Two months after the Mount Polley Mine tailings breach, staff at the Dr. Max Blouw Quesnel River Research Centre are ready to share research findings at an open house in Likely this Saturday, Oct. 4.
“We started Aug. 4, the day of,” said research centre biologist Sam Albers.
A “whole host” of people from University of Northern British Columbia staff and students, to Department of Fisheries and Oceans staff and researchers from the University of British Columbia have been involved, Albers confirmed.
They have been collecting water, sediment, and biological samples from the Quesnel Lake watershed and looking at the movement of water and sediment plumes in Quesnel Lake.
“I am very excited,” he said. “It’s all very preliminary but we will talk about what we’ve done and places we believe the research should go moving forward.”
Everyone is welcome to join the staff to discuss the findings and plans for the future, he added.
There will be a research presentation at 10 a.m. followed by refreshments and a barbecue at noon.
The research centre is located at 6581 Likely Road.
In the early morning hours of Aug. 4, a massive tailings storage facility at Mount Polley Mine above Quesnel Lake breached its earthen dam, flushing an estimated 24 million cubic members of water and tailings into Polley and Quesnel Lakes. A cleanup effort is currently underway by parent company Imperial Metals while investigations into what caused the disaster is in its early stages.