Nearly a dozen large mining projects planned for the interior of British Columbia could have an impact on the Stikine watershed and the lifeblood of Southeast Alaska – commercial and subsistence fisheries.
That was the bleak picture painted by a group of activists who visited Wrangell last week to inform the public of plans by private industry and the B.C. government to build a number of open-pit mines and explore the vast, unpopulated region east of the U.S. border.
Guy Archibald, the Clean Water Coordinator for the Southeast Alaska Conservation Council and a former mine surveyor, was at the meeting and told those in attendance what lies ahead for Canada will have a detrimental impact on Alaskans downriver.
“Every single mine violates water quality standards,” Archibald said. “Healthy fisheries depend on clean water and any reduction in water quality will result in declined fish health.”
Some of the threats to salmon include mercury and other chemicals that enter the ecosystem through tainted runoff and powdered tailings waste that escapes from containment areas.
“You’ll start to see chemicals and turbidity in the water from that,” Archibald added. “An amount as low as two-parts-per-billion of copper will affect the olfaction of a salmon. Once they lose their sense of smell, it affects their reproduction. They can’t migrate either.”
The headwater of the Stikine is a major habitat for salmon and nearly 7,300 jobs are dependent on the nearly $1 billion fishing industry it provides in Southeast Alaska.
According to Archibald, major firms are looking to make that area the largest mining center on the planet.
“It will be unique and there is nothing like it in the world,” Archibald said. “It’ll be that large. There are nine very active sites and 20 very probable ones in the Northwest B.C. area. They are absolutely huge projects.”
The Kerr-Sulpherets-Mitchell project is a proposed gold and copper mine owned by Seabridge Gold of Canada and is set to be located on the Sulpherets Creek, a tributary to the Unuk River that flows southward into Behm Canal above Ketchikan.
Preliminary studies assert that the KSM mill would process an average rate of 120,000 tons per day and would require a pair of earth-filled dams to contain 2.3 billion tons of waste tailings accumulated over the expected 52-year production life of the mine.
That plan is unsustainable according to Archibald.
“When you build these tailings dams, you have to keep them in place in perpetuity,” Archibald said during the meeting. “That is unrealistic, and any release of those dams would have catastrophic effects on the environment and downriver. About two of those dams fail per year.”
Mark Robinson, a professional geologist based in Wrangell, said that he has a hard time believing that.
“I’m trying to figure out what he meant by that,” Robinson said. “I went on the EPA website for toxic waste discharges and cannot find any reference to that. To me, that is a questionable statistic.”
According to Archibald, the majority of the projects on the horizon for B.C. were first floated in the 1980s but were abandoned for lack of infrastructure and power lines. That will all change when the 287 kV Northwest Transmission Line (NTL) project is completed.
The NTL will carry power from the Skeena substation in Terrace, B.C. northward to a planned substation on Bob Quinn Lake. From there, Archibald says, it would be easy to power the many projects under development.
“It wasn’t economical back then because of cost, but with power in the area, there are 20 large projects now in the works,” Archibald added. “They are planning on a huge open pit mine about 6,000 times the size of the Greens Creek mine on Admiralty Island.”
Archibald also calls the placement of the NLT – and the reason given to Canadians to build it – suspicious at best.
“It was supposedly built with green infrastructure money and sold as getting native Canadian villages on the grid,” Archibald said. “Interestingly enough, it doesn’t go to any of the villages but goes to the area where the mining will happen.”
Gordon Loverin, a co-chair of the NTL Coalition and the president of the Tahltan Business Council said the information presented by SEACC on the transmission line is inaccurate.
“I think they are misleading the public by saying the NTL was created to not go to villages,” Loverin said. “It was always understood as a power project to go to resources in the province. The green funding of $130 million provided by the government allowed it to be built and there is a stipulation to get smaller communities off diesel power.”
According to Loverin, Iskut and other small villages will be taken off petroleum power under the plan.
“It is not fair to say the NTL line was built for entirely different reasons than to power to help support infrastructure and mining projects in the region,” Loverin added. “It will provide $15 billion in future investment. It will also create 10,000 jobs for 40 communities from Prince George to the Yukon over the next decade.”
Jeremy Maxand, who is employed by SEACC as community organizer, said he is not against mining or the jobs it would provide. Rather he is concerned about the threat such large development poses to fisheries in Southeast Alaska.
“I think people are generally supportive of mining, but the scale of these projects is what worried me,” Maxand said. “It’s also the type of mining and the location where it will happen. It’s about the magnitude of the projects and the land out there. It’s so desolate in that area, so we need to understand more about what is happening.”
That magnitude of mining projects and the effect they would have on the environment are studied differently in the two countries.
“In the United States we rely heavily on the Environmental Impact Study,” Archibald said. “In Canada, they use a less stringent Environmental Assessment process, which isn’t as comprehensive.”
Archibald added that Sulpherets is the only major project currently underway that is into the EA process.
Seabridge, by its own admission is a junior mining operation, meaning they do the preliminary legwork and then, after the permitting process is complete, sell the property to a larger, better capitalized company.
“The smaller stuff in the portfolio is what we are selling right now as a way of generating funding for our larger projects,” said Seabridge CEO Rudi Fronk in a 2010 interview with The Street online financial magazine. “This allows us to continue to advance the big projects without equity dilution. We would prefer to sell the company in its entirety to a larger mining company that wants two big assets to build and operate.”
In the interview, Fronk added that those larger companies being looked at include mining giants Barrick, Newmont, Kinross and GoldCorp.
A sale to a larger company would possibly reverse any mitigation efforts Seabridge might assert in developing the KSM or other projects.
“When Seabridge makes promises to protect water quality and make sure salmon is safe, keep in mind they will not be the ones developing the project,” Archibald said. “It will be developed by another, more senior, mining company. Whoever buys the project is not bound to those promises.”
Robinson, who has decades of experience in the mining industry, said that the involvement of larger companies does not mean a degradation of quality control.
“You can be assured that the larger companies, if they make it through the permitting process, will comply with the requirements in the permit,” Robinson added. “In Alaska, we have the DNR-based Large Mine Permitting Team that includes Fish and Game, the Department of Environmental Conservation, and the federal EPA, as well as any other group who is a stakeholder.”
Robinson also related a story of how mining actually helped the environment of one locale in Alaska.
“There are good examples in Alaska like Red Dog Mine, north of Kotzebue,” Robinson said. “In 1978, water in that creek was very enriched with naturally occurring metals and minerals, and it cut through the ore body. Because of that, it supported no life. During the mining process, part of the restoration was to clean it up and now they have grayling and arctic char in drainages, as well as plant life. In that sense, it was good to mine that area because the mitigation process cleaned it up.”
At any rate, Archibald said, the Boundary Waters Treaty of 1909 between the U.S. and Canada is the last best hope to defeat the plans to develop the pristine B.C. interior.
“At the very least, people who are concerned need to be in contact with the State of Alaska and put pressure on the State Department to demand that Canada follow the treaty,” Archibald said.
Reader Comments(0)