National Post (National Edition)
Millions down a giant hole and nothing to show
More than $350 million of taxpayer dollars in the past two decades — over a quarter billion dollars in the past decade alone — has been spent to clean up the abandoned Faro mine site, a moonscape of waste rock and mustard yellow ponds in the mountains of southcentral Yukon.
But, according to the Treasury Board of Canada’s annual reports posted online, nothing has been remediated: Zero. Zip. Nadda.
“Actual cubic metres remediated: zero; actual hectares remediated: zero; actual tonnes remediated: zero."
Off limits and out of sight — overlooking the Pelly River Valley on the territory of the Ross River Dena First Nations — the 2,500-hectare Faro mine property is one of Canada’s largest contaminated sites.
And one of its costliest secrets. Few outside of the North have paid attention to this toxic mess.
And, managed by several layers of government since the mine was abandoned in 1998, accountability appears astonishingly absent.
“The biggest problem has been figuring out what to do,” said Lou Spagnuolo, the Vancouver-based Faro mine remediation project director for Indigenous and Northern Affairs Canada (INAC), which has the lead on the mine clean-up, and is also working with the Yukon government and affected First Nations communities.
Faro Mine began operations in 1969, and was once the world’s largest lead-zinc mine and the Yukon’s largest employer. The company’s permit simply required a $100,000 security deposit, and that it “dispose of its mill tailings in a good and miner-like fashion.”
In 1998, after 29 years of mining, Faro’s final owner, Anvil Range Mining Corp., declared bankruptcy and the mine was abandoned.
Today, Faro’s 70 million tonnes of tailings fill a four-and-a-half-kilometreby-one-kilometre psychedelic slough. The 320 million tonnes of acid-leaching waste rock surrounding it could rebuild Egypt’s largest pyramid 40 times.
When it was abandoned, a joint federal-territorial government team stepped in to manage the toxic mess, with funding through the Federal Contaminated Sites Action Plan.
And that’s when things got really messy, critics say, with layers of bureaucracy and endless consultations stalling any cleanup.
For example, between 2003 and 2009, more than 100 technical studies and assessments were undertaken, and 12 plans created to deal with various levels of government and affected communities.
Things keep dragging out, said Kathlene Suza, who represented the Ross River Dena on the Faro Mine Closure Office team run by the Yukon government. “We were supposed to have a remediation plan in place by 2011,” she said.
“How much longer is this going to go on?”
In 2009, remediating the site was projected to take another 40 years and cost $450 million, according to a statement made at the time by a committee of senior officials from Indian and Northern Affairs Canada (as it was known at the time), the Yukon Government, Selkirk First Nation and Ross River Dena Council.
Now, remediation costs may rise as high as $1 billion, according to Spagnuolo, not including the $350 million already spent.
“By 2009, we all agreed on our options,” said Spagnuolo. “Since then, we have been gathering information and refining our design.” which indicate that since 2005, just over $29 million has been spent on care and maintenance at the Faro mine, while more than $241 million has been spent on remediation.
Spagnuolo explained the contradictory figures as “a reporting blip.” The Treasury Board website “is a little different,” he said. “It might not be up to date.”
The Treasury Board simply tracks and reports departmental spending. “We collect the inventory from the departments and maintain the database,” said spokesman Alain Belle-Isle. INAC is closer to the actual breakdown of spending at Faro. The Yukon government, meanwhile, has also been awarding contracts at the site.
Spagnuolo estimates that $150 million has been spent on care and maintenance at Faro. Annual monitoring, continues to deteriorate. “You’ve got big mounds of acid-generating rock. There are old Roman mines in Great Britain with acid generating rock — the chemistry is nothing new,” said Rifkind.
On Rifkind’s office wall in Whitehorse is a blown-up photo showing mountains of grey rock surrounded by neon ponds. He points to a pool of cloudy orange tailings. “That is the polishing pond,” he said, the last pond before water is released.
“Obviously, there is a problem. It’s not meant to be that colour. The water should be clear.”
There are concerns anaerobic activity in the waste rock piles is releasing heavy metals into the groundwater, while zinc levels in Rose Creek, which flows past the mine site toward the Selkirk First Nation, have spiked in recent years.
“We only learned about the zinc spike because an Environment Canada water monitoring station happens to be set up 10 kilometres downstream from the mine,” said Rifkind. “And they put all their findings online.”
The mine site is continuously degrading, Spagnuolo said. The longer it takes for the cleanup to begin, “the worse the site conditions get,” he said.
He hopes to have a remediation plan in hand, for review by the Yukon Water Board and the Yukon Environmental Socio-economic Assessment Board, by 2018. Such a plan would include things like re-sloping the waste rock piles, installing engineered soil covers over the tailings and waste rock, and upgrading the contaminated water collection and treatment system.
If all goes according to plan, shovels would hit the ground in 2024, and take 40 years to complete. And after that? Spagnuolo confirmed that the Faro mine will “have to be monitored in perpetuity.”
He did not project how much that will cost.