It was a Monday morning and the sun had just begun to rise when Doug Watt received an alarming phone call from his local fire and rescue department on Aug. 4, 2014.
A tailings pond dam at Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley mine in B.C.’s Interior had failed, releasing 25 billion litres of toxic sludge into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake, where Watt’s small community of Likely stretches along the shore.
“They informed me that the dam had burst overnight and was pouring down into the lake and we should be prepared to evacuate,” Watt, who worked at the Mount Polley mine until 2001 as a metallurgist and shift supervisor, says in an interview.
When Watt went outside to pull his boat out of the water, he heard “a roaring, like Niagara Falls from a distance” — the sound of billions of litres of Mount Polley mine wastewater and toxic mining byproducts, referred to as tailings, pouring downslope into the fish-bearing Quesnel Lake.
The waste surge — with a total volume that would fill about 10,000 Olympic-sized swimming pools — turned the tiny, overgrown Hazeltine Creek into a broad, bleak channel lined with stumps and debris.
About 19 billion litres of tailing slurry gushed into the water where the creek entered Quesnel Lake, the deepest lake in B.C. and possibly the deepest fjord lake in the world. The heavier elements eventually settled over six kilometres of lake bed in a waste plume between one and two kilometres wide and up to 10 metres deep.
All told, the tailings pond breach dumped tonnes of debris and heavy metal into the local watershed, including 134.1 tonnes of lead, 2.8 tonnes of cadmium and 2.1 tonnes of arsenic, according to a national inventory of harmful substances released into the environment. The spill contained 92 per cent of the lead dumped into Canada’s environment in 2014, Environment Canada estimated.
It was, and still is, the worst mine waste disaster in Canadian history.
According to an expert report commissioned by the B.C. government, the Mount Polley tailings dam breach was the result of poor design that failed to account for a weak glacial silt layer underneath the tailings facility. For 14 years prior to the breach, the province had allowed Imperial Metals to increase the height of the dam by more than 40 metres, about as high as a 12-storey building.
Eventually, the unstable ground underneath the tailings dam caused it to shift and shear, resulting in the breach, the 2015 report concluded.
In the wake of the disaster, Vancouver-based Imperial Metals pledged to take responsibility for the destruction, which affected the traditional territories of the T’exelc First Nation and the Xatśūll First Nation. (Both nations have confidential “participation agreements” with Imperial Metals and declined to comment for this story.)
Yet Imperial Metals has never been fined or faced legal repercussions for the tailings dam failure — and B.C. taxpayers covered $40 million in cleanup costs. Many questions remain about the company’s compliance with regulations. And the company, with provincial environment ministry permits in hand, is still pumping wastewater from Mount Polley into Quesnel Lake.
Imperial Metals is now seeking to expand the Mount Polley mine pit and extend the life of the mine into 2031. The company wants to extend the repaired tailings pond dam by another four metres and to continue discharging wastewater into Quesnel Lake. Notice of the public consultation period for the company’s application for the proposed tailings dam expansion is expected to go out by mid-August, according to an email from the B.C. mining ministry.
Bev Sellars was chief of Xatśūll First Nation at the time of the tailings dam breach. In 2017, she launched a private prosecution of Imperial Metals with 15 charges under B.C.’s Environmental Management Act and Mines Act. The day before the case was set to go to court, a news outlet informed Sellars the province had stayed the charges.
“The province didn’t even have the decency to phone me,” Sellars recalled in an interview published in the academic journal BC Studies, part of a commemorative issue marking the tenth anniversary of the disaster.
In 2018, Imperial Metals settled a lawsuit against two engineering firms involved with the tailings dam’s design and upkeep for $108 million. The company reports it paid more than $70 million to clean up the spill and remediate Hazeltine Creek.
“Overall, it didn’t come out of their pockets to pay for the cleanup — and their cleanup basically was just trying to rehabilitate Hazeltine Creek,” Watt tells The Narwhal. “They worked away at that but it’s going to take 100 years or more before it’s back to where it was [before the spill].”
“Are we ever going to get restitution and restoration for the Mount Polley tailings pond spill?” Judy Wilson, the former elected chief of Skat’sin te Secwépemc (Neskonlith Indian Band) asks in the BC Studies commemorative issue. “Is there ever going to be any real concrete changes from it? Those are really important questions now that we’re going to be doing more mining in Canada and British Columbia.”
Energy, Mines and Low Carbon Innovation Minister Josie Osborne’s office responded to questions from The Narwhal via email, after cancelling a scheduled telephone interview about the government’s work to strengthen oversight of the mining industry following the Mount Polley disaster.
