We live in an era — the Anthropocene — where humans and societies are reshaping and changing ecosystems. Pollution, human-made climate change and overfishing have all altered marine life and ocean food webs.

Increasing ocean temperatures are amplifying the accumulation of neurotoxic contaminants such as organic mercury (methylmercury) in some marine life. This especially affects top predators including marine mammals such as fish-eating killer whales that strongly rely on large fish as seafood for energy.

Now the combination of mercury pollution, climate change and overfishing are conspiring together to further contaminate marine life and food webs. This has obvious implications for ecosystems and the ocean, but also for public health. The risk of consuming mercury-contaminated fish and seafood is growing with climate change.

Mercury rising

Regulations have lowered global mercury emissions from human-made sources, such as coal-fired power plants, between 1990 and 2010, but mercury is still present in the marine environment.

Methylmercury builds up in the muscle tissue of fish across the food web, “bioaccumulating” in larger and high trophic level predators. This is why larger pelagic fish (for example, tuna, marlins, billfishes and sharks) — those that eat a lot of fish — are in general considered riskier to eat than smaller ones.

Seared tuna. Photo: Taylor Grote / Unsplash

In humans, mercury can lead to neurological disorders. Children who are exposed to mercury during fetal development and childhood have a greater risk of poor performance on tests that measure attention, IQ, fine motor function and language.

Climate change can amplify the accumulation of methylmercury in fish and marine mammals at the top of their food webs due to changes in the entry and fate of mercury in the ocean and the composition and structure of these marine food webs. A warmer and more acidic ocean may increase the amount of methylmercury that enters the food web.

Overfishing can also exacerbate the mercury levels in some fish species. Pacific salmon, squid and forage fish, as well as Atlantic bluefin tuna and Atlantic cod and other fish species are susceptible to increases in methylmercury due to rising ocean temperatures.

Our modelling research work shows that Chinook salmon, the largest Pacific salmon species and main prey of endangered southern resident killer whales, is projected to be exposed to high methylmercury accumulation due to changes in its prey that are driven by climate change.

Under a worst-case climate-change scenario, where greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase and global temperatures reach between 2.6C and 4.8C by 2100, Chinook salmon will see a 10 per cent increase in methylmercury. But under a best-case scenario, where emissions are low and global temperature rise is in the order of 0.3C to 1.7C at the end of the century, mercury levels would increase by only one per cent.

For forage fish, such as Pacific sardine, anchovy and Pacific herring, which are key ecological and commercial species in the Pacific Rim ecosystem, the methylmercury increase is projected to be 14 per cent under the influence of high emissions and three per cent under low emissions. Here again, this increase is driven by dietary shifts and changes in the food web composition due to warmer oceans.

A school of sardines. Photo: Klaus Stiefel / Flickr

Fishing down the food web

Atlantic cod stocks were over-exploited along the northeastern coast of Canada during the last century. Chinook salmon stocks from the northeastern Pacific Ocean are also dwindling because of natural factors and environmental stressors, including predation, habitat loss, warming oceans and fishing. The combination of these pressures can make Pacific salmon more susceptible to methylmercury bioaccumulation.

When one species is overfished, fishing fleets expand and adjust their targets, often fishing down the marine food webs. The cascading effects lead to changes in prey and foodweb composition for the remaining species, likely altering the transfer of organic contaminants such as persistent organic pollutants and methylmercury in top predators.

Aquacalypse now: the end of fish

When fish are removed from the food web, larger fish and top predators may be forced to consume more or different prey, or smaller fish than they usually do. These fish can be highly contaminated with mercury.

The combination of climate change and overfishing are further shifting the composition of fish in the ocean and where they are found. They are also altering the way these species are exposed to pollutants, increasing levels of methylmercury in Atlantic cod and Atlantic blue fin tuna — fish that are often eaten by humans.

Protecting health and the planet

Based on this evidence, the public health community should revisit and revise fish consumption guidelines for those who are most likely to be exposed to mercury (coastal communities) or experience negative effects (pregnant women, infants and children).

Our simulations show that the projected methylmercury concentrations in forage fish and Chinook salmon will surpass Canada’s mercury consumption limits this century, as well as the consumption advisory level issued by the World Health Organization.

In our human-dominated world, it is imperative that we consume fish and shellfish that come from sustainable fisheries and make efforts to reduce ocean pollution. International and national environmental policies, such as the UN Sustainable Development Goal to conserve and sustainably use the oceans, marine resources and fisheries (SDG 14) and the Paris Climate Agreement, can conserve marine species and protect our blue planet for generations to come.

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This is part two of a three-part, reader-funded series on the Muskrat Falls dam inquiry.

Marjorie Flowers grew up in the Labrador community of Rigolet on the shores of Lake Melville, eating nutrient-rich Inuit foods like brook trout and seal. Traditional foods still form the backbone of her extended family’s diet, as they do for thousands of Inuit who hunt seal each April and catch salmon in June.

Even if Flowers wanted to buy all her food from local grocery stores, “the price of food here in Goose Bay is just outrageous,” she said. “We’re paying $30 for a small chicken.” A medium-sized cabbage costs $4 or $5, while a package of cheddar cheese fetches $18.

