Lorne Fitch, P. Biol.
Who asked you?
Does a mountain miss its creeks? The question just hung there as Carl Hunt and I, retired provincial biologists, toured coal mines in the Coal Branch. Carl, the former regional fisheries biologist based in Edson, has seen most of the era of coal strip mining, the blasting apart of mountains, and the loss of streams from mining since the early 1970s in the McLeod River watershed.
Creaky of joints but clear of memory, he was initially reluctant to view the ravaged landscapes. It’s like the title from one of Thomas Wolfe’s novels, “You Can’t Go Home Again.” You cannot physically or emotionally return to the past, how things used to be, because time moves on and everything changes. Returning to view what has become of intact watersheds is emotionally challenging. It is one of many scars biologists bear, based on long histories of watching landscapes and watersheds unravel with industrial brutality.
Very little of the workings of the Luscar/Gregg River mines and the Cheviot Mine are visible from either Highway 40 or the Grave Flats Road. Liberal use of no trespassing signs under the provisions of the mineral surface leases means you cannot access and see much of what they have done to your land.
It takes a flight on Goggle Earth, or maybe the use of a chartered helicopter, or a drone to see the extent of these mines. Even the tiny glimpses one gets from the road is enough to form questions about the scale and impacts of coal mining.
Breathtaking is the best neutral expression of the scale of these mines and their disturbance footprint. The combined Gregg River and Luscar mines extend over 20 kilometres of extreme topography where coal has been blasted and clawed out of at least 18 pits of variable size. Steep topography is typical over the ten kilometers of the Cheviot Mine, with at least eight discernible mine pits. For both mines, some of the excavations have been partially or fully backfilled with overburden, but many of the bigger, deeper pits will remain as a visible legacy of coal extraction.
Every tonne of recoverable coal took the removal of eight to ten tonnes of overburden. It was estimated that around ten million tonnes of rock overburden were blasted, excavated, and moved for every year of mine operations. Only a fraction found its eventual way back to the original excavations.
As a result, drainage courses, streams, and rivers were either diverted, truncated, channelized, or buried beneath overburden, irrevocably changing the drainage patterns of the watershed.
Based on the hydrographic layer of the Alberta Energy Regulator’s coal mine map viewer, the Luscar/Gregg River mines impacted an estimated 40 streams, stream tributaries, and seasonal drainages. For the Cheviot Mine at least 20 watercourses were similarly affected. As Carl observed, many of the named streams have ceased to exist, in part or in whole, as ecologically functional systems, capable of sustaining aquatic life and fish.
Eventually, often sooner than later, the coal runs out, or the price drops, and it becomes uneconomical to mine. But first comes the hype, the breathless enthusiasm for economic development, and the venal sin of over-promotion. Then, swirling Coriolis forces lead to mine approvals.
When reality sinks in, after the mountains have been razed, the valleys filled with overburden, and the streams, the ones left, are devoid of fish, it’s too late to reassess the decision. The bold prospects, the inflated returns, and the exaggerated claims of environmental protection are seen in the clear light of lost landscapes and watersheds.
The unseen, although measurable legacy of these mines is the toxic stew of chemicals that contaminate the waters pouring off the mine slopes. Heavy sediment loads are often the carriers of other contaminants. Extensive monitoring of the McLeod River and its tributaries provide unequivocal evidence that aquatic life is being negatively impacted by selenium of mine origins. All that shattered rock, thousands of tonnes, will continue to leach selenium and other pollutants into the watershed for the foreseeable and perhaps the unforeseeable future.
These mines are now in the “reclamation” phase. For all the promises of mitigation, returning the land to an “equivalent, productive” state, the work has most of the hubris of attempting to glue a smashed egg back together. It’s prohibitively expensive to move overburden more than once, so reclamation is smoothing out some of the bumps, turning rubble green with imported agronomic species, and adding some cosmetic erosion control features.
Reclamation will never, in human time, restore the wild to a mined landscape. At best it might, sometime, resemble something trying to remember what it once was before the brutal removal of the essential system of ecological and hydrological pieces.
Weighing the future costs and liabilities against 15 to 20 years of production with minimal royalties to the province seems an uneven bargain. At the Mountain Park cemetery is a one-way rotary phone which supposedly connects the living with the dead through the wind. Using the phone to get answers to why turning mountains upside down for such a fleeting economic return provided the same response as trying to communicate with the dead.
Even the provincial regulators sometimes see the light. Carl recalled a field trip of the Energy Resources Conservation Board (the precursor to the Alberta Energy Regulator) to the Luscar mine. One board member who had fished in the Coal Branch as a child, was emotionally overwhelmed upon seeing the destruction of Cabin Creek, a trout stream tributary to the Gregg River. He left the group and sat in the truck the rest of the tour. I wonder what the result would be if trout sat on some of these regulatory bodies, or at least people who spoke for trout instead of the glittering economic tinsel of development.
Our Coal Branch drive had us see-sawing from seemingly intact landscapes and streams to the Mordor-like mine sites. It was sobering to try and reconcile these irreconcilable differences. It was a reminder that mined mountains cannot be glued back together, impacted watersheds cannot be reconnected, pollution cannot be stemmed, and lost native trout populations cannot be revived. All we could do was mourn for the mountains.
For those without conscience, without a stewardship ethic, who would turn mountains upside down, hack down forests with trees older than Canada, plus bury and contaminate streams under waste rock and mud, the sentiment of asking whether a mountain misses its creeks has no currency.
Lorne Fitch is a Professional Biologist, a retired Fish and Wildlife Biologist and a former Adjunct Professor with the University of Calgary. He is the author of Streams of Consequence, Travels Up the Creek, and Conservation Confidential.
Crowsnest Headwaters is a purely volunteer group of citizens committed to the protection and recovery of the Crowsnest/Oldman watershed from decades of coal mining and clear cutting. We rely on your donations to continue our work in the field, in the laboratory and in the courts. Please donate what you can by Interac eTransfer to funding@crowsnestheadwaters.ca