“The Mount Polley disaster left an indelible mark on a fragile local environment and on the mining industry,” Osborne says in her emailed response. “However, it also evolved the way we regulate tailings storage facilities and conduct mining compliance and enforcement in the province. My ministry is committed to maintaining world-leading regulations and implementing robust oversight of all regulated mining practices.”
Imperial Metals didn’t wait very long after the breach to try and restart mine operations. In 2017, the B.C. Ministry of Environment and Climate Change Strategy granted the company a permit to discharge wastewater into the fish-bearing Quesnel Lake. That still worries Watt and other Likely residents.
“Their water treatment only removes solids. It does not remove any of the dissolved chemicals, like nutrients and metals,” Watt explains. “They’re still dumping that into the lake.”
In December 2020, the provincial environment ministry issued a $9,000 administrative penalty to Imperial Metals for failing to investigate and test long-term water treatment systems at Mount Polley in accordance with its permit. The company’s attempt to have the fine reduced was rejected by B.C.’s Environmental Appeal Board in September 2021.
One year later, in 2022, Imperial Metals re-launched gold and copper mining operations at Mount Polley, which employs about 350 people. The mine’s production target this year is to extract at least 30 million pounds of copper and 35,000 ounces of gold, according to the company website.
Given the lingering effects of the dam disaster and Mount Polley’s compliance record, Watt and others are calling for more transparent and rigorous provincial government scrutiny of the mining operations.
The B.C. environment ministry says it has conducted 14 inspections since the wastewater permit was issued in 2017. In an email, the ministry says it issued five notices of compliance, five advisories, three warnings and the 2020 monetary penalty. The ministry’s most recent Mount Polley inspection took place in 2021; a ministry spokesperson says the mine is scheduled for reinspection “in the next couple of months.”
According to a database of compliance and enforcement actions against natural resource companies operating in Canada, the ministry’s December 2021 review of the mine’s annual environmental and reclamation report found key information was missing. A January 2024 inspection to determine if Imperial Metals was obeying provincial greenhouse gas reporting rules found the company had underreported its emissions by more than 6,600 tonnes and failed to have its figures verified by a third party, as required. The company subsequently corrected its reporting, the environment ministry spokesperson says.
In its email responding to questions from The Narwhal, the mining ministry says officials have conducted five inspections at the Mount Polley mine since April 1, including the tailings storage facility and water treatment plant. Those inspections resulted in a warning for improperly storing aerosol cans, an advisory about the potential need for a permit amendment and requests for more information about the tailings storage and dam, according to the ministry.
Mount Polley will undergo “a minimum of 12 inspections” by the mines ministry in the 2024-2025 fiscal year, the ministry says.
“They’re probably the most scrutinized mine in the world,” Richard Holmes, a 50-year resident of Likely and a provincially registered biologist, says in an interview. “Unfortunately, it took that disaster to make that happen.”
Holmes views the B.C. mining industry’s relationship with provincial regulators as overly cosy, pointing to a 2016 report from the province’s auditor general, which stated the mines ministry was “at risk of regulatory capture” — a term used when regulatory agencies are dominated by the interests they’re meant to oversee instead of operating in the public interest. The auditor general recommended the province create an “integrated and independent” compliance and enforcement unit for the mining sector, emphasizing the unit should be separate from the ministry.
“That never happened,” Holmes says. “That’s probably the biggest disappointment.”
In 2020, the Mines Act was amended to separate responsibilities for authorizing new mines from conducting compliance and enforcement activities. This move, the ministry says, had the effect of “improving efficiency.” But that’s cold comfort for Quesnel Lake residents still impacted by the dam breach.
Christine McLean and her husband bought a property next to Quesnel Lake in 2012 and planned to retire there.
“We call it our happy place,” McLean says in an interview. But since the 2014 disaster, she looks at the lake differently. “Every time I walk down to the water, I wonder what’s in the water.”
McLean finds it tough to trust the claims Imperial Metals has made about the clean up and remediation. “Every time I see something change in the lake … it makes you wonder immediately if it’s something to do with the tailings in the lake.”
Tailings debris still coats the bottom of Quesnel Lake, where seasonal currents stir the material back up into the lakewater that flows out into the Quesnel River, a major tributary of the Fraser River.
“The fact that 10 years on we still see sediment enriched in copper coming out of the lake is quite amazing,” researcher Phil Owens says in an interview.
Owens and his colleague Ellen Petticrew are both research chairs at the Quesnel River Research Centre and professors at the University of Northern British Columbia. They have detected concentrations of metal in zooplankton, a food source for local fish including lake trout and sockeye salmon.
