Mt Polley clean-up costs top $73 million

Phase one of the Mt. Polley clean-up has been completed with the provincial government spending $6 million dollars to date.

Minister of Environment, Mary Polak says they will seek to recover whatever costs they’re entitled to.

“Some of our costs such as investigations are not recoverable because they fall within our regular duty but we will be seeking to recover our costs for salary over time, sampling costs, and other expenses related to that.”

Imperial Metals, which owns the Mt. Mining Polley Mining Corporation meanwhile has estimated that they have spent $67 million dollars to date.

Polak says phase one was completed by the end of June and add that it is very difficult to say when Hazeltine Creek will ever be back to the way it was before.

“This is going to take decades to really get to a place where we see full re-mediation and so it will be sometime to come, but you can see from the video that change is already very significant.”

Phase two which will continue to focus on re-mediating the impacts of the breach through summer 2016 and beyond, will include an ecological and human health risk assessment.

The province has created the following video showing the extent of the remediation work completed over the past year;