A mine, a northern community, and 237,000 tonnes of arsenic

Jordan Mining has been an integral part of Canada’s resource economy forever. Today, we know more than we used to about the dangers of resource extraction and the byproducts that come with it. And so we hope our governments are making wiser decisions with that knowledge. That’s because some of us are still living with decisions made decades ago, still living with the threat of deadly poison next door from a mine that was shut down more than 20 years ago. I’m not exaggerating this threat. Today, at the site of a mine near Yellowknife, there is enough arsenic buried to kill everyone in this country and many more. The arsenic is just sitting there, hopefully never to be exposed to humans. After all, enough people have already suffered its effects during the half century the mine was operational. We are only now beginning to figure out how to compensate them for that. So this is the story of that mine, that community, and that arsenic, 237000 tonnes of it. How it got there and what happens next.

I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. This is The Big Story. Eva Holland is a freelance journalist based in Whitehorse. She covers stories across Canada’s North. She covered this one in the Walrus. Hi Eva.

Eva Holland Hey, Jordan.

Jordan Why don’t we start with the basics? Tell me about Giant Mine. What was it? Where was it?

Eva Holland Giant Mine was a gold mine on the outskirts of Yellowknife. It went into production, meaning it started producing gold at the very end of the 1940s. And it closed in 1999 when the ownership declared bankruptcy. So since the early oughts, it’s been sort of under the purview of the federal government. And it was a major player in Yellowknife sort of gold rush years. It was one of two major gold mines in the city, major landmark, and kind of one of the drivers of the Yellowknife economy for 50 years.

Jordan How did the process that it used in mining actually work? I ask because what actually happened in that mine is really important to the rest of what we’re going to discuss.

Eva Holland Right. So gold can be found in some different types of rock in the world. And the rock around Yellowknife is called Greenstone. And the gold was held, I guess you would say, within a substance called Arsenopyrite. There are different methods to extract different types of gold from rock, and in this case, they roasted it. And the byproduct was arsenic trioxide, which is the arsenic we know as a poison. Madame Bovary Arsenic and Old Lace, the famous arsenic.

Jordan What do we know now about the danger that the mine caused while it was operational? And maybe when did we begin to suspect? Tell me the story of how we realized what was happening around the mine. So this was one of the things that surprised me in my reporting. I sort of assumed that people realize the danger later, but the danger was realized immediately. Giant Mine expelled its arsenic trioxide byproduct as a dust through a smokestack. The hope was that the smokestack was tall enough that it would be dispersed widely enough that it wouldn’t poison anyone. But within weeks of the roasting process beginning, people were being hospitalized, wildlife was dying, livestock was dying. And eventually a young boy did die. In the spring of 1951, I believe, a toddler died from they believe drinking water melted from snowmelt that was covered in arsenic dust.

Jordan So what did they do about that? If they realized that so soon after opening, surely they must have made, at the very least, some adjustments to the process to try to make it safer for the surrounding area?

Eva Holland Yeah, eventually. A government official called for the roasting to be stopped immediately in December 1949. And that’s sort of the moment that I opened my story with, a moment that surprised me because I hadn’t realized the call to shut down had been so explicit and so immediate. But they were overruled. And throughout the 1950s, a series of pollution control mechanisms were implemented at the mine that reduced the amount of arsenic coming up the smokestack. So instead, they captured the arsenic dust in what was called a bag house, and it’s literally a room full of arsenic, from what I understand. And then they buried the captured arsenic underground in the mines old unused chambers. So instead of letting it spray out the smokestack, they stuck it in their basement, effectively.

Jordan Sounds super safe. And we’ll talk about what happened to that arsenic in a little bit here. But first, the people around the mine who suffered the most from the dust, tell me some of the stories that you gathered and what this place did to them.

