Yellowknife (May 04/05) - On summer days you can still see the wind whip dust devils of arsenic over the tailings ponds and beyond, say a trio of former workers at Giant Mine.

That's only one example of why Don McNenly, along with former Giant workers, Norman Plante and Dale Johnston, think residents ought to be more worried about the arsenic sitting above ground than the stuff buried beneath it.

Norm Plante: Helped shovel arsenic trioxide into barrels.

They say the tailings ponds are chock full of arsenic trioxide - dumped there by the truckload for decades, not to mention the steel cans stuffed with asbestos and cyanide scattered in shallow graves throughout the mine site.

There is also an arsenic chamber underground they say had its top blown out in a blasting accident and later filled in with loose, crushed rock. The collapsed chamber is next to an open pit by the Ingraham Trail.

And not least of all, the mine buildings themselves: the cottrel where arsenic-bearing gas from the roaster crystallized onto electrical conductors, and the baghouses where arsenic dust was collected after it cooled.

They say those buildings are stuffed to the brim with arsenic crystals so thick it's like walking into some absurd, fairy tale palace.

"The biggest concern to me right now is they're going to be freezing this stuff underground, but you don't hear nothing about all the stuff up on the surface - inside the roaster, the cottrel, all the flues," said McNenly, who worked at the mine from 1967 to 1999.

"There's thousands of tonnes of it there - pure arsenic trioxide."

News that the federal and territorial governments reached an agreement last March on surface clean-up has left McNenly and his former co-workers skeptical.

They doubt either government is aware of how contaminated the mine really is, or if the contaminants can be dealt with effectively.

A report based on interviews with Giant Mine employees in 1999 said it was likely 3,000 to 13,000 barrels of arsenic trioxide were dumped into the tailings ponds over the years - a serious regulatory no-no according to rules dating back to the earliest days of the mine.

But the three workers say there was probably a lot more dumped into the mine's three tailings ponds under all its previous owners than was suggested in the report.

"Three days after I got there we had to shovel about 300 barrels of dust," said Plante, who started working at Giant in 1969 and stayed until 2000.

"There's spots where they buried asbestos and arsenic. There's some all over the property."

The report states that the number of barrels may have been smaller because arsenic spills were vacuumed, and then discharged into the underground chambers.

The former workers say, however, that baghouse spills were never discharged underground.

That's because the machine used to connect the vacuum truck to the chambers never worked.

It's still sitting outside the baghouse compartment, rusting and unused.

"We used it once," said Plante. "It plugged up and that was it. When we had the vacuum truck, we use to vacuum up spills in different areas, and then we would take the vacuum truck out and dump it, just the dust itself, no barrels or anything," added McNenly.

Spills and other mishaps in the mine's eight baghouses happened frequently -- about once a month -- they say.

When the conveyor belts broke down, the arsenic dust poured out of the hoppers "almost like water," said McNenly.

They say government mine inspections, meanwhile, were a joke. Management was usually given the heads up when a Worker's Compensation Board inspector was coming.

"They didn't look for environmental stuff," said McNenly.

"They just looked at whether there was a hose across a bloody walkway, or a guard on a pulley or a conveyor belt."

There was never any sign of Environment Canada or any other environmental inspection agency out there, they say.

"After the (1992) strike the cottrel and baghouse was a disaster," said McNenly.

"The dust was just pouring out of there. I tried to tell mine inspectors. They didn't listen to me at all."

Workers in the baghouses often developed severe rashes and had to be pulled off the job.

Arsenic trioxide is rarely fatal when inhaled or brought into contact with the eyes or skin, but it can be deadly in doses as little as one milligram if ingested.

Blasted a hole

Dale Johnston, who started work at Giant in 1974, said while serving as the mine's union president in either 1988 or 1989, an incident occurred where mining crews accidentally blasted a hole into one of the mine's arsenic chambers next to the B-1 pit, near the Ingraham Trail and across the road from the smoke stack.

"They blasted right into the arsenic stope, and then they dumped rock into it to cover it up," said Johnston.

"That's the one that's 50 feet from the surface."

It was also common knowledge among baghouse staff, said Plante, that a large amount of arsenic dust and grit from the roaster was dumped into a pit behind the cottrel during the 1950s, before the baghouse was built, and buried under crushed rock.

"They just covered it up, that's it," said Plante.

"This stuff isn't just going to sit there. If it gets wet or it rains, it's going to go down into the creek."

Johnston and McNenly said they raised their concerns about surface clean-up at a DIAND public hearing two years ago, but haven't heard back from them.

"At the time, DIAND and their consultant group said they were going to form a committee of former employees who were familiar and aware of the arsenic," said Johnston.

"I'm still waiting."

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