By IAN ROSS
Early one autumn morning in 2006, Chris Hamblin observed a flock of migratory geese feeding on grass atop the covered tailings at the old Kam Kotia mine near Timmins.
"That's what we wanted," says Ontario's Mines Rehabilitation project co-ordinator of the ongoing clean-up at one of the province's worst post-mining environmental catastrophes.
"The whole point was to put the site back to a state where it was not impacting on the environment."
A decade earlier, anything that managed to grow among the dead trees and rotting plants would have been toxic to wildlife.
Hamblin, who once lived at nearby Kamiskotia Lake in the early 1980s while working as a government geologist, distinctly remembers the "kill zone" along a bend in Highway 576.
A large flood plain of rust-coloured tailings, metres thick, fanned out from the closed mine site and the long-since-disappeared headframe atop an elevated knob of rocky outcrop.
Sulphide in the ore, when exposed to water and oxygen, created an acid that leached out aluminum, iron, zinc and copper that produced an almost napalm blast-like visual on the landscape.
Closer in, the mine site was a garbage dump of barrels, mine truck tires and derelict cars.
Kam Kotia was part of the legacy of Ontario's mining history.
"There's nothing else out there like Kam Kotia," says Hamblin. "It's the biggest and the worst."
The former copper-zinc mine, 30 kilometres west of Timmins, began operation during the 1940s in response to the desperate wartime demand for minerals.
Environmental concerns at the time were an afterthought.
After Kam Kotia closed in the early 1970s, it became a notorious environmental 'hot-spot.' About six million tonnes of sulphide-rich tailings were dumped in three pockets over a 500-hectare area.
As was common until mine closure plans became mandatory in Ontario in the early 1990s, the last company to operate Kam Kotia went bankrupt and walked away leaving the property in the hands of the Crown in 1988.
After two decades of public outcry, the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines (MNDM) created the Abandoned Mines Rehabilitation Program in 1999.
Of the $78 million in program funding invested so far, most of it has been gobbled up at Kam Kotia.
When it's complete in 2009, the clean-up is expected to exceed the original $41 million price tag by about $19 million.
"There was no record of what to expect in the tailings," says Hamblin, who has shepherded rehab work at more than 75 sites across Ontario.
The Kam Kotia work involved building a specially-sealed tailings dam where contractors dumped about a million cubic metres, or 1.8 million tonnes, of material.
A lime plant at the old mine site collects and treats about a 1,500 cubic metres (or 1.5 million litres) of contaminated water each day on average.
However there's still some isolated pockets of tailings that must be collected and moved next winter.
The Ontario Mining Association (OMA) is pitching in to help.
The OMA is sharing costs with MNDM in a $757,900 now-completed project that expanded a collection pond for excess ground and surface water to handle heavy run-off that otherwise would have flowed away untreated.
Back in 2003, the OMA previously chipped in to plant vegetation on the tailings dam to keep the granular surface from blowing and washing away.
OMA Manager of Environment and Sustainability Adrianna Stech says this is not a one-shot deal but only the beginning of an ongoing annual involvement
"Once we're done here, we'll start the process of looking for a new project next year and start the fundraising internally."
Member companies like Vale Inco, Xstrata Nickel and Breakwater Resources have contributed money for future projects over the next three years.
The donations do not give OMA members any inside track on the competitive bidding process. It's all done according to Ontario Public Service requirements.
Stech says the OMA is now waiting on new Mining Act regulations allowing companies to also contribute in-kind labour to small projects in their local communities.
"We're still committed to doing work on these legacy issues on different fronts and levels," says Stech.
With 5,700 known abandoned mines, exploration shafts and trenches in Ontario, Hamblin is working on a prioritization system. Many are on private lands, most are potentially hazardous.
There's old shafts, tailings and exploration sites to be fenced off, capped or backfilled with waste rock. Most pose little to no environmental threat but are public safety issues.
And Hamblin is aware junior miners like to explore old deposits -- 'in the shadow of the headframe' -- to search for untapped mineralization deeper down.
He would like to see the ground become useful again, be it as wilderness sanctuary or for mineral production. But he adds various ministries would likely have a strong say that the money, effort and time invested there not be disturbed.