Eva Holland So Yellowknife is on a bit of a Peninsula between two bays, and the tip of the Peninsula is an area called Latham Island, and that’s where the community of N’dilo is, which is one of the primary communities for the Yellowknives Dene First Nation. And it is directly across the Bay from the site of Giant Mine, which is sort of off the Peninsula, over on what you might think of as kind of the main shore, sort of facing N’dilo across a relatively small body of water. And so the community in N’dilo, Yellowknives First Nation were the people most at risk, most directly affected by the arsenic. The toddler who was killed was a member of the First Nation. The government documents I found only refer to that toddler. But the First Nation remembers other sort of suspicious deaths in this period as well. So they were sort of the primary recipients of the risk or the danger from the arsenic.

And the other group was the workers at the mine. If you talk to family members of people who worked at Giant in those years, there’s a lot of deaths from lung cancer and other related illnesses.

Jordan This is maybe a dumb question, considering that there were concerns raised immediately. But what did we know about the long term effects of arsenic residue and this kind of stuff? There’s one thing where people drink water with arsenic in it and obviously can get sick and die. There are others that don’t make themselves known over decades. What was the scientific consensus if there was one at the time they were making these decisions?

Eva Holland The emphasis at the time was really, like you said, on transmission by water. The concern was drinking water. And so that was why the town was less affected or largely unaffected because it was water from snowmelt, untreated water that was, they believed, carrying the risk. And so that’s why it was primarily wildlife and communities that relied on snowmelt that were affected as opposed to tap water.

There was a limited understanding, I think, at the time, of air pollution and a limited understanding of sort of long term carcinogens. So arsenic was well understood to be like an acute poison. But the mechanisms of sort of air pollution and carcinogens weren’t yet super well understood in the 50s is my understanding.

Jordan What about the culture in general around mining and resource extraction in the north? Back in that time, you mentioned this was a part of the gold rush. It must have been a scramble to get these things up and running and get the gold out of the dirt.

Eva Holland Yeah. The gold around Yellowknife had actually been sort of prospected and discovered before the war. And these big mines were sort of in the works in the 30s, and then they were basically postponed by World War II and then revisited after the war and got online pretty quickly. There wasn’t much hesitation back then, I don’t think. I don’t know if they had the kind of environmental review boards we have in place now. I’m not going to say it was the Wild West because it was the 1950s. It’s not without oversight. Obviously. There was this Department of Health official inspecting the mines and saying this isn’t good, but nobody listened to him. And whether people would listen to his equivalent now is, I guess, an open question and varies depending on where you live and the climate. Certainly we’re still fighting about where we put mines and how safe they are for communities today.

Jordan That’s very fair. And we’ll get to the legacy of the mine today and why it was eventually shut down decades later. But first, you were specifically drawn to this mine and this story why?

Eva Holland My mom lived at Giant. She was born in Yellowknife and lived on the Giant mine site for the early years of her life, I think for the first six or seven years of her life. So I had always heard stories about Giant growing up. And when I moved to the north myself, she told me more about it. I lived in Yellowknife briefly when I was working for Up Here magazine. Other than that, I’ve been in Whitehorse since I’ve been in the north. But I was curious about it always because it was this place that my mom remembered as sort of a paradise. She had very fond memories of living a Giant, sort of just packs of kids roaming around the landscape freely on this mine site. Sort of a small community, really tight knit, beautiful setting on this kind of Rocky shield country shore of Great Slave Lake. It was kind of like the happiest time in her childhood. So there was a real dichotomy for me between her memories of Giant and what I learned about it when I was briefly living in Yellowknife in 2012, which is when I first started to learn about the arsenic.

Jordan What did people like your mom and I guess your grandfather and family at the time understand about the dangers of living on the mine site and near the mine site. Again, you mentioned there were concerns raised fairly early on. Do you know if any of that was ever discussed in your family?

