A Decade After Disaster, Mount Polley Tailings Dam Could Get Even Bigger [1]
"A faulty tailings dam at the B.C. mine dumped billions of litres of waste into the environment — and Quesnel Lake is still contaminated. Now Imperial Metals wants to expand the same dam"
"It was a Monday morning and the sun had just begun to rise when Doug Watt received an alarming phone call from his local fire and rescue department on Aug. 4, 2014.
A tailings pond dam at Imperial Metals’ Mount Polley mine in B.C.’s Interior had failed, releasing 25 billion litres of toxic sludge into Polley Lake, Hazeltine Creek and Quesnel Lake, where Watt’s small community of Likely stretches along the shore.
“They informed me that the dam had burst overnight and was pouring down into the lake and we should be prepared to evacuate,” Watt, who worked at the Mount Polley mine until 2001 as a metallurgist and shift supervisor, says in an interview.
When Watt went outside to pull his boat out of the water, he heard “a roaring, like Niagara Falls from a distance” — the sound of billions of litres of Mount Polley mine wastewater and toxic mining byproducts, referred to as tailings, pouring downslope into the fish-bearing Quesnel Lake."