Once-scenic Wolverine Valley home to B.C.’s latest coal mine

Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, August 16, 2006

Mike Caisley looks at the devastated mountainside — a thriving forest a few short months ago, now being dismantled one truckload at a time — and acknowledges the “mixed blessing” that is inevitably associated with a booming local economy based on the revival of northeast coal mining and exploration.

Caisley is in a tricky position. He’s mayor of Tumbler Ridge, a modern community of 3,200, just 25 kilometres away, that is debt-free thanks to almost a quarter century of coal mining.

He’s also employed as manager of community and aboriginal affairs for Western Canadian Coal Corp., Vancouver-based owner of the Wolverine mine and a big player around these parts.

Caisley’s also someone who loves getting out into the outdoors on his all-terrain vehicle in summer and his snowmobile in winter. Come back some time and try it yourself, he says, ever the community booster.

Maybe just not in the Wolverine Valley, a once-scenic area especially hard hit by coal mining.

Western Canadian says it is spending $320 million in capital costs developing the Wolverine mine out of a five-kilometre-long by one-kilometre-wide slash of mountainside. The mine opened in July, and expects to produce 2.5 million tonnes per year. The lifespan is estimated at about 13 years, employing 250 workers.

Western Canadian also operates a second, small coal mine, Dillon, closer to Chetwynd, and is spending another $200 million to develop its Brule property, with reserves to support two million tonnes of production per year over a decade.

Gary Livingstone, president of Vancouver-based Western Canadian Coal, agreed that the Wolverine mine will permanently alter the landscape, but said that doesn’t mean wildlife will suffer over the long term. “Our objective is to put that land back, such that it will maintain the same, or enhance, wildlife values.”

Tumbler Ridge is a community born of the coal industry, custom-built to serve the Quintette and Bullmoose mines that opened in 1983. When those mines closed in 2000 and 2003, respectively, the town underwent a dramatic transition, attracting the interest of soon-to-be retirees looking for bargain-priced homes and clean fresh air.

Among the influx of new residents were Arnold and Monique Begg, a couple who sold their Tsawwassen condo in 2000 and bought a 1980s-era 1,100-square-foot bungalow with basement in Tumbler Ridge for $26,700 — make that $65,000 if you include improvements they’ve made since then. Today it’s worth closer to $225,000.

The couple had reservations about leaving their three grown children — and vice-versa. “Their reaction was, ‘What are you doing? How can you abandon us?’” Arnold recalls. “Now they come here and visit and love it. They’re envious.”

Tumbler Ridge has certainly changed with all the industrial activity, they note. The quiet roads are now bustling with truck traffic and there are grumblings about the lack of buffers on logging clearcuts next to roadsides.

But there is also hope that the economic boom results in more services for residents, including competition for Shop Easy.
And they insist the best food in town is now found at Ma-M-Way Open Camp, a complex of trailers on the edge of town that houses more than 250 people.

Originally established for Western Canadian Coal workers, the camp’s rooms and cafeteria are open to all. Rooms cost $135 and up per night, a dinner for two, with a choice from three entrees and all the trimmings is $18.19.

Whatever the future brings, the Beggs insist that the face of Tumbler Ridge has changed. The community is not satisfied to be a backdrop to mining or oil and gas. “Tumbler Ridge is not just an industry town,” Arnold says. “It’s here to stay.”

Jeff Lang, 26, drives an ore truck at the Trend coal mine, opened last December by Northern Energy and Mining Inc. He first came to Tumbler Ridge at age eight when his dad landed a welding job with Quintette, but left after the mines shut down.

“I never thought I’d come back here,” Lang offers from his truck cab, rumbling away with another load.

He has worked in coal mining for three years, first in the Alberta oilsands of Fort McMurray before returning to Tumbler Ridge, where he purchased a three-bedroom home with a fixer-upper basement for $145,000.

Problem is, you can never go back, at least not to what you left behind. The bustle of industrial resource activity means that a whole new transient population is drifting through Tumbler Ridge.

“Before, it was really tight,” he says. “We’d go to school together, all our families were friends. Now, there are people from outside.”

Caisley served three terms as the first elected mayor of Tumbler Ridge, worked for Quintette mine in community relations, training and personnel management, but was laid off in 1991 when the mine merged with Bullmoose.

