Raven Coal Mine
Compliance Coal Corporation plans to truck 40 million tonnes of coal from its proposed Raven coal mine, near Fanny Bay, along Highway 4 to Port Alberni. The coal will then be shipped to Asia. Since the mine will operate around the clock, that means 96 coal trucks will drive the route every 24 hours. That’s 672 coal trucks each week!
Highway 4 is a narrow, winding and, at times, steep and slippery road. It's the only route across the island to Tofino and Pacific Rim National Park. See a new website that explains why people in Port Alberni are opposed to the Raven mine.
Listen to the enticing tale of Rocky the Raven by Sierra Comox Valley chair Mike Bell. Join Rocky and the Ravens in opposition to the Raven coal mine on Vancouver Island.
Compliance Coal Corp. also owns the Bear and Anderson Lake coal deposits near the proposed Raven mine.
CoalWatch Comox Valley has slammed the environmental assessment process on the proposed Raven Coal Mine Project for lack of transparency and disincentives for public participation.
BC Environmental Assessment Office and the Canadian Environmental Assessment Agency announced a second public comment period from Nov 15 to Nov 29 2011, based on Compliance Coal Corporation's response to the concerns flagged in the first public comment period last June.
However, the 1,100 pages of documents offered for public comment are so voluminous and unwieldy that they in themselves are an obstacle to meaningful public participation.
"The proponent has had over four months to respond to the nearly 3,000 public comments—a task they achieved using a full-time staff. Yet the public, with volunteers who have other lives and jobs, is given only two weeks for the mammoth task of responding,” said Cam Connor, Vice-President of the CoalWatch coalition, of which Sierra Comox Valley is a member.
Read the Coalwatch press release.
Read the story in the Port Alberni Times.
All the local governments in the Comox Valley and Port Alberni, along with thousands of British Columbians, have called for a more rigorous environmental assessment review, an independent review panel with public hearings. So far, those requests have been rejected at both the provincial and federal levels of government.
The first public comment period for the proposed Raven mine drew more than 2,500 letters, with 1,500 people in total attending the three public hearings in Courtenay, Port Alberni and Union Bay.
Read a Sierra Club fact sheet about the Raven mine, coal and global warming, steel-making and a recent coal victory in the Flathead River Valley.
Why all the fuss?
Coal is a dirty business. Aside from health impacts, burning coal releases carbon dioxide, a major contributor to global warming. In 2008, B.C.’s coal exports generated more than 55 million tonnes of carbon dioxide—almost as much as B.C.’s total greenhouse gas emissions in 2007. Surprisingly, we do not count emissions generated by burning B.C. coal overseas as part of B.C.’s carbon footprint!
The High Cost to Taxpayers
Mining companies must post securities to the B.C. government, ostensibly to ensure that the costs of mine decommissioning and reclamation are borne by the mining company rather than by taxpayers. Yet the record shows that taxpayers still shoulder most of the burden for clean-up costs. In the four decades since Vancouver Island's Mt. Washington copper mine ceased to operate, B.C. taxpayers have paid $6 million for environmental clean-up costs. That doesn't include the $2 million annual loss to communities from destroyed Tsolum River salmon runs, or millions of dollars that could potentially be spent on water treatment.
In 2003, B.C.'s Auditor General reported that securities being taken under the Mines Act are "inadequate to remediate the known mines sites in BC where contamination exists." The problem persists, with $100 million in unsecured liabilities today in B.C.
Learn more about Inadequate Securities for Mines in British Columbia.
