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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Long-held perceptions of Canada as a country with strict environmental standards and B.C. as a province that values natural beauty are taking a near-fatal beating in Southeast Alaska, where many now regard Canadians as bad neighbours who are unilaterally making decisions that could threaten the region’s two major economic drivers.

Fishing and tourism — each billion-dollar industries — are the lifeblood of Southeast Alaska, where glaciers sweep down into rivers home to five species of wild salmon and massive snow-covered peaks tower over fertile wetlands.

Tourism accounts for 10,900 jobs in the Alaska Panhandle and salmon fishing employs 7,300 people.

Air and water are the only ways into communities such as Juneau, the state capital, and almost seven million hectares, or three-quarters of Southeast Alaska, are within the Tongass National Forest, where industrial activity is limited.

But, upstream, in northwest B.C., there is a new-style gold rush with an unprecedented number of applications for open-pit gold and copper mines, some made viable by construction of the Northwest Transmission Line and all requiring road access.

Alaskan politicians, tribes, fishing organizations and environmental groups have come together in a rare show of unity to condemn B.C.’s push to approve mines close to major transboundary salmon rivers, such as the Stikine, Taku and Unuk, which run from B.C. into Alaska. Tensions are running so high the groups are asking the International Joint Commission, designed to resolve Canada/U.S. water problems, to step in.

Canada is increasingly viewed as a “bad actor,” whose record — most recently illustrated by the Mount Polley mine tailings dam collapse — shows that the province’s environmental regulations and oversight is not strong enough to protect downstream communities.

“It’s the new wild west,” said Heather Hardcastle, a commercial fisherman and co-ordinator of Salmon Beyond Borders, pointing out that, even though Alaska has nothing to gain and everything to lose, Alaskans are being denied meaningful input into mine decisions.

10 Advanced Mining Projects in Northwestern B.C.

The new mines include Imperial Metals’ Red Chris, a copper and gold mine operated by the same company that owns Mount Polley, and Seabridge Gold’s massive KSM (Kerr-Sulpherets-Mitchell) mine, 30 kilometres from the U.S border and Misty Fjords National Monument, which will open up mining of the largest undeveloped gold reserve in the world. KSM has provincial and federal environmental assessment approval and is waiting for permits.

According to B.C.’s Ministry of Energy and Mines there are 10 advanced projects in the northwest corner of B.C. and numerous others in exploration phases.

Graphic: Salmon Beyond Borders

They include Kitsault (under construction), Silvertip (provincial permit granted in June), Tulsequah Chief (construction started, but project delayed), Brucejack (Mines Act permit application under review), Kutcho and Schaft Creek (both in the environmental assessment pre-application stage).

In comparison, there are only five operating mines in Alaska, of which two are in Southeast Alaska and one of which uses dry stack tailings, the method of dealing with acid-generating mine waste favoured by the expert panel that investigated the Mount Polley dam collapse.

The Canadian system appears to aim “to get to yes fast,” without consideration of other values when it comes to resource extraction, said Jev Shelton, a commercial fisherman and former member of the Pacific Salmon Commission, the joint Canadian/U.S. regulatory body designed to protect salmon stocks.

“It is certainly triggering a fair bit of anger,” Shelton said.

B.C. Moving 'Full Speed Ahead'

The pace and scale of development is huge, said Chris Zimmer of Rivers Without Borders.

“B.C. is going full speed ahead without any brakes. It looks as if they’re trying to move as fast as they can before Alaska puts up hurdles.”

There is growing indignation that B.C. is not listening to Alaskan concerns and that additional input, promised in May after Energy and Mines Minister Bill Bennett met with Alaska’s Lieutenant Governor Byron Mallott, amounts to little more than window-dressing.

“We were a bit stunned by Bill Bennett giving us the table scraps and saying Alaska can come in at the final stages of permitting — they’re saying we will involve you when the final decision has been made to build the mine,” Zimmer said.

Alaskan Concerns Ignored

Gillnetter and fisheries consultant Lindsey Bloom agrees that Alaskan questions are being ignored.

“Since I started working on this issue, the disregard of Canadian officials towards us is concerning,” she said.

While Mallott and Bennett were meeting in B.C., a group of Alaskan tribal leaders, fishing industry representatives and environmental advocates met with high-level provincial government staff.

However, it was an exercise in frustration because of the lack of answers or acknowledgement of downstream concerns, according to several people who attended the meeting.

“We tried to explain we don’t want more say in the permitting process, we want something to put us on an equal footing with B.C.,” Hardcastle said.

B.C. government staff appeared to think their task was to explain the process instead of listening to concerns and suggestions, said several members of the Alaskan delegation.

Mallott, who is leading an Alaskan transboundary waters working group, said in an interview with DeSmog Canada, that, during their meeting, Bennett was amenable to the notion of more Alaskan involvement and he has been invited to Alaska to continue the conversation.

Staff who have looked at B.C.’s technical permitting and assessment of mines believe the rules in B.C. and Alaska are generally equivalent, said Mallott.

“But there are significant differences. Whether the entire range of environmental assessment and permitting is robust enough to protect both B.C. and U.S. and Alaskan interests is still something we all need to be made more comfortable with,” he said.

“We would want Alaskan officials at the table when decisions are made in such areas of permitting that it is possible that catastrophic events could take place.”

Mount Polley Tailings Dam Collapse Stokes Fears Downstream

The pace of development and the cumulative impacts of the mines in B.C. are alarming, but it is the failures that haunt Alaskans.

The image of 24-million cubic metres of mine tailings and waste water sweeping down from the Mount Polley tailings dam is etched into memories, but there are others such as the constant irritant of the ongoing acid drainage from the Tulsequah Chief mine.

“It underlines the Canadian government’s lack of commitment to what happens in the river,” said commercial fisherman Len (Pete) Peterson.

The copper and gold mine, near the confluence of the Tulsequah and Taku Rivers, has been leaking acid since Cominco stopped mining in 1957. Since 1989, there have been numerous remediation and pollution abatement orders from the B.C. government, but the leakage continues.

Earlier this year the province gave Chieftain Metals Corp., the latest owner, permission to re-open the mine and the company is currently trying to obtain financing. However, hurdles include opposition from the Taku River Tlingit First Nation. In an attempt to circumvent the problem, the company is proposing a barging system, instead of an access road, but that is likely to be a problem for Alaskan gillnetters.

At Johnny Mountain, close to the Iskut River, operations ceased in 1993 and the company attempted to burn and bury equipment. Although there has been some soil remediation, what threat remains of acid rock drainage from the underground operation is unclear.

“They shoved (the equipment) into the mountain and blew it up,” said miner Joe Bradley, who recently flew over the area.

The test of B.C.’s process is how it is carried out and the “real world” results, Zimmer said.

“Alaska understands the B.C. process. Where has it gotten us? Mount Polley disaster, Tulsequah Chief and five decades of acid mine drainage, renewed talk of Taku River barging, a total lack of involvement on the evaluation of the Red Chris mine, a denial of Alaska’s request for a KSM panel review,” Zimmer said.

Photo: Chris Zimmer

The Narwhal’s reporters are telling environment stories you won’t read about anywhere else. Stay in the loop by signing up for our free weekly dose of independent journalism.