Mt. Polley Employees Going Back to Work
Williams Lake, B.C. – Good news for Mt. Polley employees.
United Steelworkers local 1-425 president Paul French says the majority of workers will be called back to work in short order.
“The majority will be back tomorrow and I believe the actual last day of recall will be December 1.”
He says the call-back will bring the mill up to full production but not the mine as Imperial Metals awaits word from the Ministry of Energy and Mines on all the necessary permits.
For example, French says the company “still has to deal with their water issues” and with issues surrounding “the buttress of the dam.”
He anticipates those approvals will be in place “any day now.” The tailings pond breach shut the mine down in August 2014 but was given the okay for a restricted restart of its operations last July.
The impact of the closure was enormous – throwing hundreds of people out of work while having a negative economic impact on the communities of Likely, Williams Lake and 100 Mile House.
Comments
An early Christmas present for some! Good to see.
Yes it is good to hear.. Guessing the tailings pond will be better built and monitored :)
I see this move as the company attempting to bully the government into giving them their water discharge permit. If they don’t have the permit (which they don’t), this move gives them even larger numbers of employees that will be laid off, with responsibility placed on the government by the company.
It is my hope that they get the permit if it is safe and environmentally sensible, but if it isn’t, that the government stands firm and forces the company to do what is best for the long term.
Crazy. I looked into the “water issue” with Mt. Polley’s last tailing impoundment facility. Among other insanely toxic contents, it housed over 5 tonnes of mercury, which are now in the “receiving environment”, meaning Hazeltine Creek, Quesnel River, Quesnel Lake, other waterways beyond, and in living organisms, like humans. It seems clear that BC will not force IMC to clean up this abomination. So this story wraps up the entire year and a half incident with a smile. Ah, good, everyone’s back to work. A trillion dollars worth of environmental destruction so that 3oo people can keep on truckin’.
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