Mouldering in the Yukon’s idylic Pelly Mountains is the North’s most toxic minesite. By Michael Ganley
Deep in the mountains of the south-central Yukon, in what was once a pristine valley and prime hunting area, are the unnatural remains of a giant lead-zinc mine. They sprawl across the broad floodplain of Rose Creek: 55 million tonnes of silver-orange tailings, a “pond” stretching four-and-a-half kilometres long and half a kilometre wide, a rusting mill, and waste rock – 250 million tonnes in all – in heaps so high that, save for the absence of vegetation, they look like mountains themselves.
Behind the waste-rock piles yawns the open pit from which the rock was taken. Named the Faro pit, it’s 1.6-kilometres long and almost a kilometre wide, plunges down 345 metres, and is half-filled with water. Fifteen kilometres down a haul road, two more open pits puncture the landscape: the Vangorda and Grum. Seventy million tonnes of waste rock are piled around them.
These pits and piles are the leftovers of 30 years of operations at the Faro lead-zinc mine, in its heyday the largest employer in the Yukon and one of the biggest lead-zinc mines in the world. It ran, on and off, from 1969 until 1998, when its final owner, Anvil Range Mining Corp., went bankrupt. It had its profitable times, particularly in the early years, but no plan was ever developed to deal with its aftermath and no money was set aside. So, left behind for current and future taxpayers is a toxic shambles that will take hundreds of years and perhaps $1-billion to clean up. It is, many say, a cautionary tale about unbridled development in the North.
The story of the Faro mine begins in 1953, when members of the Ross River Dena First Nation led prospector Al Kulan to the area, telling him of a rusty creek-bank. That year, Kulan staked what later became known as the Vangorda ore body. In 1956 he hit paydirt again, staking the Faro body. Low metal prices and its distance from market – the closest road was the Canol, 80 kilometres away – kept the find on the backburner for a decade, but in 1966 the Anvil Mining Corp., later known as Cyprus Anvil, began a feasibility study.
Federal and territorial governments were keen to get the project going, agreeing to provide help with transportation and energy infrastructure. Whitehorse economist Malcolm Taggart estimates that, of the mine’s total capital cost of about $114-million, government assistance totalled $28-million. No environmental assessment was required and no baseline studies were conducted. There was no abandonment plan for the mine, just a requirement that the company “dispose of its mill tailings in a good and miner-like fashion.”
Faro shipped its first concentrates in 1969, and through much of the 1970s it employed as many as 750 people, about 15 per cent of the Yukon’s workforce. In its best years, the mine contributed a fifth of the Yukon’s GDP. They were profitable years for the mine’s owners and shareholders. “Cyprus Anvil made a lot of money initially, and Faro was a cash cow,” says Taggart.
Throughout these years, the miners continued to pile waste rock and tailings into the Rose Creek valley, expanding the tailings pond by building bigger and bigger dams. The mine closed twice due to low metal prices or corporate mismanagement (from 1982 to 1985 and again from 1993 to 1994) and experienced two strikes. The final owner, Anvil Range Mining, exhausted the Vangorda deposit in 1998, declared bankruptcy and walked away.
Twenty-two kilometres down a muddy, gravel road from the mine site, Faro Mayor Michelle Vainio proudly shows off the little town she calls home. “I’ve lived on the upper bench since 1994,” she says. “I’m in awe, every time I drive down the hill, of the beauty that surrounds me.”
Faro sits on three plateaus, or “benches,” overlooking the broad expanse of the Pelly River valley. Snow-capped mountains ring the horizon. Built as a company town and once home to 2,500 people, it now counts fewer than 400 residents. The single-family bungalows are all occupied, well kept with neatly trimmed lawns and flowerbeds. But most of the housing – four-plexes and six-plexes built for single miners – are abandoned, with bushes growing up through the paved driveways. Vainio says you can get a house for $25,000, and that the nicest homes go for around $100,000.
The mayor is Faro’s biggest booster, and is hesitant to discuss the mine for fear of having it reflect poorly on her town. “Should it have happened? Well, it did happen. Part of it is that they truly didn’t know all they know now. We’ll leave it at that. But they are committed to cleaning it up and that’s what’s important. They’ve done some pretty state-of-the-art studies and yes, it’s taking a lot longer than anybody thought, but I believe in the end they’re going to be doing it right.” Even now, Vainio insists she has no concern about the town’s water supply, which comes from an aquifer recharged by Vangorda Creek. “We have good, clean drinking water,” she says. “We’ve done our checks, and have for years, and have never had a problem.”
Indeed, since the Faro mine’s closure, Ottawa has paid for its care and maintenance, monitoring and treating water and inspecting structures. The current tab for that work is $7.2-million per year. In 2003, the federal and territorial governments, concluding that the mine would never reopen, entered an agreement with area First Nations – the Ross River Dena Council and the Selkirk First Nation – to develop a closure plan. That plan is still being prepared, with the lead agency being the Faro Mine Closure Office, a joint effort of the federal, territorial and First Nations governments.
