In a shaky GoPro video taken deep underground, the so-called “snot” hangs from the ceiling and coats the floors. The dim light of flashlights and headlamps exposes the yellowish tinge of the shiny, gooey film.

The room is one of many subterranean tombs housing 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide, a dusty powder deadly to humans and most other living things, far below the surface of Yellowknife, N.T.

Whatever is growing on the walls doesn’t seem to mind the poison; in fact, it seems to thrive in its presence.

Scientists have been looking at the biofilm and have even sequenced its genes. The slimy bacterium’s ability to live with dissolved arsenic could make it part of the solution to the intractable problem of dealing with 70 years’ worth of the stuff, the legacy of Giant Mine’s gold smelting process. Above all else, its ability to convert the arsenic at cold temperatures makes it especially valuable.

But despite headlines hailing the discovery as a potential solution to the arsenic problem, it’s not a silver bullet, explains Heather Jamieson, the geochemistry professor at Queen’s University who first took a sample of the bacterium from deep within the mine.

“I think saying it’s ‘cleaning up’ is way overstating the case,” she says. “It’s not any kind of magic solution.”

What the microbe can do is oxidize the arsenic — add a couple of oxygen atoms to the molecule — converting it to a less deadly form that is also easier to treat.

“But you can do the same thing using a chemical,” she writes later in an e-mail. “So it doesn’t really solve the problem. There is still as much arsenic in the water as before.”

Arsenic “snot” clings to the walls of an underground chamber in Giant Mine. Photo: Heather Jamieson (Submitted)

The arsenic trioxide dust, released from the rock as it was roasted to get the gold, was pumped underground during most of the mine’s life. Better there than in the air (in the early days of the mine, it was sending up to 7,400 kg of the dust out into the environment, sickening locals and even killing a Yellowknives Dene child) but it presents its own problems underground.

Dealing with the arsenic trioxide has been the central headache for the federal government since 2004, when it took over remediation of the mine from its bankrupt owner. The dust has meant that, barring an unforeseen technological breakthrough or unthinkable disaster, there will never be an end to the government’s role in keeping the site secure.

“This will never be a walk-away solution,” Brad Thompson, senior project manager for Public Works and Government Services Canada, told a group of reporters at the mine in mid-September.

He means that the government, and therefore taxpayers, will never walk away from Giant Mine — a feat that, for its owners, took just a flick of a pen. They mined $2.7 billion worth of gold, and then Canadians were left with the billion-dollar cleanup.

“These long-term environmental legacies and financial liabilities — the ‘zombies’ that stalk northern mine sites and communities — illustrate the fundamentally unsustainable nature of extractive industries such as mining,” wrote Arn Keeling and John Sandlos in the conclusion to their book, Mining and Communities in Northern Canada.

“[The] environmental liabilities associated with historic abandoned mines provide a potent reminder of the need for strict environmental assessment, public oversight, and regulation of new northern mineral projects in all phases of their operation.”

The void

The Giant Mine site still resembles a mine today in the level of activity on the surface: heavy machinery rumbles up and down the long roads, piles of rock and earth hold tailings water as it’s treated for arsenic and workers mill around in hardhats and reflective vests. The billion-dollar project is ramping up as it awaits a water licence from the territory that would allow the main work to be done.  

The goal, though, is to leave the site looking something like its previous form, before gold was ever discovered or mined there.

The townsite where miners and their families lived is being scraped down to the bedrock to remove contaminated soil, then refilled to create a livable neighbourhood. Even the sediment in the water will be dredged out so that people can swim there safely.

During operation, Giant Mine housed some workers and their families directly on site. Aside from cleaning the soil for arsenic, the residential area will also require removal of asbestos-filled homes; unlike the rest of the site, the townsite will be remediated to residential standards so it can one day be occupied again. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

The residential area is at the end of Baker Creek, which runs through the site. Grayling are already swimming up the creek from Great Slave Lake and spawning there like they used to. It winds past what is currently an open pit, but which will soon be filled in; still, the creek is being rebuilt and diverted to avoid the potential for flooding the mine.