And the pair didn’t just find those metals in Quesnel Lake, where the tailings plume is located and Mount Polley wastewater is dumped. When Owens and Petticrew recently collected water samples from the bottom of Hazeltine Creek, they found creek water also contained high levels of metals, including copper, which can disrupt the migration of fish like salmon and make them more susceptible to disease.
“We don’t know where that’s coming from,” Owens, who teaches environmental science, says.
“There’s a problem somewhere and they don’t seem to be willing to deal with it,” geography professor Petticrew added. “While they say that they’re finished remediation, it’s not fixed.”
Owens and Petticrew say they have shared their Hazeltine Creek findings with both the provincial environment ministry and Imperial Metals.
Owens described the ministry’s response as “surprisingly muted.” The ministry did not respond to questions from The Narwhal about whether it received Owens and Petticrew’s findings or acted on them.
In July 2022, the pair were invited to present at a quarterly meeting of the Mount Polley mine public liaison committee, which the company was required to establish to help keep local residents, First Nations and other stakeholders informed about the mine’s activities.
Owens says Imperial Metals asked to see the information he and Petticrew planned to present in advance of the meeting.
“When they saw our presentation, they were uncomfortable with the messages that were coming across and therefore we were disinvited,” Owens recounted. The Narwhal called Imperial Metals for comment and was asked to send a message to the company’s general email address. Imperial Metals did not respond by publication time.
Watt and McLean both say ministry officials seem to take information produced by consultants hired by Imperial Metals at face value, while ignoring peer-reviewed evidence from independent researchers like Owens and Petticrew.
“It’s frustrating that Mount Polley’s so-called science is what the B.C. regulators are following in setting up their permit conditions and currently totally ignoring the research from the University of Northern B.C. scientists and their many associates,” Watt says.
“They are independent of the mine or ministry,” McLean points out. “This is the only place where the residents on the lake can actually get real facts that are not manipulated or presented in a way that favours the mine or ministry … that’s the only place I feel like I’m actually not being bullshitted.”
In the wake of the disaster, the B.C. government pledged to enhance oversight of the mining industry, including launching a robust inspection and audit process for the sector. But critics and community members say B.C. has yet to deliver the world-leading standards the government promised to implement.
Dozens of tailings dams like the one that failed at Mount Polley still dot the province, and little has been done to change the way the companies that own them store their mine waste, according to MiningWatch Canada co-founder Jamie Kneen.
“The tailings map that we’ve got on the BC Mining Law Reform website shows a number of relatively high-risk sites,” Kneen says in an interview.
“We know that, mathematically, the probability that something will happen in the next 10 years is pretty high.”
While countries such as China, Ecuador and Brazil ban the construction of tailings dams near communities and sensitive ecosystems, B.C. has no such restrictions. However, the Mount Polley disaster seems to have served as at least a small “wake-up call for the industry” according to Kneen, who notes that while B.C. has yet to ban upstream tailings dams, companies seem to have stopped trying to build them.
“None of the new proposals are for that construction.” he says. “So maybe we’re halfway there; at least the industry has recognized that this is not a viable method anymore.”
In her emailed response, Minister Osborne says the unique conditions of individual mines determine what type of tailings storage facility is most appropriate. “Limiting available [tailings storage facility] design options could lead to unintended increases in the risk to human and/or environmental health,” she says when asked about an upstream dam ban.
The minister also notes the health, safety and reclamation code for mines in B.C. has been amended twice since 2014 “to maintain British Columbia’s status as a world-leading mining jurisdiction.”
“These amendments ensure that, in our province, [tailing storage facilities] are designed and operated according to industry best practices, all while introducing additional layers of responsibility and oversight over the facilities’ lifecycles,” Osborne says.
Even where regulations exist, companies do not always follow them and enforcement remains weak, Andrew Gage, an environmental lawyer with West Coast Environmental Law, says in an interview.
“There’s very, very high levels of non-compliance in many industries, including the mining industry, and very, very low levels of the government doing anything about it,” he says. “I continue to be surprised, given the magnitude of it — the largest mining disaster in Canadian history — that they didn’t do something more.”
Updated on Aug. 1 at 7:40 a.m. PT: This story has been updated to correct the timing of the Mount Polley public liaison committee meeting at which Phil Owens and Ellen Petticrew were scheduled to present their findings. The meeting took place in July 2022, not January 2023 as previously reported.
Updated on Aug. 1 at 3:38 p.m. PT: This story has been updated to add that B.C. taxpayers paid $40 million in clean-up costs following the Mount Polley dam breach.
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