“Half the people here can’t afford to buy from the stores,” Flowers told The Narwhal. “We’ve depended on that food for decades and centuries as a way of life.”

But this spring will be the last that Flowers and her daughter, who is five months pregnant, consume country food from the Lake Melville area without fear of health impacts from methylmercury, a neurotoxin so dangerous the World Health Organization ranks it among the top ten chemicals of public health concern.

In the next year, when the Muskrat Falls hydro dam on Labrador’s lower Churchill River floods an area twice the size of the city of Victoria, methylmercury will immediately start to contaminate the food chain as microbes feed on inorganic carbon stored in flooded soils and vegetation, setting off a sequence of events.

Methylmercury impacts of hydro dams

“It’s widely known that hydroelectric development has a methylmercury impact,” said Ryan Calder, a Duke University postdoctoral associate and expert on the methylmercury impacts of hydroelectric development. “That is beyond question at this point.”

When large hydro dams flood river valleys and forests, microbes convert inorganic mercury — found in soils worldwide in greatly increased levels due to coal-fired power plants and other industrial activities — into methylmercury, the type of mercury of greatest concern for human health.

Most human exposure to methylmercury comes from eating fish, although marine mammals like seals and other traditional foods can also carry high levels.

“This is what our body consists of — our cellular make-up is fish and seals and the wild birds that come into the rivers,” Flowers said.

Dane Shiwak, 8, removes his gloves to absorb the warmth from the breast of a ptarmigan that he shot with his father Martin while on the land in Rigolet in northern Labrador. Martin Shiwak, an experienced Inuit trapper and hunter, tries to impress upon his children the importance of understanding how to live off the land on Labrador’s rugged northern coast. Photo: Darren Calabrese

“It’s all the other seafood and wildlife, too, that we depend on in Lake Melville. It’s the smelts, it’s the trout, it’s the shellfish, it’s all the fur-bearing animals in the area that depend on the seafood. And the seals in the spring. Right now, it’s spring hunting for seals. It’s not an industrial seal hunt here, it’s for sustenance.”

Mercury impacts extend far beyond area considered in environmental assessment: Harvard study

Lake Melville, a brackish subarctic estuary downstream from the Muskrat Falls dam, was not included in an environmental assessment conducted by Nalcor, the province’s publicly owned energy corporation.

Nalcor said it did not study Lake Melville — designated an “ecologically and biologically significant area” by the Canadian Science Advisory Secretariat — because it predicted that the Muskrat Falls dam would have no measurable impacts on the estuary, a traditional Inuit hunting and fishing ground.  

But that decision didn’t sit well with Flowers and other Inuit.

In 2014, the Nunatsiavut government, which represents the Inuit Land Claims Area, commissioned a scientific study of the impacts of methylmercury from the Muskrat Falls dam. Calder, a civil engineer and PhD student at Harvard University’s School of Public Health at the time, was one of a half-dozen American and Canadian scientists who worked on the peer-reviewed research project, led by Harvard.

There was no reason for Nalcor to cut off the Muskrat Falls dam environmental assessment study area at the boundary of Lake Melville, Calder told The Narwhal.

“There’s no scientific basis to say that there’s no impacts. There’s all kinds of data from Quebec and Brazil that show that in many cases downstream impacts are greater than from reservoirs … the methylmercury comes from the bottom of the reservoir and what comes out of the dam is disproportionately the methylmercury-rich bottom waters.”

“A lot of data from Quebec over the past 40 years has shown very clearly that when you dam a river over the next few years the mercury levels in the fish increase.”

A Harvard-based study found methymercury impacts extend far beyond the region assessed in Nalcor’s environmental assessment. Source: Nunatsiavut Government / Harvard. Map: Dezine Studio / The Narwhal

From Minimata to Grassy Narrows: the rise of methylmercury contamination

Methylmercury surfaced as a global concern in the 1950s, when four people from the Japanese coastal city of Minamata were admitted to hospital with mysterious neurological diseases characterized by general muscle weakness and damage to hearing, speech and vision.

Eventually 900 people in Minamata died and several thousand more were afflicted with serious and, in many cases, permanent symptoms that also included kidney, lung and skin ailments.

The culprit turned out to be methylmercury in waste water discharge from a chemical plant. The mercury had quickly travelled up the food chain as Minamata residents consumed their traditional diet rich in local fish and shellfish.

Two decades later, methylmercury contamination made headlines in Canada when residents of the Grassy Narrows First Nation in northern Ontario were poisoned after eating fish from the English-Wabagoon river system, tainted by a mill that dumped industrial effluent containing methylmercury into the water.

Residents of Grassy Narrows still suffer from a host of chronic health problems, including language and speech disorders and vision troubles.

The Muskrat Falls study experimentally flooded soils from the future reservoir area, showing a spike in methylmercury concentrations within 72 hours, and a 14-fold increase in methylmercury concentrations within 120 hours, with elevated levels expected to last decades.

Inuit reliance on traditional foods

The study found that human exposure to methylmercury could increase by up to 1,500 per cent because of the Muskrat Falls dam. Locally caught wildlife represents a large fraction of food consumed by Inuit living around Lake Melville, constituting 70 per cent of their future exposure to mercury, according to the study, which noted that country foods are at the heart of Inuit health, well-being and culture.

