Dan Maclennan, Courier-Islander, October 22, 2010

Hillsborough Resources officials and city councillors avoided the elephant in council chambers Tuesday when the company came to discuss its Quinsam Coal mining expansion proposal.

Public concerns about elevated arsenic and sulfate levels in the Quinsam River watershed went unmentioned over the course of a 30-minute presentation from the mine owners and the 12-minute council question period that followed.

"I was surprised that there weren't more questions," the Campbell River Environmental Committee's Stan Goodrich said after the presentation.  "There's a whole lot of unanswered questions here."

Gary Gould, Hillsborough Resources vice-president at Tuesday?s city council meeting. (Photo: Dan MacLennan)

Quinsam Coal has applied to the Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources (MEMPR) to allow a new underground mine called 7 South at the mine site. Plans call for the extraction of 1.7 million tonnes of raw coal from 2011 to 2014. Because waste materials - coarse coal rejects (CCR) - can oxidize and generate acid when exposed to air, the application also calls for former open pit mines to be flooded so that the CCR can be stored underwater.

Hillsborough has recently altered its application to say some of the CCR will eventually be stored underground in mined-out areas of 7 South which will be flooded.

Representatives from the company and from MEMPR were invited to appear before council after a coalition of local environmental groups repeated long-standing concerns about elevated levels of sulfates in water and arsenic in lake sediments below the mine. A recent study prepared for the Canadian Water Network found "arsenic concentrations are elevated in Long Lake as a result of acid rock drainage and other chemical process associated with mine waste."

Study co-author Dr. William Cullen of UBC, said data "firmly establishes that Long Lake sediments are significantly higher than surrounding lakes for both arsenic and manganese concentrations, and points to the mine as the source. In other words, the high arsenic concentrations are not a consequence of naturally elevated arsenic in the lake sediments in the region. The high sulfate concentration in the water of Long Lake is evidence that the processes that release arsenic continue unabated."

Hillsborough Resources vice president Gary Gould appeared before council Tuesday night with mine general manager Norm Johnson and Steve Gardner, manager of technical services. Johnson said the mine employs 138 workers producing roughly 500,000 tonnes of coal annually, contributing an estimated $10.5 million in revenues to the local economy.

Gardner said the mine's environmental department takes thousands of samples of surface, lake and groundwater annually.

"We're monitoring our impacts on a weekly, daily, and monthly basis," he said.

"We take over 2,500 samples from 53 sites on an annual basis. I think that demonstrates our commitment to the way the mine is operated and our commitment to looking after the environment."

MEMPR has raised some concerns with the mine's application. Gould said the company will be submitting new information next month. He's hoping the application will be approved by late February.
But the presentation didn't mention sulfates, arsenic, or the Canadian Water Network study.

"The presentation tonight was specific on 7 South," Gould explained later outside council chambers. "We see what we're planning to do with 7 South and the storage of that material really as separate from the studies that are ongoing on Long Lake and what we see in the Canadian Water Network's reporting. We don't feel there's a connection.

"We don't see the mining activity exasperating the level of arsenic in the sediments in Long Lake. Testing that was done on Long Lake prior to mining, indicated that the lake sediments had elevated arsenic levels in the same range that we're seeing in the testing that's being done now, both by ourselves and by the Canadian Water Network. Long Lake has elevated arsenic."

After the meeting, Mayor Charlie Cornfield wasn't surprised that council had no questions for Hillsborough about arsenic and sulfate levels.

"No, it's an opportunity for us to ask questions about their presentation," he said. "They made a presentation on the process that's used, not in terms of the findings or anything else. This was more on the process that's used to evaluate (the application). It wasn't about the emissions data, the current mine and that sort of thing."

Goodrich and others in the audience were clearly hoping for more.

"The Cullen report indicated that the sulfates are continuing unabated and the sulfates are tied in with the arsenic that's in the sediment, very high arsenic in the sediment," he said. "I'm concerned and I was a little surprised at council not having more questions."

Goodrich is among those who've followed the mine from its beginnings, when company officials first insisted they could control mine run-off.

"Gary Gould really hasn't been with the company too long," he said. "I don't know that Gary Gould knows that we've heard all this before. It just means that it's really, really hard to have confidence when we were told these things and now we know what has happened."

© Courier-Islander (Campbell River) 2010

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