letter to the Globe

The Editor,
Globe and Mail

Sir,
There's a mine at the head of Buttle Lake in Strathcona Park on Vancouver Island. For years it had permission to drop its tailings into the lake, which in addition to being part of a hydro reservoir is Campbell River's municipal watershed.
For years this seemed a relatively benign solution; promoters of the mine said there was and would be no effect on the water.
And then testing started to show an alarming increase in heavy metals in our water supply.
That was when the mine built a proper tailings pond and system. The problem began to diminish gradually until nowadays we don't think much about it any longer.
Want to bet that's what the people living downstream of the Mount Polley Mine tailing pond disaster are looking at in their future unless the tailings are recovered and cleaned up?
(That's most of British Columbia's population, by the way.)

Sincerely,