Those country foods carry significant nutritional benefits, according to researchers. On days that country food is consumed Inuit diets have significantly less fat, carbohydrates and sugar and more protein and essential micronutrients such as vitamins, riboflavin and iron.

Because environmental systems are hugely complex, no one really knows what the impact will be until impoundment, Calder said, so scientists used environmental models to characterize the likely range of impacts on both the environment and human health.

They developed estimates for the impact the Muskrat Falls dam would have on methylmercury levels in the river and Lake Melville and connected those estimates with a dietary study to understand impacts on human exposures. Then they assessed those increases in the context of the health benefits of eating foods like fish.

“On the one hand methylmercury is bad. You don’t want to increase exposure to methylmercury. But, on the other hand, fish and seal and other nutritional foods are very nutritious,” Calder said.

“We didn’t find anything to suggest that people are going to drop dead or face acute medical distress as a result of the increases. Grassy Narrows is a whole other magnitude of risk.”

Among other predicted outcomes for Muskrat Falls, researchers found “some risk of delayed neurodevelopment of children born to mothers with elevated exposures.” IQs in the next generation would be reduced, “fractions of an IQ point, on average,” according to Calder.

Increased exposures to methylmercury could also lead to a higher risk of heart disease and other health impacts, Calder said.

Derrick Pottle, an experienced Inuk trapper and hunter whose diet is 95 per cent sourced locally, carries sealskin boots and a caribou jacket from the loft of his shed while preparing for a hunting trip in Rigolet. Pottle’s diet of wild game, salmon, berries, trout and seal would have been similar to his ancestors living in Hamilton Inlet roughly 8,000 years ago. Photo: Darren Calabrese

Canada’s guidelines for human consumption of methylmercury are weaker than those in the U.S.

Under the Canadian guidelines, the Harvard study found that more than 200 Inuit will potentially exceed health guidelines for methylmercury ingestion if the future reservoir area is partly cleared of trees and brush. Under U.S. guidelines, that number rises to more than 400 individuals under a high methylmercury scenario.

Calder’s modelling drilled down into questions like whether or not eating less trout would be a good decision or a bad decision given the health benefits of consuming it and the alternative foods available. One of those alternative foods is Atlantic salmon, which will have much lower mercury levels because they spend most of their life at sea.

Calder said there is room within the traditional diet to adapt and eat more species that are lower in mercury to counterbalance mercury increases in other food such as seal.  

“We shouldn’t tell people to be afraid of local food … If you’re worried about mercury and instead of eating trout you eat Doritos, that’s not a health protective response. You’re better off eating more mercury.”

‘A way of life that has existed for centuries’

But that’s of little solace to Flowers, who says she is “not comfortable” at the thought of her pregnant daughter and future grandchild eating traditional foods tainted with methylmercury. She views the Muskrat Falls dam as one more serious threat to the long-term survival of Inuit culture, with its deep connection to the land.

“It infuriates me,” said Flowers. “It really does make me so mad that there’s a group of people, most of them Aboriginal, that have concerns about a way of life that has existed for centuries. And we can’t even be heard. We’re frustrated beyond frustrated.”

In an attempt to draw attention to the impacts of the Muskrat Falls dam, Flowers and 60 others, including Indigenous elders, have blocked the gates to the project and engaged in other acts of civil disobedience. Flowers said she’s been arrested so many times that she’s lost track of the charges against her, which include extortion.

In 2017, Flowers refused to sign a document saying she would stay away from the Muskrat Falls gates where protests were taking place.

” … all I’m doing is standing up for the rights of my people and a way of life that originated here first.”

“That’s when they incarcerated me. The took me to a jail cell down here in Goose Bay and then half an hour later I was on a flight to St. John’s and put in [Her Majesty’s] men’s penitentiary for 10 days.”

After Flowers was flown back to Labrador, she was placed under house arrest for 29 more days.  

“I’m the one being punished and being made to look like an irrational bad person when all I’m doing is standing up for the rights of my people and a way of life that originated here first,” she said.

“We were the first people here. And now we’re being trampled on and silenced by this colonial system that we can’t win against.”

Escalating protests led the Newfoundland government to strike an independent expert advisory committee to review science and traditional knowledge and examine ways to reduce methylmercury contamination from the Muskrat Falls dam.

While Nalcor accepted the committee’s recommendations about aquatic program monitoring and methylmercury modelling and acted on them, at least in part, it has ignored other important recommendations, according to Rodd Laing, director of environment for the Nunatsiavut government.

Those include a recommendation that Nalcor undertake targeted removal of soil — the most immediate contributor to a spike in methylmercury — and capping of wetlands prior to flooding in order to minimize contamination of local food sources.

Nalcor has also ignored three out of four recommendations made by the Nunatsiavut government as part of its Make Muskrat Right campaign, including to clear all trees, vegetation and soil from the future reservoir area.

Removing soil and clearing all the trees and brush would add to the cost of the hugely over-budget $12.7 billion project, now the focus of a two-year provincial inquiry.

