permitting process,” but he said it's the province, not the company, which controls that process.
“From my perspective we’re very transparent,” Kynoch said. “We are following what the province tells us,” he added about the permitting process.
“Not everyone is in favour of everything we do but they’re consulted.”
The EPN was published as a notice in the Efteen, however the paper does not get delivered to Likely.
Xatśūll First Nation, on whose traditional territory the mine operates, has filed for a judicial review of the province’s decision to approve Mount Polley’s plan to raise its tailings dam without the nation’s consent. On April 25, Xatśūll filed an injunction to put a pause on construction of the dam until the judicial review is completed.
In response, Mount Polley said it has always been open to input from First Nations and has been meeting with Xatśūll and Williams Lake First Nation monthly since the latest permitting process began.
To learn more about why the tailings dam is being raised, visit Mount Polley’s online journal. To learn more about Dr. Owens and Petticrew’s research, visit the Quesnel River Research Centre’s Mount Polley research page and the UNBC Landscape Ecology page.
With files from Monica Lamb-Yorski and Ruth Lloyd.
