Giant Mine roaster deconstruction complete

The landscape at Yellowknife’s Giant Mine is forever changed now that 10 buildings have been taken down in a painstaking process designed to minimize exposure to arsenic.

“You can’t just demolish buildings like that,” says Jane Amphlett, operations manager with the federal government’s Giant Mine remediation project.

Workers spent a total of eight months over the past two summers tearing down the roaster complex in one of the most toxic sites in Canada.

It was a complicated operation: the buildings were shrouded in plastic — essentially shrink-wrapped — to control the contaminants, and then taken down from the inside.

Amphlett says about 3,000 metric tonnes of material was taken down and put in storage — about the same weight as 1,400 Ford F-150 pick-up trucks.

The material was put into dangerous goods-approved bags and stored in shipping containers in the mine’s tailings ponds.

“It's a storage area that we constructed just for this purpose,” Amphlett says. “It's monitored, it's fenced, it's regularly checked and all that water, because it's in our tailings ponds, we treat all that water, so it's a really contained facility.”

In May of 2013, the Giant Mine remediation team presented people in N'dilo with the deconstruction plan and heard concerns about what effect it would have on water in the area.

Amphlett says they check for potential leaks on a weekly basis.

So far, testing shows there is no impact to water and air quality.

More tidying is planned for the roaster site this spring.

The full remediation of the site, which will include the freezing of 237,000 tonnes of arsenic trioxide dust underground, has yet to begin