Chief financial officer Derrick Sturge of Nalcor Energy leaves the Muskrat Falls inquiry in St. John’s, N.L., on March 27, 2019. Photo: Paul Daly / The Narwhal

“There’s also a huge cost to Indigenous peoples if the level of mitigation is not appropriate for this project,” Laing said in an interview.

“Based on the science and the modelling that’s been done, this it the one chance you have to mitigate the impounding of the reservoir. As soon as you put water on that you’ve lost the opportunity to mitigate any of these methylmercury impacts.”

Nalcor has already started to bring up the reservoir level, aiming for the full 39-metre height later this year — about the size of a 13-storey building — and for full power next year.

“The methylmercury is accumulating as we speak,” Flowers said.

In a statement emailed to The Narwhal, Nalcor said it has put many resources into understanding changes in methylmercury levels “and we remain committed to continuing this in the future to ensure the health and safety of those living in the Muskrat Falls project area.”   

Nalcor said its methylmercury monitoring plan will track changes in methylmercury concentrations in water and sediment at 11 locations along the lower Churchill River, from Grizzle Rapids to Rigolet, following increases in the water levels with the creation of the Muskrat Falls reservoir.

To date, concentrations of methylmercury measured have “generally remained low,” Nalcor said, noting “a couple of slight increases in methylmercury” that do not pertain to the downstream area around Goose Bay and Lake Melville.

“Based on all of the information and data collected to date, the increase in methylmercury in fish predicted would result in an extremely low chance of risk to human health from eating fish from Goose Bay or Lake Melville at peak levels following raising the water levels to full height,” Nalcor stated.

“Based on these predictions, local residents would continue their land and resource use, including consuming a healthy, traditional diet.”

That statement is echoed by BC Hydro, which says people will be able to continue consuming bull trout and other fish species once the Site C dam floods 128 kilometres of the Peace River and its tributaries, putting them under up to 15 stories of water.

“. . . fish mercury levels in the reservoir will increase for a time, but the increase is predicted to be sufficiently low that it will not create risks to fish, wildlife or human health,” says a 2018 BC Hydro fact sheet on Site C and methylmercury, which points out that fish will be tested for methylmercury contamination after flooding.

BC Hydro bases its findings on a 2012 study of methylmercury it commissioned. There has been no independent review of Site C’s methylmercury impacts on human health and the environment.

The Muskrat Falls dam under construction in April 2018. Photo: Nalcor Energy

‘Time wasted’

Memorial University scientist Trevor Bell called the lack of action to reduce the impacts of Muskrat Falls mercury contamination “time wasted.”

“Nothing has really happened since the fall of 2017,” said Bell, a member of the science advisory committee that formed part of the independent expert advisory committee.

“One of the things the engineers have said is that, in order to [carry out] some of the recommendations of the advisory committee, time is a critical issue. The government has let time drain away to some degree.”

Bell said the “wait and see” approach to see if methylmercury levels are elevated above safe guidelines isn’t good enough, given that available science suggests there will be a health impact on Inuit living downstream of Muskrat Falls.

“Here we should be doing everything we can to limit increased methylmercury in the system,” Bell said in an interview. That includes reducing the amount of soil with organic carbon in the system and covering up wetlands where organic carbon may be exposed to flooded water, he said.

The Inuit community of Rigolet. Photo:Darren Calabrese

Failing to take every measure possible to limit mercury contamination of traditional Indigenous food sources in Nunatsiavut results in a “morally unacceptable harm” imposed without adequate consideration of Inuit human rights, Bell said.

“It affects Indigenous rights to basically impose food advisories on them because of elevated methylmercury.”

These rights are protected by the Labrador Inuit Lands Claims Agreement, the Canadian Constitution and the UN Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples.

In February, Flowers testified at the Muskrat Falls dam inquiry, telling commissioner Richard LeBlanc that she had listened to plenty of testimony about the project being over-budget and behind schedule and that she didn’t really care about those things.

“Because more fundamentally — to me, as a human being, as an Indigenous woman, as a person who occupies this land, whose ancestors occupied this land for centuries — we’re the ones who will face annihilation as far as I’m concerned,” Flowers told the inquiry, which seeks to determine why the Muskrat Falls dam proceeded.

“And this is one step in that direction. If you’re taking away my food source, what else are you going to take next?  

Flowers said in an interview that there are “really no words” to describe how she feels about the impending contamination of Inuit country foods with methylmercury.

“I feel very passionate about continuing to spread the message. I feel so angry that we’re ignored.”

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.

Toxic heavy metals, including arsenic, barium, cadmium, lithium and lead, are flowing unchecked into the Peace River following a series of unusual landslides that may be linked to B.C’s natural gas industry fracking operations.

The landslides began nearly two years ago and show no sign of stopping. So far, they have killed all fish along several kilometres of Brenot and Lynx creeks just downstream from the community of Hudson’s Hope.

As plumes of muddy water laced with contaminants pulse into the Peace River, scientists and local residents are struggling to understand what caused the landslides and why they have not ceased.

Hudson’s Hope mayor Gwen Johansson is also worried about a broader question raised by the ongoing pollution. The toxic metals are entering the Peace River in a zone slated to be flooded by the Site C dam. That zone could experience nearly 4,000 landslides should the dam be built and the impounded waters begin to rise in the landslide-prone area.

