Learning from Mount Polley

Photo: Contributed

Jacinda Mack

Jacinda Mack, the mining response coordinator at the Northern Shuswap Tribal Council, will give a public presentation entitled, “Mount Polley Mine Disaster Response.”

The talk will take place at 5 p.m., Tuesday March 3 at Thompson Rivers University (TRU) in the Old Main Building, Room 3632.

Imperial Metals’ ‘Mount Polley Mine’ tailings pond breached on Aug. 4, 2014, releasing 25 million cubic meters of water and toxic slurry into Polley Lake, and causing one of the largest environmental disasters in modern Canadian history.

Jacinda Mack, who has experience protecting Indigenous land and advising on natural resources policy, will discuss the tailings disaster and the contamination of the Quesnel River Basin, as well as the Northern Secwepemc response to the breach and its clean-up.

Mack calls for accountability in the extractives industry and encourages communities to work toward maintaining water as a public trust.

For those in the Kamloops region, lessons learned from the Mount Polley disaster are particularly relevant with respect to the proposed KGHM-Ajax Gold-Copper mine.

The event is sponsored by the Federation of Post-Secondary Educators’ Human Rights and International Solidarity Committee and the TRU Faculty Association Human Rights Committee.