Ask Slashdot: Can Tech Help Monitor or Mitigate a Mine-Flooded Ecosystem?

An anonymous reader writes "The dam break which flooded toxic mining sediments into Quesnel Lake, British Columbia will affect the food web of a very important fisheries ecosystem for many years to come. Here is the challenge; I am asking the people here to come up with suggestions for new and inventive ways to monitor and or help mitigate this horrendous ecological disaster. A large portion of a huge world famous food and sport fishery is at stake. The challenges ahead will take thinking outside the box and might not just be effectively done by conventional means." What would you do, and what kind of budget would it take?

Comments

Start with a prescription from Hipocrates:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

First: Do no (more) harm

One of the lessons from the Exxon Valdez oil spill is that attempts to clean things up may make them far worse, while the ecology's toughness in the face of environmental changes is vastly underrated.

For instance: They did a major removal of oil from part of a beach. In the process they stripped the bulk of the lifeforms off, leaving essentially sand - mineral dust. In an adjacent section that was missed, the orgnisms did a fine job of consuming the oil that had spilled. (It seems sea life has to deal with seeped oil quite a bit, from natural sources. Some stuff not only handles it, but considers it a valuable resource.). After a couple years the un-cleaned beach was flourishing (though perhaps not with the same mix of populations as before). A picture of the boundary is impressive: Cut like a knife.

Granted disturbing mine tailings is a very different case. But similar rules apply: Will letting them settle to the bottom, where they can be processed over decades to geologic time, cause less harm than attempting to clean them up RIGHT NOW - which might keep them mixed into the water and produce a much larger, sustained, iinput of "toxic" minerals to the bulk of the waterway's biosphere?

Re:Start with a prescription from Hipocrates:

[Ungrounded Lightning]

The flaw with this analysis is the timeline. Yes, the short term impact on the cleaned beaches was pretty horrendous, but it remains to be seen how this plays out over time as the ecology recovers

Hear, hear. The "cleaned" beaches may come back closer to the original - after they've been repopulated by pioneer speecies and gone through the whole beach-equivalent of the succession to climax forest. The uncleaned beaches may get where they're going more quickly, but that may be somewhere other than where they started. And so on.

Maybe, once the toxins have been cleaned up by lifeforms in one case, the soil rebuilt and recolonized by successive populations of organisms in the other, they'll come back to what they once were. (Assuming the area hasn't been reshaped by then.) Maybe they'll come back as something else - like the "flip-flop" island of recent history: Lobsters ate the snails and kept their population down. A hurricane wiped out the lobsters. Attempts to recolonize by importing lobsters failed. Turned out the snail population boomed once the lobsters were gone and it got to where a newly introduced lobster would, within minutes, pick up enough snail riders to weight it down and eat IT, so now the ecology was stable in a different mode. So in either case the beach ecology may converge to a different equilibrium.

But there are sections of the Pacific Northwest where a natural phenomenon did something similar: Two glacers met along the front of the ice cap during the last ice age. When things finally melted they melted last, forming a dam holding back an ocean. When it finally melted through, the ocean poured through in that one spot. It scoured an area comparable to an eastern state down to bedrock, washing everything from topsoil to gravel to rocks to boulders off toward the Pacific. The area STILL is nearly as lifeless as the moon.

So my bet is the unwashed beach will reach a robust and stable exology in historic time. But I wouldn't be surprised if, even with lots of sea life washed up by wave action, the washed beach takes geologic time to make a similar recovery.

Re:What would I *not* do?

[ArcadeMan]

I just bought Bitcoin-plated TOSLINK cables and the sound quality is fantastic!

Re:I would

[bmo]

throw the ones responsible into jail for a long ass time to make a nice example.

While I applaud the sentiment behind this, the "ones responsible" will be some poor schmuck low on the totem pole sacrificed to the god Mammon. Probably a janitor somewhere that would be blamed for throwing away an "important memo" on "please don't do that" which didn't exist anyway.

In an ideal world, emails would be pulled, phone records retrieved, evidence recorded, and those up top would be held responsible for this. And in a really ideal world, none of this would happen. But this isn't an ideal world and fines are "just the cost of doing business."

Look at what Duke Energy got away with. Look at what they all get away with.

>letting the corporation survive

No. That won't fix anything. It has come to the point that corporate death penalties actually have to start happening to light a fire under the asses of employees that would see their livelihoods taken away by higher-ups in the corporation through mismanagement, along with boards seeing their corporate governance (and cash that goes with it) taken away, and stock holders wiped out. Only then will there be any motivation for good corporate governance.

--
BMO

There is evidence

[future assassin]

There is evidence that the company ignored warrning from the engineering company that built the projects and the pond had to be fortified or there would be issues in the future. The engineering company says they let the management and the gov know there will be issues if things didn't get fixed. No one listened so they bailed before this hit the fan and eventually it did.