The landslide estimate is contained in a voluminous consultant’s report to BC Hydro, which under the direction of Premier Christy Clark is rapidly advancing work at Site C in an effort to push the project past “the point of no return.”

“If this much damage can result from tiny Brenot Creek, what happens to the reservoir if we get thousands more landslides?” Johansson asks.

No definitive cause has yet been identified to explain what caused the Brenot Creek landslides. But one possibility is that they were triggered or exacerbated by natural gas industry fracking operations, in which immense amounts of water are pressure-pumped deep underground with enough force to cause earthquakes. Fracking is known to cause unanticipated cracks or fractures in underground rock formations, allowing contaminated water, natural gas, oil and other constituents to move vast distances undetected.

Such brute-force operations happened frequently in the years immediately before the first slides were noted at Brenot creek in August 2014.

Between July 2010 and March 2013, a dozen earthquakes ranging between 1.6 and 3.4 in magnitude occurred in the Farrell Creek fracking zone, about eight kilometres away from Lynx and Brenot creeks. (A small number of other fracking operations also occurred closer to the creeks, but do not show up in the seismographic record.)

Requests to B.C.’s Oil and Gas Commission or OGC, and information gleaned from non-redacted parts of Freedom of Information requests to BC Hydro, indicate that by March of 2013 both the provincial energy industry regulator and the Crown-owned hydro provider were increasingly concerned about “events” at Farrell Creek.

“Right now our focus is on getting the improved seismographic network up and running. We will continue to monitor and study all cases of induced seismicity [earthquakes] in NEBC [Northeast British Columbia],” Dan Walker, the OGC’s then senior petroleum engineer wrote in an email to Andrew Watson, BC Hydro’s engineering division manager, on March 7 of that year. The email was written two days after the last of the 12 earthquakes occurred at Farrell Creek.

By the time of that earthquake, Talisman Energy, the biggest natural gas company then operating at Farrell Creek, knew that wastewater was disappearing below one of four massive “retention ponds” that it had built to store millions of litres of highly contaminated water from its fracking operations.

A detailed investigation subsequently paid for by Talisman and conducted by Matrix Solutions, an environmental engineering firm, notes that Talisman’s “leakage management system” detected that contaminated water was escaping from between two liners that were supposed to trap and prevent Pond A’s toxic brew from polluting the ground and water around it.

Pond A had likely leaked for five months beginning in January 2013. In June of that year, Talisman drained Pond A and confirmed that the leaks had, indeed, occurred.

The wastewater ponds and gas reserves in the region are now owned by Progress Energy, owned in turn by Petronas, the Malaysian state-owned petro giant that the provincial government is eager to see build a liquefied natural gas terminal at Lelu Island near Prince Rupert. The Oil and Gas Commission, which regulates B.C.’s oil and gas industry, subsequently ordered Talisman to drain the remaining three ponds. At that point, it was discovered that Pond D was leaking toxic wastewater too.

Among the toxic substances found in water samples collected from groundwater sources underneath Talisman’s faulty storage pits were arsenic, barium, cadmium, lithium and lead, the same hazardous compounds that are found in the billions of fine sediments that continue to turn the waters of Brenot and Lynx creeks a muddy brown and enter the fish-bearing Peace River.

The Matrix Solutions report released in May 2015 noted that the release of toxic metals into the environment was predictable. By digging the huge pits and exposing massive amounts of unearthed material to the air, “surface and groundwater acidification” were potential risks, Matrix said.

“The primary concern for receiving environments related to acidic groundwater is the potential for release of trace metals,” the report warned.

Whether or not the fracking-induced earthquakes or the failures at Talisman’s waste ponds played any role in events at Brenot and Lynx creeks is unknown. To date, no studies have been done in the region to determine how and where water moves below ground. In its report of more than 2,200 pages, Matrix noted a troubling lack of such information. “Flow direction is not documented,” the Matrix report said. However, the report went on to say that groundwater generally moves from “topographic highs toward topographic lows.” In other words, it moves downhill.

Below the Farrell Creek fracking zone, the waters of Lynx and Brenot creeks continue to be so full of contaminants that a person’s finger placed just a millimeter below the surface disappears from view. The pollution caused one local farmer to quip at the time that his “cows are not supposed to chew the water.”

Martin Geertsema, a geomorphologist with the provincial Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations in Prince George, says he has never seen anything quite like what has occurred at the slide site since August 2014.

“We’ve got a camera pointed at the landslide. I’d like to install a few more to try to figure out what the heck is going on. It’s very unusual. There’s nothing quite like this,” Geertsema said in an interview.

“At other slide sites the water flows finished in a few days. The difference here is it just keeps going. Water is coming out of the base and because the water is eroding soil from the base it leads to cliff collapse. And the cliff is composed primarily of sand and some clay. And when it collapses, the debris just flows.”

Geertsema notes that the region is known for naturally occurring landslides, many of which show signs of “considerable antiquity.” However, today’s slides are occurring in a region with some of the most extensive and intensive industrial land-uses anywhere in B.C., including two major hydroelectric dams and reservoirs and water-intensive natural gas fracking operations that the OGC has concluded triggered clusters of earthquakes in various locales in northeast B.C.

