Nine days into what’s going to be years of investigation, the provincial government is in a no-win position when it comes to dam safety. There is widespread suspicion at this point that cutbacks years ago set the tone for less stringent regulation which may have contributed to the catastrophic tailings-pond breach in the Cariboo.
If that proves true, the BC Liberals will pay a stiff price.
But the alternative is even worse. What if inspections and regulations met reasonable expectations? What if the Mount Polley tailings-pond dam was monitored adequately by the company and government and still failed? That would suggest that no one knows what is going on in B.C.’s dams. It’s just as dismaying to contemplate that prospect as it is to wonder about the implications of the huge torrent that washed out of the tailings pond on B.C. Day.
The official word at this point — subject to exhaustive scrutiny later — is that the mine was “generally compliant” with permit conditions. The government said Friday the Energy Ministry did 16 geotechnical inspections since the mine opened in 1995. Nothing was identified that required a work order.
Officials also inspected in May 2014, after a report that water was spilling over the top. They concluded that was not the case, but that the water level was above the permit requirements. There was less than a metre of freeboard, the distance from the water level to the crest. The level returned to normal and the freeboard was 2.4 metres when last measured, just before the breach. Other data from just before the breach show no change in internal water pressure. That’s company information that was supplied to the government.
So the early information suggests the dam was being monitored and assessed by the company and the government, and there were no indications of any problems. Then it abruptly breached. That’s just as big a problem as having government ignore the thing completely.
Particularly since the ministries involved had an important lesson just four years ago that prompted a big revamp of the dam-inspection regime. That was the failure of the Testalinden Dam near Oliver in 2010. It was a private, shoddily maintained irrigation dam that failed and created a debris torrent that wreaked havoc on some downstream properties. Only a handful were damaged, but the government still had to pay $9 million to cover losses.
The deputy solicitor general did a review and found a consistent pattern of concerns and warnings about the dam going back 50 years, about which not much of anything was done. More pertinently, he also did a broad analysis of the oversight on B.C.’s 1,636 regulated dams and recommended numerous improvements. The government accepted all of them and promised to implement them.
The official response to the report cited a fundamental re-emphasis and priority on dam safety. There was a rapid dam-assessment project, an updated dam regulation and database and new policies on record-keeping and information-sharing. There was additional training of ministry staff and dam operators, and four additional full-time equivalent jobs were added to the department concerned.
Also created was an annual dam-safety report. Three have been issued since then, and they all are all reassuring reports about improved monitoring, increased audits, greater public awareness and higher staffing levels. The one filed last year highlighted “improved monitoring, increased audits and dam-owner training.”
And now this.
A brief history of B.C. dam failures going back more than 100 years on a government website suggests the Mount Polley breach is the worst ever. It happened despite the countless engineering advances over the years. And more currently, it happened after four years of concentrated attention to the issue of dam safety, following the failure near Oliver. That’s what accounts for the prevailing attitude of incomprehension as to how it happened.
It will take more than a deputy minister’s review to establish the facts this time around. Any and all probes into the breach will have to be completely independent, given all that’s gone before.
lleyne@timescolonist.com
twitter.com/leyneles