Water could transport the arsenic out of its protective chambers and into the environment, so the precautions are heavy: the engineers are preparing the new banks of Baker Creek for a flood even greater than a one-in-500-year event.

Much of the tailings rock is being stuffed back underground, filling the mine, in order to reinforce its tunnels and prevent a collapse that could prove catastrophic if it affected the chambers holding the arsenic.

One particularly large chamber — the engineers call it “the void” — is proving especially difficult to fill, requiring a thick layer of concrete as a backup to the tailings slurry.

‘The grey and ugly’

But some of the Giant Mine site will never look the same as it did before, and that is deliberate. A working group is trying to figure out ways to warn people about the monster underground.

“If somebody were to stumble across the Giant Mine site in 1,000 years, would he or she know that the site was contaminated with arsenic?” asks a report from the working group.

Next to the 360 shipping containers containing the arsenic-coated remains of the roaster and destined to be stuffed underground, there’s a wide-open plain where the rock will be deliberately left bare, with no soil or vegetation added.

Yellowknives Dene First Nation community members asked for this in consultations, calling it “the grey and ugly.”

Much of the wide-open area to the left of the image will be left bare, with a rock covering meant to convey the inhospitable nature of the place to future generations. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

It’s meant to stand as a marker to future generations — people who may not share a language, culture or semiotic understanding with those of today — that this is not a safe place. That this is somewhere to be feared and avoided.

Another area is intended to warn off future people as well. The tall pipes carrying heat from below the surface to keep the arsenic frozen in place, the thermosyphons, are presumed to be a warning sign themselves, though it’s unclear how they would seem menacing to people who may not have any understanding at all of what they are for.

Even to those who have seen them before, they could be mistaken for the thermosyphons across the North that keep foundations frozen in the melting permafrost.

The designers are still working out how to make the site look sinister, uninviting, and dangerous, informed in part by the design of a nuclear storage facility in New Mexico.

A northern tradition

Giant mine is not alone as a contaminated site left behind for future generations to pay for. The North is riddled with them.

In mid-September I’m part of a small group of reporters arriving by bush plane at the Bullmoose-Ruth site, a complex consisting of several gold mines and exploration sites that were operational in the 1940s through to the 1980s. From the plane, we board a helicopter — the site is so vast that one aircraft gets us to the site while the other gets us around it.

The sprawling site today consists of filled-in mine shafts and deep trenches, scoured-out soil and backcountry landfills.

Like Giant mine, and like hundreds of smaller sites across the North, it was left in a state that posed risks to wildlife, to humans and to the environment.

Fuel drums were left rusting and leaking, holes were left gaping in the ground over 600-foot drops while equipment, vehicles and piles of trash were scattered across the site.

It was a big job in a remote area, requiring new ice roads and camps to be built in the bush.

At the Ruth mine site, the contaminated soil was scraped down to the bedrock and replaced with sand left behind by the last glaciation while three Olympic swimming pools’ worth of soil was treated and buried in a landfill.

The government decided to bury it on site instead of risking further contamination along the ice road; and besides, what do you do with that much hazardous material back in the city?

Messes like this are a holdover from when the world was thought to be big enough to treat this way — when the planet had no limits and the consequences of far-away activities bore no consequence to the folks back home.

Miners could drill holes and leave piles of ground-up toxic waste, tangled steel and even boxes of dynamite behind with no deposit against the cost of cleanup.

They could build roads and camps and have the luxury of believing they would have no lingering effects on the animals whose habitat was being fragmented and opened to new predators.

Finally, when the company went bust, they could walk away, dust off their hands and start digging someplace else.

