A hillside mill, an acid creek, and the salmon returning
Dr A. A. Forbes found copper on Britannia Mountain above Howe Sound in 1888, but it took more than a decade of claims and of companies formed, merged and dissolved before the mining engineer George Robinson convinced backers of its promise. Large-scale mining began in 1903 with a 200-ton concentrator. The first ore went to the Crofton smelter on Vancouver Island in 1904, and the mine reached full production in 1905. For decades its people could come and go only by boat.
The mine and the homes were built into the same mountain, so the mine's disasters were the town's. On 21 March 1915 a slide destroyed the Jane Camp and killed sixty men, women and children, and a new town went up higher, at the 2,200-foot level. In March 1921, while the mine was shut down, the No. 2 mill burned to the ground. On 28 October that year, after a day of torrential rain, a dam the company had thrown across part of the creek while building a railway gave way; the flood destroyed 50 of the 110 homes on the beach, and thirty-seven people died. Carleton Perkins Browning rebuilt the lower town and the new No. 3 mill, which still stands.
Under Browning the mine boomed. By 1929 it was the largest copper producer in the British Commonwealth, and by its museum's count it supplied 17 percent of the world's copper at its peak. Across seventy years more than 60,000 people from over 50 countries lived and worked here, though Japanese and Chinese workers were barred from going underground. By the end there were 210 kilometres of tunnels, reaching from 1,100 metres up the mountain to about 650 metres below sea level. The miners unionised in 1946, the company was liquidated in 1959, and Anaconda kept the mine running from 1963 until it closed on 1 November 1974.
Nobody cleaned up. Rain and runoff through the tunnels met the sulphide rock and turned to acid drainage, and for close to a century as much as 450 kilograms of copper a day ran into Howe Sound. The creek ran clear because nothing could live in it, and salmon held in cages off its mouth died within 48 hours. In 2001 the province announced a treatment plant, fully running by 2006, and engineers plugged the 2,200-foot adit. The pollution reaching the sound fell by 98 to 99 percent, and in 2011 pink salmon returned to Britannia Creek for the first time in over a century.
The concentrator is a National Historic Site of Canada, and the Britannia Mine Museum, founded in 1971, keeps some 7,000 mining artefacts on the old mine grounds.
Other places on the map within a couple of hours.
