Government officials are looking into a recent tailings dust flare-up at Hudbay to confirm whether particles left company property and determine how repeat episodes can be averted.
George Bihun, environmental project officer for the Saskatchewan Ministry of Environment, said his department will examine weather and air-quality data from the time of the Feb. 28 incident as part of its review.
“We’re looking to understand [the incident] a little better and understand how [Hudbay] can prevent this from occurring,” he said in a phone interview Monday from his Prince Albert office.
The outcome of the review may be that Hudbay has to operate the tailings pond in a different manner, Bihun said.
He said the Ministry has asked Hudbay to obtain and fast-track air-quality results from nearby Creighton for the time frame of the incident.
Those results will come from an air-sampling unit, located on the roof of Creighton Community School, that Hudbay is required to monitor.
Results will reveal whether tailings dust reached the community during the incident. There is currently no indication that happened, as both Hudbay and its largest union have said none of the tailings particles left the company’s tailings pond area.
Bihun said the Ministry will also refer to weather data to see whether winds were blowing toward Creighton at the time of the incident.
He said this is the first time he is aware of that a dusting incident at Hudbay involved dust from the zinc tailings portion of the tailings pond.
The zinc tailings gave the cloud of dust observed over the tailings pond a red tint visible in a photo and video of the incident supplied to The Reminder by a concerned citizen.
Bihun said Hudbay is required to take steps to control tailings pond dust as part of its governmental authorization.
He hopes to have the review of the incident complete within a week or two.
Asked whether it was fair to call the tailings dust “toxic,” Bihun said he wasn’t sure if that was the right term. He said the dust “should stay on [Hudbay] property” and “should not be what people breathe all the time” because the particles contain metals.
Rob Winton, vice-president, Manitoba Business Unit for Hudbay, told The Reminder last week that company personnel and contractors took action to mitigate the “dusting event.”
He said the incident stemmed from weather conditions over the previous three days, which saw a melt of surface tailings followed by a sharp drop in temperatures and 50-plus km/h winds.
The result was sublimation – ice transforming from a solid to a gas – at the surface, which exposed fine particles that were picked up by the wind, Winton said.
Bihun agreed that such weather changes present “a really bad combination” for the tailings pond as material “dries right up and the fine particles blow quite readily.”
Winton also said Hudbay reached out to a Creighton resident who told the company it did not look like there was any community impact from the incident.
In 2015, Hudbay announced plans to spend some $5 million over two years to increase storage capacity at the tailings pond.
Tailings are the slurried material left over after minerals are removed from ore.