The Faro Mine was once the world’s largest open-pit lead and zinc mine. The mine’s tailings pond stretches five kilometres along the Rose Creek valley. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

When the owners of the Faro Mine declared bankruptcy in 1998, the company left behind more than 320 million tonnes of waste rock and 70 million tonnes of tailings. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

After nearly 20 years of maintenance and remediation planning, more than $350 million has been spent via the Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan but remediation isn’t expected to actually begin until 2022. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

Adjacent to the mine site, Rose Creek winds through a wetlands ecoystem that feeds the Pelly River. Without remediation the Pelly and Yukon Rivers could become contaminated by toxic metals from the Faro Mine. Photo: Matt Jacques / The Narwhal

It happened at Giant Mine, it happened at Faro mine, it happened at Bullmoose, Colomac, Tundra, Eldorado, and so many more across the vast North that a $2.37 billion cleanup program has been established to deal with it all.

That’s enough money to operate the entire Northwest Territories government — its schools, roads, hospitals and all — for a year and a half.

It’s not that it isn’t needed now, or being spent appropriately (a 2016 audit found the Northern Contaminated Sites Program to be running almost flawlessly) but it’s a cost that never needed to be borne by taxpayers had there been adequate regulations in place.

Despite finishing ahead of schedule and under budget, the cost to clean Bullmoose-Ruth will be more than $20 million by the time the project wraps up. Even then, it will still require monitoring: the dams built to control water flow will need to be checked on and maintained forever.

“The mining industry often invokes the words reclamation, remediation, and restoration as a cornerstone of efforts to paint itself green,” wrote Keeling and Sandlos in a 2013 paper. “But such emphasis on the visual aesthetics of remediated landscapes obscures as much as it reveals about abandoned mines. As important as it may be to repair the uglier side of extensive, open-pit mining operations, in many cases it is the unseen (or more accurately, the unseeable) impacts of mining that pose the gravest long-term threat to ecological and human health.”

As we leave one part of the far-flung site in the helicopter, a government official points out the aircraft window at rusted fuel barrels that were discovered after the cleanup finished.

Two of the three barrels that were discovered just outside the area of the remediation contract after the remediation finished. Photo: Jimmy Thomson / The Narwhal

They, along with other debris that’s still being discovered, will have to be airlifted out. Even the cleaned-up parts of the site bear the markings of a heavily disturbed landscape, cut up and bulldozed.

We take off from a cleared area between the landfill and a wetland water treatment project. The wash from the propellers blows a cloud of dust across a square test area not much larger than an ambitious home garden, where a few seedlings are taking root.

In a new approach to revegetation, the seeds being planted here aren’t brought in from the south, or grown in nurseries; they’re collected from the trees immediately surrounding the patch. Using the most local seeds possible makes sure the plants that will grow there are the right ones for that particular area, and it gives them the best chance to take root and thrive.

Even so, plants grow slowly in the North, stunted by the cold and the dry air and the wind that whips past the nutrient-poor soil.

It will be decades before the shrubs and grasses and trees grow back to cover the bare ground, and much longer before the site looks anything like it did before its short stint as a mine turned it upside down.

If it ever does.

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Even though it was closed decades ago, the Giant Mine on the outskirts of Yellowknife has left a long environmental legacy.

The gold extraction process, which required roasting ores at extremely high temperatures, created a toxic byproduct called arsenic trioxide. For about 55 years (1948-2004), arsenic and other toxic elements were released into the environment, causing widespread contamination of the terrestrial and aquatic ecosystems around Yellowknife.

About 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust is buried underground, and several nearby lakes show arsenic contamination.

Elevated arsenic levels have also been reported in soil, vegetation and fish around Yellowknife, but we knew little about how it has affected the health of the small mammals that live in the area.

Many of these fur-bearing animals are still being trapped for their pelts and for food, so knowing their arsenic levels is also important for human health.

Weak bones

Small mammals can serve as sentinels for environmental contamination. Snowshoe hares (Lepus americanus) live in a relatively small area and eat soil, so they are likely to accumulate higher levels of arsenic and other trace metals from the environment.

Exposure to elevated levels of arsenic can cause damage to the liver and other organs. And cadmium, a toxic metal and another byproduct of the gold extraction process, can replace calcium in the bones, leading to bone deformities and weakness.

In humans, chronic arsenic exposure (usually from water) can lead to changes in skin colour, skin growths and cancers of the skin, lung and internal organs.

