Editorially speaking…
If I and Chronicles readers had nothing better to do than my writing, and they reading, my mutterings on a daily basis, I still couldn’t keep up with yesterday’s news.
By which I mean current events that have their roots deep in our historical past. Sort of deja vu, if you will. Even when history doesn’t quite repeat itself, it certainly plays out, in sometimes eerily similar ways, over and over again.
Jennifer Goodbrand looks up at the Tyee Mine ore dump which would be recycled if a proposed mining venture goes ahead. --Author's Collection
Just this morning, a tip from environmental champion Larry Pynn (www.sixmountains.ca)--and please note that I spelled his name right this time—about a CHEK-TV news feature on Mount Sicker. As I’ve written innumerable times before, this otherwise nondescript Westholme hump was the site of a major copper strike at the turn of the last century.
Three major mining operations occurred there, the latest during the Second World War when the federal government subsidized reopening of the abandoned Lenora and Tyee mine shafts because lead and zinc had become vitally strategic metals.
The result of these mining operations over 50 years are several waste piles—rocks, including some lovely chunks of chalcopyrite if you look hard enough in the Tyee pile—and acres of gravel at the Lenora. Now a Vancouver company, Sasquatch Resources, has optioned and owns 1800 hectares on Mount Sicker.
Its interest is in these waste piles which, according to a company spokesperson, contain gold, silver and lead that earlier extraction and smelting methods couldn’t extract economically. Thanks to modern metallurgical science, however, this is no longer the case.
Whether anything comes of this company’s proposal remains to be seen. Latter-day environmental and Indigenous concerns can now be the trump cards in new mining ventures even though, in this case, Sasquatch Resources is touting their idea as a long delayed opportunity to clean up the mess left by earlier miners.
I for one will be following this story with great interest. I might have to write an update for my book about the 1890s-1900s Mount Sicker excitement, Riches to Ruin: The Boom to Bust Saga of Vancouver Island’s Greatest Copper Mine, FirGrove Publishing, 2007.
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This one is more personal than historical. I’ve written before of growing up beside Swan Lake in Saanich in the Jurassic Age. That’s before Saanich was transformed by development. Paradoxically, the eastern shore of Swan Lake has gone backwards in time—deliberately encouraged to return to nature what were, in my Tom Sawyer days, three adjoining dairy farms.
A recent news story in the Times Colonist reported that “Langford warns of toxic newts in Westhills Park.”
An accompanying photo of a ‘rough-skinned newt’ is what caught my interest.
Nobody told us kids that these varmints could irritate our skin! —Wikipedia
According to the TC, these tiny lizards can emit harmful toxins when ingested by pets and cause skin irritation when handled by people.
Who Knew?
I certainly never knew this when, as a kid playing in what we called The Overflow, the flooding of Atkinson’s fields when Swan Lake spilled its borders every winter, I and my friends would turn up these dark brown newts with their orange underbellies. I don’t recall our ever harming them; we’d just examine them out of curiosity than let them go. Frogs, on the other hand, we took home to let loose in the garden. But newts were of momentary interest.
My point being, I don’t recall suffering any skin irritation afterwards. Maybe a case of fortune favouring the innocent?
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This one is both historical and personal. Another recent TC headline, on the front page no less, read: “B.C. regulations for asbestos handling a first in Canada.”
By now, most people must know that asbestos has been banned for use in residential and commercial construction because of it’s hazardous to the respiratory system when inhaled. Ergo, older buildings being renovated or deconstructed now must be strictly cleansed of what was long a favoured material for fireproofing and insulating.
How times change.
I can well remember, about Grade 5, going with a friend to Preston’s Hardware in Lakehill Village on an errand for his father. We were to buy powdered asbestos which, mixed with water, made a paste that one applied to joints in heating ducts and the like.
Mr. Preston pulled out a small drum from which he casually ladled several large scoopfuls of the white powder into a bag. He wore no breathing apparatus and neither did we, standing within feet of him as we watched the dust rising from the bag as the asbestos hit bottom.
Now, of course, we know better.
Well, the truth is, they knew it back then, too. What, pray tell, do you think they meant by the word, asbestosis?
Although too young to really appreciate it at the time, I later got a grim hint of what asbestos could do. On the short street on which I lived, every able-bodied man but one served in the armed forces during the Second World War and two of my father’s friends, brothers, worked in the shipyards. As pipefitters, they regularly worked with powdered asbestos, and asbestos tape which they applied to pipe and duct joints.
All of the aforementioned veterans, including my father, came home safely. Twenty years later, while in their 40s, both brothers were diagnosed as being terminally ill with asbestosis. Both left young families.
Asbestos, undisturbed, still fireproofs and still makes good insulation. But when disturbed... So what once was a major Canadian industry that employed 1000s is now, I believe, all but history. Those who continue to work with asbestos today are in the business of removing and safely disposing of it.