Eva Holland I know that my mom and her sisters were told not to eat the snow. I think specifically the phrase was don’t eat the yellow snow because that means something different to us. But the yellow snow at Giant was snow that had been dusted with arsenic. They were told not to eat the snow and not to eat the berries that they would find around the mine and not to drink the Lake water. But as I quote my Aunt Sheila and the piece, of course, we were kids, we did eat the snow and we did eat the berries. So I think there was some awareness about that direct transmission. But I don’t have any sense that they would have been thinking about it in a bigger picture way, beyond those acute sources of sort of direct ingestion of arsenic.

Jordan Down the road. How did those years living on the Mind site impact your family, both health wise for your mom and grandfather who lived there, but also in terms of the legacy of the site and your family? I mean, it’s clear from your piece that you’ve thought a lot about this.

Eva Holland So I can’t know for sure. But my grandmother died at 45 of cancer a couple of years after they left Giant, and my grandfather died a few years after her from heart disease. And so it’s at least possible that the arsenic exposure contributed to them both dying young. It’s not knowable. Epidemiology can’t assign causes to individual cases, but it’s possible that their lives were shortened by their time at Giant, and their deaths changed the whole trajectory of my family. My mom was orphaned. It was the biggest two events of her life. It changed my life eventually. It changed everything. And it’s why I don’t know anything about my grandfather, and I’ve never been able to ask him about his life at Giant. I knew that he was an engineer at Giant, but I didn’t know until I started working on this story how directly involved he was in the arsenic emissions and the emissions control process.

Jordan What did eventually happen to propel the shutting down of the mine and when and why.

Eva Holland So if Canadians are aware of Giant, that might be because it was the site of one of the nastiest labor disputes in Canadian history. In the early 90s, there was a strike at Giant. It was sort of ambiguous if there was a strike or a lockout. I believe the workers were voting to strike on the same day that the Pinkerton Guards arrived and shut them out of the property. At any rate, it was a nasty, nasty strike. It culminated in the murder of nine replacement workers with a bomb placed underground. And the, American at that time, ownership of Giant ultimately declared bankruptcy in 1999 after sort of winding down post strike, and walked away, and left the federal government with the cleanup bill.

Jordan Is it fair to say then that it was not, in the end, the arsenic that caused this mine to close?

Eva Holland Oh, yeah. No, the arsenic was not the issue.

Jordan Once the mine closed, how long did it take before the federal government kind of looked at what had happened here? And I know our federal government does not exactly have a long, great history of acknowledging damage caused to First Nation people. But what, if anything, was acknowledged about the arsenic and the harm to the Dene First Nations? What did they do about it?

Eva Holland I think the acknowledgment has started to come well after the cleanup has begun. I’m not certain exactly when the sort of formal process at the mine site began, but it’s been ongoing for well over a decade in any case that the site has been sort of, not walled off exactly, it’s a huge site, but sort of set aside for a remediation process. The acknowledgement of the harm is a more recent phenomenon, and I saw my first news story about it in March 2021. CBC North ran a story saying there’s a formal negotiation process underway between Yellowknives First Nation and the federal government for a formal federal apology of the type that we’ve become familiar with, the Prime Minister stands up and apologizes on behalf of the nation on the record for the harm done. That was the impetus for my story, really, was the news that there was potential federal apology underway, and that will come with compensation in various forms, as well as the ongoing remediation of the site.

Jordan Speaking of the ongoing remediation of the site, as we speak, how safe is the mine site? When might it be safe? Like how’s cleanup gone?

Eva Holland Define safe. There’s 237000 tons of arsenic powder stored underground at Giant Mine. When I first came to Yellowknife in 2012, I was told that that’s enough arsenic to kill everyone on the planet. That’s sort of one of those things we say that doesn’t really mean anything because it would have to be evenly distributed to seven and a half billion people or whatever it is we’re up to for that to be the outcome. It’s a lot of arsenic. It’s a vast quantity of arsenic. It takes a quarter teaspoon or something of arsenic trioxide to kill a person. It’s not a lot. So there’s a huge mountain of poison underground at Giant. And the long term plan for the moment is to freeze it in place and just keep it down there until there’s a better plan.