When we measured arsenic and cadmium levels in hares living within two kilometres of the Giant Mine and compared them to hares living about 20 kilometres away from Yellowknife, the results were striking.

The arsenic levels in the guts of snowshoe hares living near the Giant Mine were 20-50 times greater than those living away from it. We also saw higher concentrations of arsenic in the organs and nails of the Giant Mine hares.

Cadmium levels were also higher but the difference wasn’t as marked. Hares from both locations had weaker bones and showed signs of osteoporosis, probably due to chronic exposure to cadmium.

Ecological implications

This chronic exposure to elevated levels of arsenic and cadmium may explain why snowshoe hares living near the Giant Mine are in poor health.

Wildlife living in metal contaminated areas in other parts of the world have also shown problems with reproduction, osteoporosis, neurological damage and chronic metabolic disease. But in Canada, it’s the first time we’ve seen small wild mammals with chronic arsenic poisoning.

The high levels of pollutants could compromise the long-term survival of the snowshoe hare and other small mammals in the Yellowknife area.

The high arsenic and cadmium burden in hares could have consequences for other animals that prey on them, such as foxes, wolves or other carnivorous mammals, and for the people who hunt them.

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Space-age pipes loom over me, two-pronged fingers jutting straight up at the sky.

They plunge into the earth under our feet, where, like a steampunk Lovecraftian nightmare, the pipes full of carbon dioxide freeze a quarter-million tonnes of deadly arsenic trioxide dust to keep it dormant in perpetuity.

The size of an office building, the test chamber below is the first, and the smallest, of 15; there’s a long way to go before all of the dust is contained.

This is the future of what was for 60 years the crown jewel of Yellowknife, the economic driver of the North, until it finally closed in 2004.

This is just one part of a billion-dollar cleanup that will take another generation, and, even then, require supervision and maintenance forever lest it break down and poison us again.

This is a 900-hectare maze of dusty tailings ponds, yawning open pits, poisoned water, toxic soil and decaying buildings full of arsenic.

This is Giant Mine.

Photos by Matt Jacques.

A lump in the bay

Yellowknife’s history, and its destiny, has always been tied to one mineral or another, even drawing its name from the copper tools preferred by the Yellowknives Dene who inhabit the region. It’s situated where the slow-moving Yellowknife River drains into Great Slave Lake, almost exactly 1,000 km north of Edmonton.

In the early 1930s, what is now Yellowknife was a backwater compared to the nearby Hudson’s Bay Company trading post at Fort Rae. But a young Dene woman named Mary Fishbone would have encountered plenty of white Canadians as they passed through, prospecting or preaching. When she found a lump of shiny rock in the bay, while she was out foraging on her First Nation’s territory, she gave it to her priest — or, as some versions of the story have it, traded it to an unscrupulous prospector for a stovepipe. Mary Fishbone’s name is forgotten in the history of the mines, except by her descendants, who keep photos of her on their walls and readily tell her story to visitors.

The story is possibly apocryphal; searches in the NWT Archives and the Geological Survey of Canada came up empty, (“there’s a story like this for every find,” an archivist tells me over the phone) though that alone doesn’t mean it’s untrue, and there had been some gold discovered by a prospector near the turn of the century. But regardless of who initially discovered the gold, the ensuing years would be devastating to the Yellowknives Dene.

By 1934, prospectors had arrived and found more gold in the region, opened the Burwash mine across Yellowknife Bay, and things began moving quickly. On the south end of Yellowknife, overlooking Great Slave Lake, Con Mine poured its first gold brick in 1938. The same deposit would soon give rise to three other new mines: north of the city, the Ptarmigan and Tom mines. Right next to Con, the Negus mine operated for 13 years before its neighbour acquired it.

The population swelled, and when men returned from the war in 1944, the extent of the potential development at Giant Mine ramped the excitement up further. Digging through the bedrock for gold, the mines themselves became the bedrock of the city.

But there was one huge catch to all the feverish development, which wouldn’t become obvious until at least one child had died and many more been sickened by the air and water around them.

