Waterloo Region Record YELLOWKNIFE — Federal officials are
scrambling to clean up a crumbling, abandoned northern gold mine
that is in imminent danger of releasing massive amounts of
arsenic, asbestos and other toxins. “It’s pretty scary stuff,”
said Mark Palmer, senior adviser on Aboriginal Affairs and
Northern Development’s Giant Mine Project, which describes a
proposed cleanup of collapsing, poison-filled buildings and
caverns on the shore of Great Slave Lake as an emergency
response. “We are worried they are going to fall down, and if
that happens there will be a release.” The Giant Mine just
outside Yellowknife was an economic mainstay for 50 years. But
its gold was locked within crystals of arsenopyrite, and after
the mine finally closed in 2004, about 237,000 tonnes of highly
toxic, water-soluble arsenic trioxide remained on the site. Most
of the arsenic was blown back underground, where huge dustpiles
of it sit in 15 subterranean chambers, some big enough to
swallow an 11-storey building. About 3,600