Editor: With reference to “Undermining regulations major concern for Canmore council” in your Nov. 10 edition.
I began my career in mining in 1952 as a collier in an English mine and became a mine manager. Five years as general manager of an Indian coal company matured me quickly. I arrived in Canmore 48 years ago as assistant general manager of Canmore Mines Ltd.
I was underground three days a week for five years in the five operating mines and studied in detail the 350 mine plans dating back to 1886. In 1990, I was president of Norwest Resource Consultants Ltd. when Rick Melchin, president of Three Sisters, contacted me saying he had a very difficult situation with the undermined land on his property.
For 11 years I directed a Norwest team detecting and mitigating 300 sinkholes, shafts and caves on the property and evaluating and mitigating land for a golf course, the parkway, Peaks of Grassi, Homesteads and Worldmark Inn.
Canmore’s geomining conditions make safe mitigation very difficult, including steep seams, extreme faulting, friable coal pillars whose behaviour is difficult to predict and workings inaccessible requiring many drill holes to confirm the mine maps.
The maps are generally accurate, though occasionally workings are not shown and areas shown as depillared or with pillars left in place are often unreliable.
Consequently, it is impossible to mitigate to a 100 per cent level of safety as a representative of QuantumPlace claimed recently in a council meeting. No engineer worth their salt would make that claim.
Events will occur as they did on the parkway when a huge plug Norwest built to support the road sank when leakage from a water pipeline dislodged the plug or, as at Dyrgas Gate, when a known shaft which had not been accurately located failed, dislodging the nine metres of unstable gravel above.
Severe events will occur, however much investigation and mitigation is carried out. And, because our previous provincial government failed to follow their own bylaws, taxpayers, municipal and provincial, will continue to pay for events which will occur, rather than developers who created the problem.
Why? In 1997, Alberta regulation 114/97, the Canmore Undermining Review Regulation, was passed and section 7 on insurance stated “The developer of a development described in Section 4(1), (essentially on undermined land), must obtain insurance coverage of a type, in the amount and for a period of time, satisfactory to the Minister to insure against claims for damages arising from undermining and related conditions”.
There is no ambiguity here. The insurance must be obtained. Ministers under the previous administration failed in their duty of care, for reasons known only to themselves, to oblige developers to take out insurance. Developers claim they cannot obtain insurance, which I doubt, because Norwest and, since 2001, Golder, have carried out sophisticated risk analysis on mitigation required to achieve a high level of safety.
Since this has been done, surely insurance can be obtained. Because of this negligence on the part of the previous government, no insurance exists on $535 million of development, leaving municipal and provincial taxpayers, rather than the developer, on the hook when events occur.
It may be difficult to obtain insurance outlasting the life of an individual company. Given three bankruptcies experienced so far, this is a problem. If so, a trust fund should be considered which the owners pay into. When they next go bankrupt, their funds would be available to pay for damages, rather than taxpayer’s money.
I’ve been working on this issue for some time and am very much aware of the strong efforts being made by our mayor and Lisa de Soto to solve this problem. I had a meeting and good discussion with MLA Cam Westhead last week to present the problem as a taxpayer who has significant experience of mining and mitigation and dangers of the situation. Cam certainly appreciates the problem; does our new government?
If all else fails, there is a very simple decision the provincial cabinet, which we elected a year ago, can take. If developers cannot or will not find a solution, cabinet should immediately forbid any further development on land affected by undermining. We taxpayers are entitled to have this protection.
If the owners of the land are unhappy about this undermined land being declared undevelopable, they might want to approach the province to see if the land can be transferred back to the Crown to remain, after modest mitigation, either public lands for recreation or for designation as wildlife habitat and corridors.
Gerry Stephenson,
Canmore