Giant consequences

The gold found at Giant Mine is microscopic, contained in rocks that need to be physically crushed then heated to extremely high temperatures to free the tiny specks of gold. But there isn’t just gold in the rock — there’s another notable mineral lurking inside, and that’s where the billion-dollar problem began.

Arsenopyrite is a mineral often found alongside gold, silver, lead and other valuable minerals. It’s common across the Yellowknife landscape, folded into the bedrock. In crystalline form, it’s a beautiful silver or white mineral. Worn down, it looks like any other rock. And when it’s crushed, melted and blasted into the sky, the arsenic trioxide dust, as fine as baby powder, is deadly.

The Materials Safety Data Sheet for arsenic trioxide classifies it as a confirmed carcinogen that may cause damage to blood, kidneys, liver, the cardiovascular system and the central nervous system, and cautions, “Keep locked up. Do not ingest. Do not breathe dust. Wear suitable protective clothing. If ingested, seek medical advice immediately.” Until 1958, Giant Mine was pumping as much as 7,400 kg of arsenic trioxide dust into the air every day, and as the mine produced more and more gold, the byproduct floated through the sky and precipitated onto the earth, coating the landscape and poisoning the water.

Yellowknife Bay used to be a prime fishing spot, and its surrounding lands used for hunting, trapping and foraging for berries and medicines like Labrador tea or spruce gum. Baker Creek was reserved for hunting moose and picking the blueberries that carpeted the land. Today, after 70 years of heavy industrial use, the creek is only just starting to recover, with grayling spawning in its water.

In 1951, a toddler died from eating snow.

The toddler was a relative of Elder Muriel Betsina, who today lives in Ndilo, a Yellowknives Dene community across Back Bay from Giant Mine. Though she only arrived in Yellowknife in 1962 after she left residential school, she immediately saw the effect the arsenic was having on the community.

“We got so scared,” Betsina recalls. Children were getting rashes from wearing clothes washed in the same lake water that had always been a clean source for the community.

“‘One day all this arsenic will kill you’ — nobody ever explained that to us,” she says.

On the way out of Ndilo from Betsina’s house, I pass K’alemi Dene School, where VICE News’ Hilary Beaumont reported in December that the soil has been tested at nearly three times the safe exposure limit for arsenic. Children play on a fenced Astroturf field.

Meanwhile, researchers from the University of Ottawa have begun taking fingernail clippings and urine samples from locals to measure how much arsenic remains in the people who live here.

The government has never compensated the Yellowknives Dene for the loss of their land, or the health impacts of the arsenic on their health. A letter the territory sent to the federal government to demand compensation and an apology for the First Nation was met with a simple acknowledgment, but no promises.

By 1960, the mine had drastically cut back its arsenic emissions with the installation of new technologies. But it didn’t stop the gold-smelting process from producing the poison, only from emitting it out the stack. That’s where the 237,000 tonnes of arsenic came from; it was caught, gathered up and air-pumped back underground for safekeeping. That left Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada with a seemingly impossible task: to secure, for at least 100 years, chamber upon chamber of fine deadly dust.

The committee reviewing 56 possible options to store the arsenic trioxide considered freezing the best among them. That’s why, today, the pronged carbon dioxide-filled tubes act to essentially siphon heat out of the dust, day and night, with no power input required. It’s not a final solution, but it’s stable.

“We don’t know what the solution could be,” says Natalie Plato, deputy director of the Giant Mine Remediation Project. “We’ve noticed there’s a fungus growing on one of our chambers, so there’s a fungus that’s thriving in the highly arsenic-ridden environment. So perhaps there’s a superbug that could eat this in place. We don’t know; it’s strictly science-fiction.”

She, like most professionals involved in the Giant Mine cleanup can’t help but roll her eyes a little at the oft-repeated suggestion that this much arsenic trioxide could kill every human on the planet.

“A tanker truck, actually, could kill every person on the planet if you put it in water and everyone drank it,” she says — what’s buried at Giant is much, much more than a tanker truck. It’s just a matter of keeping it in.

