I’ll be curious to see what staff in North Cowichan will write about all that black slag left in Crofton’s waterfront area by a copper-smelting facility that operated in the area in the early 1900s.
Council voted unanimously at its meeting on May 21 to direct staff to prepare a report outlining the history of the smelting operations and recommend actions the municipality could take to begin building a case for advocating to senior levels of government to remediate the area.
Coun. Christopher Justice, who put the motion forward, said Crofton’s waterfront and bay is a contaminated site as a result of the dumping of tens of thousands of tons of copper metal slag into the area when the smelting facility was in operation.
Not only has the black slag virtually ruined what was once white sand beach with a thriving shellfish population, the black sand with metallic chunks that currently covers Crofton's beach also comes with health risks more perilous than just cutting your feet on the metal.
The primary concern is the potential for inhalation of dust containing harmful metals, which can lead to respiratory issues and potentially increased risk of cancer.
Other concerns include skin irritation, eye irritation, and the possibility of contamination of water and soil.
My very first posting as a reporter in the 1980s was in a community called Baie Verte in northern Newfoundland that had depended on asbestos mining for the previous 30 years before dwindling world markets, as the world woke up to the mineral’s dangers, forced the mine’s closure.
But the thousands of asbestos miners that worked there over the years, and the members of the community they live in, have faced health issues related to airborne asbestos ever since.
The mine produced more than two million tonnes of asbestos between 1950 and 1985, and left behind more than 200 million tonnes of waste rock and tailings that were left exposed to the wind and the elements.
Asbestos, which had many qualities that were in high demand for awhile in an increasingly industrialized world, is dangerous because its microscopic fibres, when inhaled, can cause serious respiratory illnesses, including lung cancer, asbestosis, and mesothelioma.
When the asbestos mine, which was one of the largest asbestos mines in the country, first opened, the dangers of asbestos were not widely known (or maybe just not publicized) so fibres filled the air around the mine, and the dust blew everywhere, including into the adjacent community.
An extensive registry of more than 1,000 of Baie Verte’s former miners, compiled by health researchers from Memorial University of Newfoundland (my alma mater) and published in 2013, confirmed at least 109 of them had developed at least one kind of asbestos-related disease.
While some remediation efforts have been undertaken at the mine site since the operation shut down, the asbestos tailings have still not been completely cleaned up and the site is not considered fully environmentally stable.
The tailings remain on-site and some local residents continue to express concerns about potential dust and airborne-asbestos fibres.
In the years after the closure of the mine, a group of the local business people, many of whom were badly impacted with the closure of the mine, began advocating for a plan by an American company to ship asbestos, which was being taken out of buildings all over North America at the time as the health dangers became more clear, back to Baie Verte to be buried at the mine site.
The company, and the local business people who were backing the proposal, were selling it as a practical plan that would return the now out-of-favour asbestos back where it came from.
They promised that the operation would be fully monitored and controlled to ensure it was conducted in a safe manner, and there would be lots of jobs available to the many miners that had lost their employment at the mine.
I was just in my 20s at the time and maybe more than a little naive so I began buying into the belief that it would be a benign operation that would only be good for the community.
However, I’ve learned in my many years of reporting (and just living) since then that, if something seems too good to be true, it probably is.
In hindsight and with greater wisdom that only experience provides, I can see now that if the health issues at the mine were not being dealt with properly at the time, and haven’t been since, then the company’s promise that they could bring in asbestos and safely bury it with no health impacts on the workers and the community should have been taken with a serious grain of salt.
What finally decided me on the proposed project was the fact that Paul Shelley, the area’s representative in the province’s legislature at the time, had done an extensive poll of the area’s residents and they were about 80 per cent opposed to the plan.
Thankfully, with hardly any support in the area other than the business community, the project was dropped.
The people won the day on that one, as they should have.
