My first week on a real journalism job in Yellowknife, 20 years ago, my boss took me to see the old Giant Mine site. It wasn’t among the tourist traps of the Northwest Territories, but he felt this was a place I needed to understand if I was going to report on industry in the North. Inside, the crew quarters looked like Pompeii–everything from papers to work boots left in place, though scattered–but when we started climbing the decayed stairs inside the head frame, they were so rickety even our twenty-something bravado met its limits.
Last month, Canadian Geographic called me up and asked me to investigate the Northern mine’s legacy after I wrote a feature for them on Ontario’s Ring of Fire mineral region. Now, after 10 years away from Yellowknife and 20 years since that early magazine job led me to Giant Mine, I’m going back to see what all has changed.
Gold mining was the original reason our city existed, and diamond mining was a reason it endured. But Giant Mine, in particular, was a gold mine that left a complex legacy in the form of 237,000 tons of arsenic trioxide. At the time I visited the site, it was loosely piled in the rough-blasted chambers degrading under our feet, with water seeping in and out. 237,000 tons is enough trioxide to kill the world’s population several times over, and it sat squarely within city limits. The permafrost that had frozen it in place for decades had melted when they added open pits to the mine.
The arsenic is very water soluble. One unusually powerful Spring freshet would have flooded the caverns, overflowed into a nearby river and reached its tentacles far into Great Slave Lake, the deepest lake in North America and the 10th largest in the world, by area.
This feeling of Giant Mine being a potentially malevolent force was nothing new. The mine, throughout its life cycle, was the focal point of both industry and resentment. The indigenous group on whose traditional territory it sits—the Yellowknives Dene First Nations—see it as a cautionary tale for how not to do development. “They took the gold and gave us the shaft”, in more ways than one. In the 1950s, before scrubbers were put into the smoke stacks to filter out the airborne arsenic trioxide and sulphur dioxide, locals remember there being a light dusting of black on top of the snow. Two Dene kids ate the snow and died. The company that then owned the mine showed up to offer the parents $1,000.
There was also dramatic labour conflict in the 90s. An acrimonious lock-out culminated in a bomb blast killing nine strikebreakers and replacement workers. A union member was convicted of nine counts of second degree murder and spent 15 years in prison.
There is no permanent solution yet to the problem lurking under the city. The government has been freezing it back in place using glycol systems similar to those you would use in a hockey rink, as well as thermal syphons, which use a passive process to pump heat out of the permafrost.
In a time when Canada is fast-tracking a bunch of mega-projects to compensate for the economic damage of our political reality, it’s a good time to review what the true cost-benefit looks like when you factor in remediation. In this case, it looks like we’ll be babysitting that trioxide in perpetuity.
Image: Wikimedia Commons