Scrubbing water

Plato stops her vehicle at an overlook on our tour of the Giant Mine site. She tells me she arrived here seeking a greater technical challenge, having begun her government career remediating relatively “boring” Cold War-era Distant Early Warning sites across the High Arctic.

Standing between the remains of the roaster — sequestered in 360 shipping containers in neat rows awaiting burial in the mine — and the cracked bed of a contaminated tailings pond, it’s clear that challenge is something in abundant supply at Giant Mine. The cleanup effort encompasses water treatment, deconstruction of 100 contaminated buildings, extensive underground operations and, of course, freezing an unimaginable quantity of arsenic trioxide — all within a few kilometres of a major city.

Workers will cover the tailings ponds with sheeting and then with gravel, instead of replanting them with grasses and trees. This is at the request of the Yellowknives Dene, Plato says; the First Nation didn’t want the remnants of the toxic ponds to look inviting to future wildlife or foragers.

While that work is happening, the current challenge is water. Between 100 and 400 million litres of water are pumped up from 230 metres below ground each year, and it all needs to be treated to remove the arsenic before it can be discharged into Baker Creek, which empties into Great Slave Lake. For now, the water just needs to meet industrial levels of arsenic, but soon, the water will need to be cleaned to a much higher standard. That will require an entirely new treatment plant, all for a mine that went out of operation nearly 15 years ago.

“We need to up our game,” she explains, if the water is to be treated to the point of being drinkable.

The water licence today is the same as it was when the mine was operational. It doesn’t allow for a landfill on the site (and, as Plato explains, at least some of the garbage generated on site would have been dumped in the tailings ponds) so for now, equipment, decaying buildings, cables  mine carts and other detritus litters the ground.

Underground, it’s even worse; chambers that the various owners should have backfilled as the mining moved around remain empty, a stability hazard for the mass of toxic dust waiting to be kicked up by a collapse. Now the workers are mixing old tailings with cement to reinforce the gaping holes underground.

The federal government recently awarded U.S. contractor Parsons Inc. a $32 million contract to monitor the site for the next two years while it works out the final cost to actually finish the cleanup. It’s expected to be up to $900 million; $356 million has already been spent just warding off catastrophe.

Lessons not learned

There’s a model the size of a large coffee table inside an innocuous storefront on Yellowknife’s main drag.

The storefront is the office of the Giant Mine Oversight Board, an independent body set up in 2015 to act as a watchdog, observing the process of remediating the mine from start to finish. The model depicts the underground extent of both the Giant and Con mines, which bookend the city to the north and south, respectively. The two mines combined look like they make up easily more road underground than there is in the city itself — in the case of Con Mine, stretching under Yellowknife’s roads, schools and homes.

The aboveground impacts of the Giant, Negus and Con mines extend further than the eye can see as well. Prevailing easterly winds blew the arsenic dust across the landscape to the west of the site, creating a cone of contamination that only fades 25 kilometres away from the former roaster. That left the landscape around Yellowknife, a Swiss cheese pattern of lakes and ponds, burdened with high levels of arsenic. Even on Frame Lake — which, in the middle of the city, borders the legislature, City Hall, welcome centre, two parks, museum and swimming pool — signs prohibit fishing, swimming and drinking the water, and the same goes for most of the lakes in and around the city.

There is currently no plan to clean all of them up. Neither the city, federal, nor provincial government has yet taken responsibility for contamination outside of the actual mine site, and the oversight board has criticized the remediation project in its first two reports for failing to figure that out.

Giant Mine may not be the last of its kind. The mine became the taxpayers’ problem when its final owner, Royal Oak Mines, went bankrupt. That has happened again and again, with remediation costs for mines like the Jericho, Colomac and Terra mines all falling on taxpayers.

“It’s a troubling pattern and it hasn’t been fixed,” MLA Kevin O’Reilly told The Narwhal. “In fact, we continue to see mines that go down without adequate financial security [to pay for cleanup].”

