First Nations push for involvement in monitoring of Obed spill

“Damage control” is the term Kevin Ahkimnachie uses to describe the forum hosted Feb. 27 by the University of Alberta Water Initiative to go over the work being undertaken by the province and Sherritt International Corp. to address the Obed Mountain Mine coal slurry of last October.

“It’s more of a damage control type of thing for Sherritt, backed up by the Alberta government and they keep referring to First Nations’ involvement. ‘We will contact them,’ and so on. But as far as the environmental protection order, there is no involvement of First Nations,” said Ahkimnachie, who serves as a director with the land office for Treaty 8.

On Oct. 31, 2013 the largest coal slurry spill in Canadian history occurred from a pit 30 km east of Hinton releasing approximately 670 million litres of contaminated water into two tributaries leading to the Athabasca River. It took Alberta Environment and Sustainable Resource Development until Nov. 19 to issue an environmental protection order.

John Schadan, vice president of operations for Sherritt, says First Nations and Métis groups along the tributaries and Athabasca River were notified “immediately” following the release. However, a number of First Nations downstream from the spill along the river say that was not the case.

“Since that time, we continue to send out information updates. Since that time we’ve had some Aboriginal groups enter into some dialogue with us. We continue that dialogue,” said Schadan.
Ahkimnachie contends that email updates and controlled dialogue are not what First Nations want.

“We could be integral in doing all kinds of (monitoring and sampling) for transparency purposes to have our involvement and input in any of these, which will be later implemented into what will be the policy, whatever will be coming (for reclamation),” said Ahkimnachie.

Schadan says Sherritt has trained members of the Alexis Nakota Sioux Nation to undertake water samples. To date, that is the only First Nation working in partnership with Sherritt on monitoring.

Ahkimnachie’s comments followed an entire day of sitting with officials from the University of Alberta’s Water Initiative, Alberta ESRD and Sherritt, including a closed-door session for Aboriginal groups only.

“We were hoping to have some sort of announcement that we would be meaningfully consulted and involved and to have input with monitoring and testing at the water, soil, fish, animals. That didn’t happen,” said Ahkimnachie.

Instead, those who live along the river and environmental groups (in the open forum) were told it was too early to have test results back.

“How many animals or fish have been contaminated? We’ve been told it could take six months to a year for them to figure out it’s not safe.  How many of our citizens will have eaten that contaminated food by then?” said Treaty 8 communications officer Greg Posein.

He noted that many members live off the land to supplement the high cost of buying food in remote northern locations.

“There was a significant amount of environmental damage,” said Dr. Greg Goss, an environmental toxicologist and executive director with the Water Initiative.  “So there’s  a lot of water that went into the Athabasca River, muddied that with all the chemicals … We want to see how much went in there, what the impact on fish is, what the impact on wildlife is.”

The Water Initiative, which is a team of scientists, was contracted by the Alberta ESRD as an independent body to make recommendations on how to assess the damage and to ensure that Sherritt’s monitoring plans are scientifically sound.  Goss lauds the provincial government for taking the unusual step of hiring an independent body and says Sherritt has implemented all of WI’s short term recommendations for monitoring. However, neither the government nor Sherritt is obligated to follow WI’s recommendations.

“(WI) doesn’t have any official power but I think it has moral power,” said Goss. “My job is to ensure the science is good.”

WI’s contract expired March 10. Goss says that the WI will make their recommendations public and anticipates that will happen in a month’s time.

What remediation work has to be done is not yet known. While winter freeze-up has slowed down the assessment, it has also contained the movement of contaminants.

Goss says assessment of contaminants needs to be undertaken to determine both where contaminants are located and if they need to be removed.  Some contaminants naturally exist in the environment, he says.

Goss says he will be pushing the government and Sherritt to monitor collected data closely and to hire someone who has a “good relationship with Aboriginal communities” to be able to present that data to those directly impacted.

“That would be an ideal situation, but we haven’t had any of those discussions yet,” he said.