Photo: Cariboo Regional District
Location of the Mount Polley Tailings Pond catastrophe 2014. BC has approved the Tailings Dam from Raising Mount Polley by four meters, a decade after the collapse, has caused one of the worst spills in the history of provincial history.
The BC government has a declaration of consent to Mount Polley Mining Corp. Give to increase a Tailings Pond Dam by one of the largest environmental disasters in provincial history by four meters.
The dam in Mount Polley Gold and Copper Mine collapsed on August 4, 2014 and sent 25 million cubic meters of mine waste, water and building materials downstream. Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake were all widespread and long -lasting environmental damage in the greatest such failure of North America.
A number of regulatory measures followed. And in December 2024, 15 charges for Federal Fisheries Act against the parent company of the mines, Imperial Metals Corp., and two other companies were held on the collapse of Tailing Pond Dam, the 56 kilometers northeast of Williams Lake, BC
The recent declaration of consent from the Environment and Park Minister Tamara Davidson and the Minister for Mining and Critical Minerals, Jagrop Brar, will increase the dam from its current 60 meters to 64 meters.
In a press release on Thursday, the ministers said that they were “satisfied” that security problems were properly assessed by an engineer and experts from the Great Mines office.
“We recognize that there are considerable concerns in this mine. Since 2016, the mine has been in operation under significantly stronger environmental standards,” said the ministers in a joint explanation.
“What happened in 2014 can never happen again. Our strong demands on the protection of the environment are not negotiable.”
This office approved the proposed change in approval to increase the dam on Thursday.
The mine, which was first opened in 1997, was reopened in 2016 after the dam violence.
According to the province, Mount Polley Mining Corp. Mining expanded in the coming years. The proposed expansion to the mine is still evaluated by the environmental assessment office.
“No decisions were made about whether the expansion should be approved or not so that the mine continued to operate after 2031,” the province noticed on Thursday in its release.
Nikki Skuce, who heads the BC Mining Law Reform Network, said the decision to expand the company on Mount Polley Dam is “risky”.
“They went too far. Some changes have been made since the catastrophe. We would not say enough for security to put it first,” she said. “To continue to add a volume, I am not sure whether the province has the regulatory guarantees that this will never happen.”
In 2022, a report, which was commissioned by the organization of Sucuce, found almost half of the existing mining locations in the province with exhaust gas deposits probably high, very high or extreme consequences in the event of a dam failure.
Among the locations that are currently inactive or entertaining, 46 percent became the potential, loss of human life, environmental losses or considerable economic damage. This potential rose to 83 percent for currently operational or proposed Tailings dams and found the report.
The decision about the Mount Polley Dam also takes place a day after the publication of an investigation report by the Skeenawild Conservation Trust, in which it was claimed that the lack of state surveillance and regulations led to contamination and risks of Tailing Dam Safety at BCS Red Chris Mine.
The mine is 450 kilometers north of Smith and started in 2015 and in 2023 its owners began to expand his operations. The BC government included the expansion of the Red Chris mines in a list of 18 project applications that would be quickly pursued to US tariffs.
In the Skeenawild report, which was largely based on documents, which was accessed by the law on the freedom of the information, the mine has not developed any effective water treatment plans to protect the downstream environments. It has already been found that the selencon center centering on two lakes has increased downstream, and an unexpected lack of water has complicated effects on water types.
The Tailings Dam The Red Chis Mine has now used the same foundations associated with the failure of Mount Polley dam. The construction also “failed repeatedly” to achieve goals and increase the likelihood of failure, the report says.
If only half of the stored water would break through a failed red Chris -Damm, the min waste released from its camp pond would be more than four times that flowed down from Mount Polley in 2014, the report stated.
Skeenawild came to the conclusion that the modeling and emergency planning of the dam error were confronted with “several defects”, which increased the risks for people and the environment downstream of the mine.
The dam construction in the Red Chris Mine was by Imperial Metals Corp. and monitored the engineering office Amec. Both monitored the construction of the Mount Polley dam before failing.
– With files from the Canadian press