The estimated cost of identifying and cleaning up contaminated sites on Crown land in B.C. ballooned by $73 million between 2006 and 2012, government figures show.
The province's price tag for cleanup of these sites has increased to $237 million this year, up from $163.7 million in 2006, according to government reports from those two years. The figures are cumulative since 2001.
The increase is due to a number of factors, including an expanded number of investigations into the nature of contamination at various sites throughout the province and increases in the estimated liability at these sites, a spokesman from the Ministry of Forests, Lands and Natural Resource Operations said in an interview.
The ministry identifies 13 priority cleanup sites based on their confirmed risk to human health and the environment in its 2012 report on Crown contaminated sites. They range from former mines in remote parts of the province to two remaining lots containing contaminated soil on the north side of Vancouver's False Creek.
It is not possible to forecast future increases in provincial liabilities because they will be determined by the cost of cleanup, the ministry said in a statement.
Contaminated sites on Crown land become the province's responsibility when the individuals or companies responsible for creating the pollution no longer exist and the site has defaulted to the province, or if the site poses an immediate unacceptable risk to human health or the environment, the report said. Many of the former mines which are now priority cleanup sites were productive between the turn of the last century and the early 1970s.
The ministry would not provide a cost breakdown for the 13 priority sites, citing legal liabilities, but the report indicates the Britannia mine along the Sea to Sky corridor accounts for $75.9 million of the cleanup costs, $30 million of which was contributed by the mine's former operators. To date, the province has spent in excess of $46 million on remediation at Britannia, the report states. The Britannia mine was once the largest copper producer in the British Commonwealth, operational from the early 1900s until 1974, the report said. Precipitation and melting snow entering the mine becomes contaminated with metals and turns acidic as it passes through. Until 2005, the contaminated water leaving the mine flowed directly into Howe Sound.
Cleanup at the site began in 2001. A decade on, animals such as crabs and sea anemones have returned to some of the formerly contaminated stretches of shoreline, but there is still work to do in areas such as groundwater management, the report said.
The province has spent $152 million toward the $237 million in environmental liabilities, the report said, with $4.7 million of that spent in the 2010-11 fiscal year. The ministry has budgeted another $4 million this year for investigation of candidate sites and cleanup of identified priority areas.
Ministry staff estimate there could be up to 2,000 contaminated sites on private and provincial land across the province. Treasury Board of Canada figures suggest that B.C. has 4,367 contaminated sites for which the federal government bears some or all liability, the most of any province in Canada.