The result of decades of loose requirements for upfront security is the Northern Contaminated Sites Program, a federally funded program that as of 2014 is responsible for $2.369 billion worth of cleanup projects — mostly mines that have gone bust as their owners walked away. The Giant and Faro mines occupy the bulk of that funding.

Today in the Northwest Territories, mining and oil and gas remain by far the single largest industry, though diamonds have taken over for gold. The oil and gas industry is sputtering out; in Norman Wells, the only major oil play in the territory, Imperial Oil is winding down. The day I visit Giant Mine, Imperial representatives are also visiting, to get tips on how they can clean up their own sites as they pack up for good.

Now there are rumblings of a new mine: the TerraX City Gold project, which has already staked the last remaining claims surrounding the city, even including islands in Great Slave Lake. It would dive deep into the area’s “greenstone belt” in search of the same plentiful gold that made Giant so giant.

At the same time, the government is developing new legislation to govern mining. That legislation, in its current form, would have the same department that advocates for mining also be responsible for regulating it.

“That’s a conflict of interest,” says O’Reilly. “You can’t have the promoter being the regulator.”

One day about three years ago, Muriel Betsina looked out across Back Bay and saw a black cloud of dust moving across the water. Dust sensors located around the site today give reassuringly low readings of dangerous chemicals, but, terrified by her years of living in the shadow of the mine, she later went out and scrubbed down her entire house and driveway.

The arsenic dust hasn’t just coated the landscape; it still swirls around in the minds of the people who remember babies with full body rashes, fish with lesions on their livers and Labrador tea pots ringed with mysterious chemicals.

Sitting in her home, in full view of the long overdue cleanup, she doesn’t mince words.

“We’ll never recover.”

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Tony Brumell is a poet, a fisherman and a former miner, happily retired in Kamloops B.C. He’s the kind of man that doesn’t have an email address or a laptop. He drives a red pick-up truck with a wooden canoe strapped to the top—ready to cut into the lake at a moment’s notice. Tony is the first to point out that he shouldn't have to meet with us, that his time should be spent canoeing Jacko Lake and dreaming up new lyrical ideas. Instead he volunteers his time to take anyone who’ll listen on environmental tours of the proposed site for KGHM Ajax open-pit gold and copper mine.

It was a grey day in August—a luxury in the Okanagan where mid-summer temperatures can reach upwards of 40˚C—when we, a group of writers and researchers from DeSmog Canada, met with Tony and some members of local preservation organizations. Tony took us on his tour of the rolling hills and glassy lakes that could soon be replaced with a dusty open-pit mine and tailings storage piles.

As a miner and an environmental activist, Tony understands the scale and implications of the project very well. Throughout his career, he’s been involved in everything from blasting, scaling, slope stabilization to surveying. He knows exactly what a mine like Ajax will mean for Kamloops and he is extremely worried.

Tony and a group of folks from the Kamloops Area Preservation Association (KAPA) and Kamloops Concerned Citizens (KCC) met us fully prepared, with fruits from their gardens and chairs to sit on while they confessed their concerns about the project.

Dianne Kerr, a member of the KCC and KAPA, is a former City Councillor, Chair of the Economic Development Committee, and member of the City Planning Commission. She told DeSmog that she thinks the mine “[is] too big and too close.”

Kerr and KCC co-member, Sandra Abraham, helped to produce the informational video, “Is This The Future of Kamloops?” which outlines the many dangers for Kamloops residents with regards to mining developments.  

It has been the goal of Dianne and these organizations to inform the citizens of Kamloops of the disaster that could be at their doorsteps. KAPA and KCC are concerned that residents aren't taking the threat seriously enough. Since Kamloops has an extensive history of mining and resource-based developments, KAPA and KCC fear that may have set a precedent with residents and politicians that mining is generally benign.

Tony tells us the local mining projects of the past were “nothing of any significant size compared to the proposed KGHM pit." He adds that despite the small scale of previous mining activities, the area is only just beginning to recover the migration of wildlife that once flourished in these lakes and hills. A similar recovery from such a large project as Ajax isn't likely, says Tony.

