Ontario’s Environmental Commissioner Inspects Kam Kotia Mine Site
TIMMINS, July 23, 2002 – Environmental Commissioner Gord Miller visited the Kam Kotia mine site near Timmins today to evaluate first-hand the progress the provincial government is making on cleaning up the acid-generating tailings at the abandoned mine.
“My concern about the appalling contamination at this site goes back many years,” said Miller, who worked for the Ministry of the Environment’s district office in Timmins in the 1980s. “I want to evaluate, on the ground, the progress the government is making in rehabilitating this site.”
As Environmental Commissioner, Miller monitors compliance by provincial ministries with Ontario’s Environmental Bill of Rights (EBR). In his last two annual reports to the Ontario Legislature, Miller examined the government’s response to an application for investigation under the EBR that requested the Ministries of Natural Resources and Environment to investigate contamination from the mine site that was poisoning the streams and rivers in the area.
Ownership of the Kam Kotia site reverted to the province when the mine was abandoned by private owners in the 1970s, after 30 years of producing copper and zinc concentrates and gold and silver. The 200,000 tonnes of waste rock and six million tonnes of mine tailings left behind when the mine was abandoned are releasing a brew of highly acidic water and metals, creating a vegetation “kill zone” and discharging into the nearby Kamiskotia and Little Kamiskotia Rivers levels of copper and zinc that exceed by thousands of times the Ontario water quality standards for those metals.
In early January 2002, the Ministry of Northern Development and Mines posted a notice on the EBR’s Environmental Registry, announcing that the government was committing $14 million over the next two years toward the construction of a plant to treat the contaminated groundwater and a structure to contain the tailings left over from mine operations.
Commissioner Miller said he was pleased that the province was beginning the rehabilitation of the mine site. “Untreated, the Kam Kotia mine site was an atrocious blight on the landscape, doing terrible damage to the ecosystem in Northern Ontario,” said Miller. “It’s extremely important that Kam Kotia be cleaned up, not only for the sake of wildlife and the environment, but also for the credibility of Canada’s mining industry internationally.”
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