Dane Gibson
Northern News Services

NNSL (Apr 23/99) - City councillor Kevin O'Reilly says with more than 260,000 tonnes of arsenic dust underground, Indian Affairs minister Jane Stewart shouldn't be banking on somebody to step into the mess that is Giant Mine.

"I can't believe that anyone from the private sector is going to be willing to buy this property," O'Reilly, who is an environmentalist with a decade of experience monitoring Giant, said.

"There is between $250 million and $1 billion worth of environmental liability at Giant Mine. There would have to be a heck of a lot of gold in the ground to offset that cost."

He said right now, Giant is a "break-even operation" that requires a large infusion of capital to bring it up to modern day standards, both in terms of worker safety and for pollution control.

"Jane Stewart signed the last water license (to allow Giant to keep operating), at which time she set aside $400,000 for environmental cleanup. This, for what is potentially one of the worst mining disasters in Canada, and perhaps the entire world," O'Reilly said.

To put the danger in perspective, he said that a person ingesting an aspirin sized amount of arsenic would die. There's enough arsenic under Giant to kill everyone on the planet.

He points out that the main thing keeping a Giant Mine disaster at bay is the pumps that keep ground water out of the arsenic-filled chambers.

"As long as the pumps are kept running, there's probably no immediate danger," O'Reilly said.

"We also know if those pumps quit for any reason, six months later arsenic trioxide would be leaching into Great Slave Lake and the Mackenzie River Basin, which is not acceptable.

"I'm not prepared to take the risk that those pumps (will always operate.) I'm not prepared to take that risk for my grandchildren and future generations to come."

Dene National Chief, Bill Erasmus, has called for DIAND to deal with the arsenic immediately.

"Each day that the mill at Giant Mine operates, more arsenic is pumped underground. At what point are we going to say that it's time to stop adding to an already existing environmental nightmare?" Erasmus said.

At recent NWT Water Board hearings in Yellowknife, the Dene Nation and Yellowknives Dene First Nation said they wanted to be involved in all aspects of clean up and monitoring of mine sites.

"We are concerned that only $400,000 of the $7 million owed in security deposit has been collected to date from Royal Oak. We are encouraging DIAND to enforce all regulations and to collect the remainder of the deposit," Erasmus said.

"We understand that there are a number of options available for dealing with the estimated 260,000 tonnes of arsenic. DIAND has stated that all of the existing options for clean up are expensive, all would take many years, and all require new technology. We need to stop pumping arsenic underground and begin cleaning up what's already down there," Erasmus said.