“This mine will do things to this part of the country that will alter it forever. All of this habitat and recreational area will be gone.”

The Ajax project is much larger than anything ever proposed in Kamloops. While on our tour, Tony asked us to turn and look at Sugarloaf Mountain, the tallest peak in sight, roughly 1640 feet away.

“That is roughly the top of the waste rock storage. It’s going to be 550 feet high… it’s going to be 7000 feet from the eastern edge [which is] about 100 feet from the Coquihalla Highway.”

“And that’s not the big deal” he continued. “This thing is going to be 10,000 feet long. Do you know how long the Bennett Dam is? About 7000 feet—a billion cubic metres of tailings material.”

According to the current plans, KGHM plans to construct two massive waste rock dumps. There is concern that the massive weight from rock and tailings facilities and vast amounts of water for dust control could cause stability problems in the area caused by falling water tables.

Ajax is a low-grade copper mine, expected to be a 60,000 tone-a-day operation with a waste rock to ore ratio of 2.4-1. Which means for every tone that is removed, 2.4 tones will be removed as waste rock.  

Strategic ore stockpiles and waste rock storage piles will be anywhere from 310-725 metres away from the city and could reach as high as skyscrapers. The tailings pile would be loaded with the toxic chemicals used in the extraction process, which could wash away into aquifers and lakes via rainwater, snow, and road treatment. 

The open pit and the processing plant will require KGHM to blast into 20 to 25 square kilometres around the western perimeter of town. The nearest construction site will be a mere 1.25 km away from housing in the Aberdeen neighbourhood and the Pacific Way Elementary School.

KGHM told DeSmog that they are unconcerned about the proximity to the city. "There are many examples of open-pit mines in close proximity to communities and neighbourhoods – much closer even than the proposed Ajax Project. For example, our mine in Nevada is directly adjacent to a residential area." 

However, revised plans for the Ajax project have placed the construction somewhat further away from residential zones. When asked about these reconsiderations, they told DeSmog: "The company has listened to area residents and taken an opportunity to reconfigure the project to lessen their concerns."

Shown Below: KGHM Robinson Mine, Ely, NV.

According to the Ajax Feasibility Study done by Abacus Mining and Exploration Corp, “the project is expected to generate Criteria Air Contaminants (CACs) (particulate matter and atmospheric emissions) from surface disturbance and fossil fuel combustion during construction, operations, decommissioning and reclamation of the project. Fugitive dust is expected to be the major emission relevant to air quality and the primary concern for nearby residents.”  

Initial reports by the Ministry of Energy and Mines Responsible for Core Review have found that the mine is set to blast into rock containing arsenic, lead, aluminum, chromium, uranium, manganese, and strontium.

According to the Airshed Plan 2012, The City of Kamloops said, “there is no safe level of particulate matter.” However, the arid windy Okanagan climate may make dust containing these known carcinogens impossible to avoid.

Kamloops is in a valley susceptible to inversion, which can block the vertical movement of air, making particulate matter and diesel emissions a dangerous threat to local air quality.[view:in_this_series=block_1]

When asked if the Okanagan climate would be taken into consideration in their environmental assessments, KGHM told DeSmog that "[t]he consultants studying dustfall and air quality will use a complex computer model to predict the effects of mine operations. The model incorporates scores of input and factors three years of local weather data. Results are not yet complete. The studies are underway." 

Kerr says that KAPA and the KCC have asked for more extensive environmental assessments from the provincial and federal governments but so far they’ve received only evasive, uninformative replies. 

KGHM told DeSmog: "all the studies are being conducted by independent engineering consultants. Many of the studies will also be peer-reviewed. The final say on the adequacy of the studies rests with the provincial and federal governments, either of which could seek more information or question the work done."

KGHM expects to submit their application for an environmental permit by early 2015.

Until then, Tony Brumell will be offering his time to give tours of Jacko Lake, Inks Lake and Sugarloaf Mountain, always keeping a look out for the rare burrowing owl. There's no better way to learn exactly what's at stake. 

*images used with permission of KAPA and wiki.

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