He took various human resources jobs with the B.C. government, in Prince George and the Peace region, before moving back to Tumbler Ridge one and a half years ago. He was re-elected mayor for a three-year term last November.

As Tumbler Ridge moves forward, the key is to find a balance between the needs of industry and the needs of citizens, especially seniors, whose vision of the community does not extend to the heyday of the 1980s.

Despite working for a coal company, Caisley says his priority is the greater community good, and that he is concerned about the cumulative effect of all natural resource extraction activities.

Caisley views tourism as one way to diversity the community, citing plans to make Tumbler Ridge a centre for dinosaur enthusiasts after the discovery of several important finds in recent years.

Whatever happens, the fickle coal industry will no longer determine the town’s future.

“We don’t want to kid ourselves,” he says. “We’ve been around this bend before.”

lpynn@png.canwest.com

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DIGGING COAL

Current and pending mines in northeast B.C.

- Pine Valley Mining Corp.’s Willow Creek mine, located 45 kilometres west of Chetwynd, opened in July 2004, leading the current boom in the northeast. The company hopes to produce up to 1.4 million tonnes of coal in 2006.
- Western Canadian Coal Corp. opened its Dillon mine in December 2004, producing at an annual rate of 240,000 tonnes of coal at a site about 50 kilometres southwest of Chetwynd. The company subsequently received an amendment to permit increased production to almost one million tonnes per year.

- The Trend small mine, operated by Northern Energy and Mining Inc., opened in December 2005 on a permit to produce 240,000 tonnes annually. It hopes to be producing up to two million tonnes by 2007.

- Western Canadian Coal’s Wolverine coal mine opened in July, 25 kilometres northwest of Tumbler Ridge. The mine expects to produce 2.5 million tonnes of coal per year.

- Western Canadian Coal’s Brule deposit, next to Dillon, will start production about the time Dillon is exhausted at the end of 2006. Brule has reserves of 20 million tonnes of coal, plus another 1.1 million tones from the lesser Blind deposit.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006
Roads punched into wilderness

Larry Pynn, Vancouver Sun
Published: Wednesday, August 16, 2006

They are known in mining lingo as notice-of-work permits, documents allowing companies to proceed with exploration activity under agreed-upon conditions.

These permits are responsible for roads and drill sites spread across far more of B.C.’s wilderness landscape than actual operating mines.

At The Vancouver Sun’s request, the B.C. Ministry of Energy, Mines and Petroleum Resources provided 25 notice-of-work permits issued over an eight-month period in the coal-bearing region around Tumbler Ridge and Chetwynd.

Permits typically allowed for the drilling of 10 to 75 sites spread across two to 40-plus kilometres of trails and roads built with excavators, bulldozers, or backhoes.

According to the ministry, trails and roads are broken down into four categories:

- Exploration trail construction: limited access usually accomplished by skidding a piece of equipment, normally a drill rig, into the drilling location, resulting in negligible disturbance and limited, if any, tree cutting.

- Excavated trail construction: requires cutting a small access, usually limited to a narrow road just sufficient to get equipment to a site. This includes allowing access by service equipment for fuelling, maintenance, etc. Normally associated with higher level of activities and used for more extensive exploration programs. Disturbance is limited, but some tree cutting is required.

- Access road construction: A higher standard road usually of sufficient width to allow two-way traffic. Requires the excavation of soil and construction of a roadbed suitable for use by heavy equipment. Normally used at the advanced exploration stage or for access for construction or mine development. Requires tree cutting and road design.

- Access road modification: Can encompass many aspects, but usually refers to the widening of roads for the installation of run-out lanes, construction of safety berms, and possibly re-routing existing roads.

Whatever term for the exploration work, the net result is a considerable industrial impact on a wild landscape, often fragile high alpine terrain, and the wildlife that call it home.

Trees must be felled as part of the permit, and temporary camps are often established for exploration crews. Helipads, waste dumps, settling ponds and sumps are created.

Prior to undertaking the work, companies post security reclamation deposits to ensure they do not walk away from damaged exploration sites. Companies typically commit to remediation through removal of temporary bridges and culverts, the decommissioning of roads, as well as reseeding and replanting of excavated areas.
© The Vancouver Sun 2006