Katie Morrison, director with the Canadian Parks and Wilderness Society Southern Alberta (CPAWS) was recently interviewed about the Grassy Mountain Coal Mine. Other than a few jobs, it will help make an Austrailian coal mining company richer, by having access to coal that gets sold to Asian countries. Alberta will be left from with the damage.

Morrison, who used to work in oilsands reclamation in the north before moving to the southern Alberta region to take up her current position with CPAWS, explained the process of how open-pit mining works.

“Explosives and machinery are used to access the coal deposit,” she said. “There are various coal seams throughout the mountain, and they take off the overburden, the soil and rock, to get to those coal seams. That creates a lot of waste rock which essentially piled in adjacent valleys. Water is used to wash the rock and process the coal through, and then that water is put in sediment containment ponds. So essentially the mountain comes down, the valley comes up, and you are left with a sediment pond often filled with contaminated water.”

Morrison said those were the immediate visible impacts of this type of mining, but there were also longer-term health consequences for those working in or living near these mines.

Citing a health study from the Appalachian region of the United States where this type of coal mining is more common, Morrison outlined some of those health risks, which include higher rates of cancer, higher heart and lung disease rates, higher kidney disease rates, higher rates of birth defects, and higher levels of impaired functioning due to chronic health problems.

Source: ‘You can’t rebuild a mountain’: fallout of open-pit mining discussed

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Does Alberta Need More Coal Mines?

The Impact Assessment Agency of Canada has a report, ‘Environmental hazard assessment of Benga Mining’s proposed Grassy Mountain Coal Project’ written by A. Dennis Lemly. He states, “A scientific analysis of environmental hazards of the project reveals numerous flaws in both the projected environmental performance of the mine and its regulatory control. From both environmental and economic perspectives, the proposed mine will do far more damage than can be reasonably justified on any level.

Is it worth sacrificing people’s health and contributing to global warming for the sake of a job? [Read more]