When the slides at Brenot Creek first began, the District of Hudson’s Hope advised local residents not to drink the water. The advisory was followed by a similar one issued by the provincial government. The town’s council later paid a hydrogeologist and consulting water expert, Gilles Wendling, to collect and test water samples at the slide site to determine how toxic the water was.

Mayor Johansson remains disturbed by the event’s duration, its origins and most of all its timing. At the time that the first landslide was discovered, the region had endured weeks of extremely hot and dry weather. A water-triggered landslide in August was, Johansson felt, highly unusual.

In January 2015, Johansson wrote an article in a newsletter published by the District. During a recent interview she said her views remain unchanged.

“I have contacted MoE [B.C.’s Ministry of Environment] to ask what further steps they are planning and to find out when the advisory might be lifted. The MoE representative said they have no plans to do anything further, other than file a report. He said he expected that eventually the creek would cleanse itself.”

“That seems pretty inadequate. Test results show levels of exotic metals such as lithium, barium, cadmium, and others to be significantly above guidelines. They are not normally found in shallow ground or surface water. They have not shown up at those levels in any previous testing in the area, and I am not aware of similar readings being found anywhere in the northeast of the province. Some of the metals are toxic. They pose a risk to human and animal health.”

The OGC, which visited the site shortly after the slides began, concluded that the contaminants in the water were commonly found in the soils in and around the creek and that a natural spring was the source of the groundwater.

“The 2014 landslide appears to be entirely natural, and is one of a number of similar landslides that have occurred along Brenot and Lynx creeks over the last few hundred years, resulting from natural geomorphic processes,” Allan Chapman, the OGC’s hydrologist reported in November, 2014.

Chapman added that the “landslide deposited a moderate volume of fine-grained silt into Brenot Creek and Lynx Creek. I would anticipate that these deposits along the stream channels will continue to release the elevated metals into the stream water, affecting the stream water quality, for an extended period of time.”

Wendling, however, has questions. For one, the slide was not a singular event. Slides continue to occur there regularly. In an interview from his Nanaimo office, Wendling said the only way to understand whether the presence of toxic metals in the water is natural or not would be to dig deep into the ground around where the slides have occurred and to see whether the metals are found there. If they are not, and are being carried into the creek by groundwater, then where is the groundwater flowing from and why does it continue flowing in such intensity so long after the first slides?

Such test wells might shed light on whether or not major changes to the landscape such as the nearby giant Williston reservoir and/or natural gas drilling and fracking operations played a role in altering the direction in which groundwater flowed, Wendling said.

Wendling, an independent professional hydrologist, works closely with First Nation governments in the northeast who are concerned about the gas industry’s impacts on water resources. He said the high volume of groundwater entering Brenot and Lynx creeks, the contaminated soils being carried in that water, and when the slides began are all of concern. Typically, he said, such events occur in the spring months following periods of intense rain and snowmelt. But this one appears to have occurred in the middle of a drought, he said.

Shortly after the slides began, Wending says he walked the area and was struck by the dramatically different water levels upstream and downstream of where Brenot creek enters Lynx creek. Upstream, Lynx creek was virtually dry. Downstream, the creek had 50 times the normal water discharge.

“Why do two similar steams have such a difference in flows?” Wendling asked, adding that it was “important to investigate” all possible explanations for “the discharge of larger flows of shallow groundwater in proximity to Brenot creek.”

However, no one is expecting any such investigations any time soon. Neither BC Hydro, the Oil and Gas Commission, provincial ministries such as Environment, or the natural gas industry have groundwater flow monitoring wells in place: a fact that Geertsema laments.

“I think it would be very useful to characterize groundwater flows,” Geertsema said. “It would help me and it would help the mayor whose backyard is where the problem is.”

It would also be extremely useful in light of another uncomfortable truth about earthquakes and their potential to alter groundwater flows and trigger landslides.

Hydroelectric reservoirs themselves can and do induce earthquakes. After the massive Three Gorges Dam was built in China, for example, more than 3,400 earthquakes were recorded between when the dam’s reservoir began to fill in June 2003 and the end of 2009. The frequency of earthquakes in the region during those seven years was 30 times greater than before the dam’s reservoir began to fill.

A network of groundwater testing wells would go some way to helping people in the region understand what might occur as the Site C dam goes from concept to potential reality over the coming years.

The reservoir that would be created by the dam would flood nearly 110 kilometres of the Peace River valley and side valleys.

Should the Site C dam be completed, steadily rising waters impounded by the dam are expected to cover ground vegetation that will react with the water to contaminate it with methylmercury, a substance that continues to poison fish in the massive Williston reservoir nearly 50 years after the first dam on the Peace River, the W.A.C. Bennett Dam, was completed in 1968. First Nations people and anglers are warned not to eat fish from the artificial lake, whose shores continue to erode and slide into the reservoir, causing further contamination.

Johansson’s worry is that any one of a number of other landslides like those at Brenot creek could occur in future years, leading to a steady increase in the amount and variety of other waterborne toxins that could one day accumulate in the Site C reservoir. Toxic water impounded by the future dam would have to be released to power the dam’s hydroelectric turbines, meaning that such water would then flow downstream toward the wildlife rich Peace-Athabasca Delta, one of the world’s largest freshwater deltas and a critically important staging area for migrating birds.

