Province releases risk ranking of potentially contaminated old mines

The province has released its risk ranking of potentially contaminated historical mine sites a year and a half after it said it would.

The list includes 69 sites strewn across the provincethat were once home to a range of mining operations dating back to the 1800s. The CBC requested the ranking under freedom-of-information rules.

Most of the top sites are old gold mines, while many of the lower-ranking ones were once home to other types of mines, including copper, coal and limestone.

People flocked to Nova Scotia from all over the world in the latter half of the 1800s to hunt for precious flecks of gold. But gold processing was not subject to environmental regulations at that time, and materials containing chemicals such as mercury and arsenic were dumped on land and in waterways, leaving a legacy of contamination that exists to this day.

Donnie Burke, the executive director of environmental assessment and remediation for the provincial cleanup agency, Nova Scotia Lands, said the province wanted to gather as much information as it could about the sites before the list was released.

"We didn't want people to be panicked thinking they were living next doorto, you know, some toxic soup."

The list was created by analyzing each site for human health risks, the size of the site, chemical and physical properties and ecology.Human health risks were given more weight than the other categories.

"We've proven with science on Goldenville and Montague thatthe risk is very low from a human health perspective. So I don't see these being of any imminent risk to anybody living next to them."

The province has committed to cleaning up contaminated mine sites on Crown land, beginning with Montague Gold Mines near Dartmouth, N.S., and Goldenville, near Sherbrooke. The cost of remediating those two sites alone is estimated to be at least $60 million, but that figure is expected to rise.

Those two sites are among the top five on the risk ranking.

The province is currently working on a cleanup plan for Montague and is sorting outquestions about ownership of some of the affected land in Goldenville. Five other sites are being studied, with remediation proposals and cost estimates expected in October.

Some contamination on private land

The list does not include all contaminated former mines.

Nova Scotia Landsis only responsible for remediating sites on Crown land, so private propertiescontaminatedfrom old mines are not on the list.

Burke said the province is trying to figure out how to deal with mine contamination that exists on private land.

"Is it the taxpayer's responsibility or the property owner's responsibility? So there are all the conundrums that we're faced with and it's something that we've been back and forth within government on."