In Photos: The Canadian Mining Boom You’ve Never Seen Before
“If you’re in Vancouver this is way out in the middle of nowhere, but way out in the middle of nowhere is our backyard.”
Those are the words of Frederick Otilius Olsen Jr., the tribal president of a traditional Haida village on Prince of Wales Island, Alaska.
When I met him, he had travelled to Ketchikan, Alaska, to meet with officials about the risk posed by the mining boom across the border in British Columbia.
He stood on the boardwalk overlooking Ketchikan’s fishing fleet and waved his hands animatedly while he told me about how his culture — and southern Alaska’s economy — depends on salmon.
The week before, I’d spent several hours flying in a small fixed-wing plane over B.C.’s mining boom to capture never before seen images of the province’s largest and most remote mines.
Door removed, I captured hundreds of frames as we passed over the Red Chris copper and gold mine, which began operation in late 2014. Its tailings pond and dam rises impossible and angular out of a soft, sloping valley.
Set within the vast and largely intact headwaters of northwestern B.C.’s greatest wild salmon rivers, the Red Chris mine is just one of 10 mines either in operation, in development or in advanced exploration stages in this region.
It is owned and operated by Imperial Metals, the company responsible for the Mount Polley mine disaster in central B.C. If the name seems familiar, it’s because in 2014, a tailings dam at Mount Polley collapsed, resulting in one of the worst environmental disasters in Canadian history. All told, 24 million cubic metres of contaminated mining waste flooded into a lake — a source of drinking water and salmon-spawning ground that feeds the Fraser River.
…click on the above link to read the rest of the article…