Meanwhile, as Site C construction activities accelerate, members of UNESCO’s World Heritage Committee are about to conduct a study into the impacts that the dam could have on Wood Buffalo National Park, a World Heritage Site. The investigation was prompted by a petition from Alberta First Nations concerned about the potential downstream impacts of the $9 billion hydroelectric project. The committee has asked the federal government to ensure that no irreversible work on Site C takes place until it has completed its mission and report.

This article originally appeared on Policy Note.

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This is a guest post by Mike De Souza. It originally appeared on mikedesouza.com and is republished here with permission. 

Ten days ago, I asked Environment Canada whether any of its scientists would be available for interviews about their research.

The department hasn’t yet answered this question along with others.

The questions arose following the publication of a new study concluding that deposits of toxic mercury were forming a bull’s eye around oilsands operations in Alberta.

The scientists who did the research from Environment Canada were previously discouraged from talking about their work at a science conference in 2011, according to documents released through access to information legislation.

Those documents included a script that suggested they downplay human health impacts of polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons, a toxin that can originate from smokestacks in oilsands facilities or other industrial development, by comparing it to food fit for consumption.

“If pressed on human health (say that) these (oilsands) substances are also found in BBQ’ed steak,” said the script, which was shared with the offices of former natural resources minister Joe Oliver – now the finance minister – and former environment minister Peter Kent, who is still sitting as a Conservative MP.

While the department appears to be struggling to answer basic questions about this script and other science-related questions, its minister, Leona Aglukkaq, has declined to answer some questions about her own opinions and approach.

As part of this recently published story in InsideClimate News about Quebec and California’s innovative cap and trade system to tackle industrial greenhouse gases and fight climate change, we asked the minister’s office if it could share her opinion about these cross-border efforts to make polluters pay. But her spokeswoman declined to comment and forwarded questions (about the minister’s opinions) to non-partisan public servants at Environment Canada.

The federal department has recently released a new “science guide” with five key principles designed to help it fulfill its mandate: Relevance, transparency, responsiveness, excellence and collaboration.

But it’s not clear what the department means by “transparency” or “responsiveness” along with the other guiding principles.

Aglukkaq was recently pressed in the House of Commons by NDP MPs François Choquette and Kennedy Stewart to address allegations that Prime Minister Stephen Harper’s government is censoring information about scientific research.

Stewart alleged that Aglukkaq was “forcing staff her staff to parrot” the grilled steak comparison.

“But the question still remains,” Stewart said on June 5 in the Commons. “A government study confirms raised mercury levels surrounding the oil sands. It actually calls it a bull’s eye around the oil sands. The scientist who wrote the report is mysteriously unavailable for comment. Will the minister spare us the rhetoric and instead unmuzzle our scientists so Canadians can hear the truth?”

Aglukkaq responded by suggesting that the Harper government was showing transparency by allowing the scientific research to be published.

“We worked with the province of Alberta to launch a world-class scientific monitoring system of the oil sands,” Aglukkaq told the Commons in response to Stewart. “It is a transparent and public process. Some of Canada’s top scientists are involved. The report shows our plan is working. We will continue to be transparent and promote independent scientific assessment and evaluation…”

But the minister, her department and the government have still not answered more than a dozen questions. Here is a partial list of what was asked and the “response” from the government:

1) Will any of the scientists from Environment Canada be available for interviews about their research in the future? No response.

2) When will these scientists be allowed to give interviews? No response.

3) If none of these scientists will be allowed to speak publicly about their research, would you be able to provide an explanation? No response.

4) What efforts has Environment Canada taken to measure levels of mercury, VOCs, PAHs or other pollutants coming from oilsands facilities at their source? No response.

5) How does Environment Canada know that pollution levels reported by oilsands companies in their inventory reports are accurate? No response.

6) Does Environment Canada believe the concentrations of PAHs in barbecued steaks are comparable to the concentrations of PAHs produced as a result of industrial development in the oilsands? No response.

7) Can you provide some background scientific details about how a comparison with barbecued steak realistically represents the nature of harmful substances found in waters or ecosystems near oilsands production? No response.

Questions to Environment Minister Leona Aglukkaq:

1) How many times has the minister met in boardrooms of oil and gas companies or with CAPP since she was named minister?

2) How does she approach these meetings and how does she prepare for them?

3) Has she ever personally felt intimidated by having to deal directly with executives from the oil and gas industry?

4) Does she approach the meetings in the same way she approaches meetings with other stakeholders?

5) What differences has she observed in the approach of oil and gas industry stakeholders versus the approach of other stakeholders?

Response from minister’s spokeswoman Amanda Gordon to all five questions:

Minister Aglukkaq meets with a range of stakeholders relevant to her portfolios to hear their views and perspectives. The interests of Canadians are Minister Aglukkaq’s top priority in all of her meetings.

Follow up questions:

1) What does making the interests of Canadians a top priority mean to the minister?

2) How does she do this or what evidence or examples can she give to demonstrate how she has done this?

Response prepared by non-partisan public servants at Environment Canada:

The department will be responding to you on this issue.

The Government of Canada is committed to protecting the environment while keeping the Canadian economy strong.

