An effort to create global trade criteria for mining waste has emerged just six years after a huge relay dam failed at the Mount Polley mine in British Columbia. But there are considerations that the new criteria do not get far enough to communities downstream.
The Global Relave Review effort was presented more than a year ago. His catalyst was the fatal collapse of a dam last year at a Brazilian mine near Brumadinho that killed many people.
Closer to home, the Mount Polley mine crisis in British Columbia in 2014 was not fatal. But its consequences revealed what critics saw as weaknesses in Canadian regulations that allowed a mining company to pollute a river and evade fines or prosecutions.
A wide range of Industries, Foreign Civic Organizations and United Nations Experts studied both disasters. Speaking a year ago, Elisa Tonda of the United Nations Environment Programme said that expectations for the new criteria would be high.
“The review will want to create a very strong and tough commercial that will raise the bar for existing practices and approaches,” he said in a statement.
The criteria were published on 5 August. The 21-page document states that its purpose is “0 harm to other people and the surroundings with 0 tolerance” for deaths. The UN says it will work to translate these ideals into national criteria. But in the meantime, Charlie Cobb, the dam protection engineer in Alaska, says he doesn’t see much trouble remembering.
“I don’t mind referencing federal documents as a state regulator, but I have a hard time with referencing international guidance,” Cobb told CoastAlaska.
It’s not that I don’t see a need. He chairs a committee that develops uniform rules for relay dams in the United States to complement existing National Dam Safety Program standards.
“And after Mount Polley’s failure, you know, I raised my hand at the council assembly and said, “You know, we’ll probably get to the paintings and start looking more intensely at the relay dams.”
This procedure is still underway. But the global criteria that have just been published are accompanied by a number of noble principles, such as respect for the human rights of affected communities downstream.
None of these terms are binding on a court or government regulator. And that’s a problem, says David Chambers, a mining representative at the Center for Science in Public Participation in Bozeman, Montana.
“There are no teeth, ” he said in an interview. “All of this is voluntary compliance. And I think the most important thing is a kind of lack of standards of functionality.”
And through that, he said, “we expected there to be things like the recommended safety points that exist.”
So how do these global criteria are intended to work? A commercial organization called the International Council of Mines and Metals one of the main players in language progression. It accounts for about one-third of the world’s mining industry.
When asked what its ICMM members would look like, the head general of the industry group, Tom Butler, admitted that it was a voluntary organization and not a regulator.
“But at the end of the day, if a member consistently complies with or discredits the ICMM, there are deportation mechanisms in the ICMM statutes,” he said Wednesday.
Alaska’s largest mining organization says it is promoted through national associations.
“All of Alaska’s major operational mines are affiliated with one or any of those organizations, and have provided feedback on the entire process,” wrote Deantha Skibinski of the Alaska Miners Association in CoastAlaska.
“But more importantly,” he said, “Alaska’s gigantic operational mines have received approval and follow-up of the relay garage (TSF) facility procedure, from site selection, design and construction, control and monitoring, and after closure. The various approval procedures come with a significant environmental review and opportunities for public participation”.
The catalyst for raising the criteria for the world’s canating deposits comes from tribes and ecological groups, but also from major foreign investors. Pension fund managers have invested heavily in global mining operations, and a catastrophic dam like Brazil’s has been a monetary liability that has devastated the share price.
“Because when this go over the dam breaks down, the share price of those guys collapses, it hits. And it’s investors who are wasting that money,” said Cobb, a dam protection engineer in Alaska. And then the investors, despite everything, said, “Well, what are we investing in here?” That there’s all this risk, but we don’t know. “So they forced their member organizations to disclose theirves of relay dams.”
This created a searchable online database. It includes entrances such as the Red Chris mine, a gold and open pit copper mine in British Columbia upstream of the Stikine River Basin. The mine evolved through Imperial Metals, the same business duty for Mount Polley.
It is the presence of British Columbia’s booming mining sector on the shores of Alaska that makes a coalition of tribes, environmentalists and fishermen nervous.
“We’re going to have to monitor The Poison Lake of Red Chris, you know, call it a relay tank. But it will be there forever,” said Frederick Olsen Jr., Sitka’s executive director of southeast Alaska. Cross-border Aboriginal Commission. It is a regional tribal effort to monitor mining at either border.
“Our other people have been here for thousands of years and we need to be here for thousands of years in the future. That’s why we have to be careful with that kind of thing,” Olsen said.
Olsen and other Alaskans who “watch” across the border are encouraged through the criteria set out in the Global Relay Review, but plan to remain alert. The way to deal with the disorders of the relay dams is to save them.