Stephen Mead, the man tasked with leading the Faro Mine Closure Office, is a chatty, amiable Englishman. In his office in Whitehorse, surrounded by maps and photos of the Faro site, he says the tailings in the Rose Creek valley are the single largest headache – and the biggest expense. The area is “unlined,” meaning rainwater seeps through the tailings, picking up heavy metals along the way. On days when winds top 20 kilometres per hour, dust is lifted from the deposits and sprinkled on the surrounding mountains. The first and least-expensive remedy, he says, is to cover the tailings with two metres of rock and soil, and to plant vegetation on the cover. But water would still leach through, and for hundreds of years would have to be collected and treated before being released into the environment. The cost of the entire cleanup over that time would be about $450-million.
The other option is to liquefy the tailings and pump them back into the Faro pit. “Moving 55 million tonnes of tailings is not unheard of, but it’s not common,” says Mead. “There are places it’s been done, but it comes with a degree of impact and risk, and with a high price tag: $900-million.”
Many Yukoners are weighing in on which option should be chosen. One of them is Bob Van Dijken, an environmental activist who’s followed the Faro story for two decades. He worries Faro will eventually fall out of the limelight, and so prefers the latter, more permanent solution. “It may be cheaper to look at covers, but it’s far from a walk-away solution,” he says. “Priorities change and government funding changes. It gets difficult to ensure that the necessary capital investments continue for diversions, and things like that, which require long-term maintenance. If you move it once and for all into the pit, it’s harder to conceive of events that will possibly mobilize those tailings, whereas in the valley it’s not that difficult to conceive of events that might mobilize those tailings.”
But not everyone, even on the environmental side, agrees. Kathlene Suza, the Ross River First Nation representative on the Faro Mine Closure Office team, notes there’s a crack in the wall of the Faro pit, meaning placing the tailings there isn’t a walk-away solution, either. “In the beginning I was very much in favour of taking the tailings out of where they are and to the Faro pit, but over time as I learned more about what’s involved I changed my mind,” she says. “Now I think it’s best if it’s left where it is, cover it and prevent the dust from flying up on the mountains.”
The other big issue is the 320-million tonnes of waste rock – “overburden” – removed to get at the higher-value ore beneath. Three-quarters of it, amounting to some 40 times the mass of Egypt’s biggest pyramid, is at the Faro site. Chemical reactions occur when the waste rock, which contains sulphur, is exposed to water and oxygen. Sulphuric acid is produced, which can harm fish and aquatic wildlife, and which also dissolves poisonous heavy metals from the rock and delivers them to the groundwater. The amount of acid-rock drainage from the site is expected to increase for the next century.
The proposed solution is to contour the piles to make them more stable, then cover them with a metre of soil and revegetate them. “It’s a sizeable earth-moving project,” says Mead. “Irrespective of what we do, we’ll need to actively maintain that site for hundreds of years. That’s the bottom line. We’ll need to collect and treat water for hundreds of years.”
The environmental mess is not the only sad legacy of the Faro mine. While the property sits in the traditional territory of the Ross River Dena and upstream from the traditional territory of the Selkirk First Nation, and while various owners promised to employ local people, particularly First Nations, they all failed miserably in their efforts. “Many people here feel that we as Ross River people have never gained anything,” says Suza. “No jobs, no training, no wealth.” What they did get was the loss of the so-called “breadbasket” of the Dena. “Before the mine was developed the people from Ross would go down by raft and boat,” she says. “The mountains were very close to the river so access was easy. Up around Rose Creek they hunted for moose, caribou and sheep. It was very plentiful, food-wise.”
The mine also left the detritus of the boom-bust cycle, as mining projects so often do: Thirty years of a community trying to find its way, the empty houses in Faro, and the lingering questions about whether it was all worth it. “It was highly profitable through two of its iterations,” says Taggart, who’s done work toward developing a balance sheet for the mine, “but how much and where it went and how useful it was for Canadian society as a whole, we don’t know that.” We do know most of the ore went to Asia for smelting, equipment and fuel were imported from the south, and few royalties were ever paid to the territory. Some corporate tax was collected in the early years, and there were wages and taxes on wages. But Taggart says it’s unclear if the benefits that flowed from Faro outweigh its staggering, ongoing costs.
Mead, for his part, isn’t too worried about such questions. With unflagging optimism, he tries to put the sins of our ancestors in context. “The state of knowledge changes. In the ’60s and ’70s for all sorts of reasons this was thought to be an appropriate approach,” he says. “One thing I do feel fortunate about is that we have a government that has earmarked money to clean it up. There are a lot of places in the world that don’t have that luxury, that don’t have half a billion dollars to clean up a site.”
Suza, too, feels good about the cleanup, and says that, despite the history at Faro, her people are open to new mines. “We’re more involved now,” she says. “We welcome mining because it means employment. If we’re not employed by a mine we’re scraping the bottom of the barrel, money-wise.” But Van Dijken, the environmentalist, sounds a cautionary note: “There’s a saying in the Yukon: ‘You mine the stock market, you mine your investors, you mine the government. And if all else fails you have to go out and put a shovel in the ground.’”
The Faro Mine Closure Office has now had the closure options vetted by experts and is taking everything back to the communities for further consultation before choosing a strategy to recommend to stakeholders. It will then go to Ottawa for approval and funding. The current plan hopes remediation can begin in 2012 and end 40 years later. With care, maintenance and water treatment continuing for centuries, it will be a reminder for generations to come of the folly of the Faro mine.