The Government has created three national wildlife areas, three marine protected areas, two national parks, two national marine conservation areas, and one national historic site since 2006 – for a total an area nearly twice the size of Vancouver Island. More than 90 000 hectares of wildlife habitat have also been protected and, thanks to federal investments, the Nature Conservancy of Canada has secured an additional 369 000 hectares. Moving forward, and as announced in the 2013 Speech from the Throne, the Canadian Government will unveil a new National Conservation Plan to further increase protected areas, focusing on stronger marine and coastal conservation. The Plan, which will be announced in 2014, will build upon conservation-related measures in Budget 2014, including encouraging donations under the Ecological Gifts Program, investing in national parks, conserving recreational fisheries, and supporting family-oriented conservation activities.

Considerable efforts are also dedicated to the conservation and protection of species at risk. An important milestone was the December 2013 publication of an Emergency Protection Order for the Greater Sage-Grouse under the Species at Risk Act, which came into force on February 18, 2014. This marked the first time that the federal government has issued such an order to protect a species facing imminent threats to its survival.

The Government of Canada believes that economic prosperity and environmental protection are not mutually exclusive goals. Through its Responsible Resource Development approach, Canada achieves the right balance to unleash the potential of its resource sectors to create high-value jobs while strengthening safety and environmental protection. The Canadian Environmental Assessment Act, 2012 (CEAA 2012) is an important part of this approach. CEAA 2012 established legal timelines for environmental assessments and reduced duplication with provincial reviews. However, faster reviews do not mean substandard reviews. The government continues to have a rigorous environmental review process.

Environment Canada provides Canadians with high quality weather services and is currently working to strengthen its activities. This includes new investments in federal infrastructure such as radars, and surface weather and climate monitoring stations. Canadians will benefit from more timely, accurate weather warnings and forecasts in all parts of the country as a result of these important investments.

The Government has a strong, comprehensive approach to safeguard this country’s water resources. Canada’s collaboration with the United States led to an enhanced and renewed Great Lakes Water Quality Agreement. The Government is investing in the Great Lakes Nutrient Initiative to address the re-emergence of algae caused by excessive phosphorous discharges, in the clean-up of Hamilton Harbour, and in the restoration of the ecological health of the Lake Simcoe area. The second phase of the Lake Winnipeg Basin Initiative has commenced and the St. Lawrence Action Plan has been renewed.

Environment Canada’s enforcement initiatives continue to help provide Canadians with a clean, safe and sustainable environment. In 2013 our enforcement team worked on a number of major prosecutions, including a $500,000 fine for the illegal use of pesticide in the waters of southwestern New Brunswick. This was one of the largest fines ever administered under the Fisheries Act.

With respect to greenhouse gases, the Government of Canada has taken action on two of the largest sources of emissions in this country-the transportation and electricity sectors. Canada was the first country to phase out traditional coal-fired electricity generation units. Thanks to our actions, this country’s 2020 greenhouse gas emissions are projected to be 128 megatonnes lower relative to where emissions had originally been projected to be in 2020 without action.

Internationally, Canada is actively participating in negotiations towards a single, new international climate change agreement that includes meaningful commitments by all major emitters. Canada has fully delivered on its fast-start financing commitment by providing $1.2 billion over 2010-2013, our largest ever contribution to international climate change finance. This funding is now supporting a range of climate change projects in over 60 developing countries. In addition, Canada is proud to be a lead partner in the Climate and Clean Air Coalition (CCAC) to reduce short-lived climate pollutants, which are potent global warmers and dangerous air pollutants.

Email response from Environment Canada to request for interview with scientists who published research on mercury pollution in oilsands region:

While we are unable to arrange for an interview, I can provide you with a response on this issue.

To date, the results of environmental monitoring in the oil sands region show that low levels of oil sands development-related substances are present in both air and water.

Mercury levels found in the oil sands region snowpack near the development are above the background levels but below guidelines. Levels decrease with increasing distance from oil sands development.

Mercury levels are low compared with many industrial developments, and are only slightly higher than those found in relatively undeveloped areas such as northwestern Ontario.

Considering methylmercury is a neurotoxin that bioaccumulates in the food web, it is important to continue tracking mercury levels in the oil sands development area to ensure they remain below acceptable levels.

Summary of Major Findings:

Atmospheric deposition of mercury and methylmercury is elevated near major oil sands developments (i.e. loads reach over 1,000 and 19 ng/m2 for total mercury and methylmercury, respectively, at several sites in the vicinity of the oil sands development).

Maximum mercury loads in the oil sands region are low compared to those observed in contaminated region of the Northern hemisphere that are directly influenced by anthropogenic sources.

What is somewhat unique about our findings is that although mercury deposition is often elevated in industrial areas, methylmercury (the toxic form that bioaccumulates through food webs) is not often measured and is generally not thought to be deposited in atmospheric deposition in large quantities.

The raw data that went into generating the deposition maps will be made available on the Canada-Alberta Oil Sands Environmental Monitoring Information Portal in the coming months.

Concentrations of mercury in melted snow are under water quality guidelines for the Protection of Aquatic Life established by the Canadian Council of Ministers of the Environment (CCME).

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.