Three years after a major tailings dam failure in Canada’s British Columbia province, an environmental advocacy group will be meeting with assemblies and residents in Southeast Alaska communities soon.
Salmon Beyond Borders is a campaign driven by a combination of fishermen, businesses in the tourism and recreational sectors, civic groups and concerned citizens. Working with tribal counterparts on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border, the group has primarily been focused on maintaining water quality along transboundary rivers. In Southeast, river systems of particular interest are the Unuk, Taku and Stikine, given their importance to salmon habitat and subsistence activities. The group’s concern is with mining activities upstream of these rivers, with a number of large-scale operations in development or already active in British Columbia.
In August 2014 the rupture of a dam at the Mount Polley mine in the Cariboo area ended up releasing approximately 19 million cubic yards of tailings – a combination of water and settled solid waste from mining processes – into the nearby Cariboo River, a tributary of the Fraser River system. A local state of emergency followed the rupture, with elevated levels of selenium, arsenic, copper and other substances detected in nearby waters.
The failure heightened concerns in Alaska about the safety of large-scale Canadian mining operations, with Tlingit-Haida Central Council establishing a United Tribal Transboundary Mining Work Group to focus on the issue, and Gov. Bill Walker’s administration signing a statement of cooperation with its British Columbia counterparts.
In the meantime, concerns persist as large-scale mining operations like Red Chris in the Stikine River watershed and Brucejack in the Unuk’s have begun production. Salmon Beyond Borders has noted a report issued by the province’s auditor general last year found compliance and enforcement mechanisms of its Ministry of Energy and Mines and Ministry of Environment to be “inadequate,” and that the agreement with Alaska is nonbinding.
The group has subsequently decided to tour communities in the region, meeting with assemblies and the wider public. It is hoping to update them on the latest developments since the Mount Polley spill, and spur municipal-level resolutions supporting increased scrutiny over mining operations near shared rivers.
“The way that it’s worked in each community so far is we’ll have an assembly meeting,” explained Jill Weitz, with Salmon Beyond Borders. “And then we’re also having public events to provide community members with updates.” In Ketchikan, for example, the group met with its mayor and assembly members to propose a resolution. It then followed up with a public meeting the next day.
“We had a full house at the New York Café,” she said. “In Sitka it was the same type of scenario,” with around 80 residents attending. “They’re still really, really interested.”
Their next meeting is set for Wrangell on September 27, to be held at the Stikine Inn at 6 p.m. Following that, the group will be meeting in Petersburg at its library on October 2, at 5:30 p.m.
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