The former gold mine in Sudbury, that still leaks arsenic into Long Lake, brought its owners $63 million in wealth, but the cost of its closing and fixing has been left to taxpayers. The Kam Kotia project, near Timmins, Ontario, is considered one of the largest ecological rehabilitation attempts in the province, costing roughly $75 million. Then there is the simple danger of their design, as they are often no more than gaping holes in the ground left unsupervised or patrolled. The damage is significant enough that local residents are forced to turn to bottled water. Beyond this is the long-term damage caused by leaking arsenic, as is occurring in Sudbury, where it seeps into Long Lake. That cyanide is still trapped in the tailings that were disposed of on the land,” and continue to seep into the ground in unpredictable ways. “Especially with gold mines, the processing was with cyanide. It would be a complex and expensive mission to fix them. The infrastructure just kind of gets left there.” As environmental science and awareness progressed, it became apparent that these abandoned mines were silently damaging the land. “Somebody gets the right to put a well on a property and they get what they can, or they run out of money, whatever happens. Mines were opened and discarded in a simple manner. However, the large number of pre-1991 mines abandoned continue to cause environmental damage. Before any mine can be opened in Ontario, it must present closure plans that take environmental considerations into account. Since 1991, the regulations around mine closures have tightened considerably. There were no regulations like there are today,” explains OSPE Board Director and mineral industry expert Sue Tessier, P.Eng. Once they got what they wanted, they just left. “A lot of the mines were very small companies, or they might have been family run businesses. People knew the ground held fertile minerals underneath, but long-term environmental thinking was not a factor then. Long thought of as a backbone of the provincial economy, regulation was sparse in the early decades of Ontario’s settlement. On the other side of these major benefits to Ontario is the lingering problem of over 5,000 abandoned mines requiring renewed government and industry focus. Ontario is the largest producer of gold, platinum, and nickel in the country mining also produces large amounts of salt and materials for high-tech equipment. Mining is a massive force of the Ontario economy, employing 75,000 people and generating over $10 billion in revenue annually.
EER100 Engineering Employment Readiness for IEGs.OSPE’s Four Point Diversity & Inclusion Action Plan.
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