There used to be some uses for us arsenic trioxide. It used to be used in things like pressure treated wood. And actually, one of the reasons why Giant stored theirs underground rather than trying to sell it is because they had so much that they would have single handedly tanked the market for arsenic trioxide. I believe they looked into it in the 80s. So there’s no real use for it and no way to neutralize it and sort of make it not poison in our current technology is my understanding. So the plan is to freeze it underground, keep the freezing apparatus going, I think they’re on a 100 year plan right now. And some people in Yellowknife will say, well, 100 years isn’t enough, because in 100 years, there will still be 237000 tons of arsenic underground. But that’s the plan for the moment, is to install this very complex, massive infrastructure to keep the underground frozen.

Jordan This is an audio program, but I wish you and our listeners could see just, like how wide my eyes got when you said, oh, we’re just going to freeze it and leave it underground until we have some earthly way to deal with this, possibly at some potential time in the future. What are we talking about here? What happens if the freezing apparatus breaks down?

Eva Holland Yeah, the worst case scenario is some sort of massive rupture, like a seismic event or I found some documents in the 50s that were like, we’ll put it in the permafrost, which seemed like brutally ironic to read, in 2021.

Jordan The permafrost will never melt!

Eva Holland Right? What could go wrong? It’s permafrost. Yeah. It’s a long term problem that does not have a long term solution yet, and that is kind of haunting for people who spend too much time thinking about it. I think a lot of people don’t like to think about it too much, particularly if they live in the area. The worst case scenario involves serious poisoning of the landscape in the Northwest Territories, at a minimum.

Jordan What about the Dene First Nations? Are they still living right next to this? They would, I assume, be the ones most at risk from, again, these hopefully unlikely but still possible and really bad events.

Eva Holland Yes, they would be most affected. And they view themselves as sort of the caretakers of the site and the region rightly so, and they are actively agitating for a plan, for a role in the current planning. They are involved in what’s happening in terms of the clean up process. There are various stakeholders, to use the terminology, that are involved in the remediation, but they rightly believe that since they have the most invested, they should be front and center in the process of trying to deal with this site, that they should not just bear the costs and the risks, but also any benefits that might be coming and some leadership, some responsibility for decision making and guiding the process.

Jordan Yeah, that seems fair to me. I don’t mean to harp on this because there may well be nothing to do right now, but the actual process for potentially detoxifying the arsenic, you mentioned we’re waiting on science. Is the federal government working on it? Is anybody working on it? Do we have any idea that this is a problem we can solve or what?

Eva Holland Yeah, there’s this really cool organization in Yellowknife and Called the Giant Mine Oversight Board, that’s sort of an independent entity with contributions from the First Nation, the city, other concerned citizens groups, that sort of thing. And they are helping to fund research into a longer term solution. There is work being done on how to neutralize arsenic trioxide. I don’t know how long term this sort of timeline is. The most common comparison I found in my research is to nuclear waste sites. And the sort of sobering thing that I was told is with the nuclear waste site, you only have to keep it sealed for 10,000 years. But arsenic doesn’t have a half life. So there’s no waiting this one out. There’s only figuring out something better eventually.

Jordan Eva, thank you so much for this. I feel like I learned a lot and now I have a new thing to worry about before I go to bed.

Eva Holland Well, we all need more things to worry about in this day and age, so I’m glad to give you more to lie awake pondering.

Jordan Eva Holland writing in The Walrus. That was The Big Story. If you want more, head to , find us on Twitter at thebigstory FPN. Write to us hello at thebigstorypodcast.ca. Let us know what you think. If you are listening to this podcast in your favourite podcast player, please do give us a rating. Give us a review. We wait to read them every week.

Thanks for listening. I’m Jordan Heath-Rawlings. Have a great weekend and we’ll talk on Monday.

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