ROCKY VIEW— A collection of concerned residents have banded together to oppose a new gravel pit in Rocky View County.
Mountain Ash Limited Partnership’s newest project, the Summit Pit, is currently in the application process with Rocky View County.
The parcel of land on which the gravel pit is located off of Highway 567— 800 metres from Big Hill Springs Provincial Park.
The park, nestled in a shallow valley roughly 10 km northeast of Cochrane, boasts riparian features, springs that feed the Bighill Creek, several waterfalls, the remains of a historic fish hatchery, the ruins of Alberta’s first commercial creamery and hiking paths.
The watershed is a unique aquifer because it is spring-fed. The source of the stream is underground, so the temperature of the creek stays fairly constant in both the summer and winter months.
In July 2020, Alberta Parks announced it would be closing the park to visitors for much-needed refurbishments, costing roughly $1.2 million.
The park was being loved to death by the visitors and sees roughly 250,000 visitors per year according to the Big Hill Creek Preservation Society.
The Friends of Big Hill Springs Provincial Park, the name the county residents have given themselves, say the project could cause irreparable damage to the sensitive ecosystem.
“It’s approximately 800 metres away, and I live about a mile and a half from a gravel pit, and I hear their noise,” said Harry Hodgson, one of the concerned residents. “If it goes ahead it’s going to lessen the enjoyment of the park for everybody who visits it. The dust and the noise— It’s not going to allow for full enjoyment of the park and the natural environment.”
Hodgson said the dust released in these kinds of operations could potentially contain silica, a known carcinogen, and a material identified by the Canadian Centre for Occupational Health and Safety as highly toxic.
“Your nature walk will be to the sounds of industrial rock crushers, and instead of breathing in fresh air, it will be silica dust,” he said.
The permit Mountain Ash has submitted to Rocky View County Council is to mine within “a minimum of 1.0 metres above the groundwater table,” says the company’s Master Site Development Plan.
At that level, Hodgson said he is concerned the mine would remove protective layers of organic and inorganic materials which would typically act as a filter and guard the aquifer against contamination.
And while Mountain Ash has installed 10 groundwater monitoring stations in and around the mining site, the wells “would only identify harmful contaminants in the aquifer after they have already entered the groundwater and traveled toward the Park,” Hodgson said.
The aquifer has also been identified as one of only two known spawning grounds for bull trout between Calgary and the Ghost Dam Reservoir. Bull trout have been identified by the province as a sensitive species, and are officially listed as a threatened species under Alberta’s Wildlife Act.
Ken Venner, land use consultant with B & A Planning Group, said the Mountain Ash project has other safeguards against groundwater contamination in addition to the monitoring wells.
“If in fact there is equipment being stored on the site for any length of time, there would be requirements to store that equipment on non-permeable surface material,” Venner said.
Those non-permeable surfaces, such as a layer of compacted material built on a bed of sand, are meant to absorb and mitigate the effects of spills.
Venner also noted that Mountain Ash is looking into monitoring pre-existing wells on the properties to the east and south of the project.
He said that there are many procedures in place to mitigate the risk involved with this sort of operation and that Mountain Ash has undertaken “best in class” procedures to ensure the safety of the operation.
“I can’t 100 per cent equivocally say that there’s no risk— No risk more than an agricultural operator operating a piece of farm machinery on the landscape,” he said. “I think what we’re dealing with, the 40-acre at a time excavation area. This is not a wide-spread, extensive industrial operation. It’s going to be contained, it’s going to be phased, there are going to be tight controls.”
The south end of the southern quarter of land on which the Summit Pit is located is an area that has been earmarked as a habitat preservation area by Mountain Ash.
Venner said the area slopes down toward a natural escarpment and a regional drainage that meanders through the area.
The area has been identified as gravel-free by Mountain Ash, and provides a buffer for the landowners to the south.
The drainage area sits directly to the west of the beginning of the Big Hill Spring, which feeds the Big Hill Creek that drains into the Bow River.
Hodgson said the entire zone is an important recharge area for the aquifer, and forcing the spring to recharge through a “dramatically reduced protective filter” could expose it to “spilled machinery fluids, herbicides and harmful metals and trace elements released by the mining process.”
Rocky View County is scheduled to hold a public hearing regarding the Summit Pit application on March 2, at 9 a.m. The meeting will be broadcast live via rockyview.ca/.
If you would like to voice your opinion on this issue, you are asked to email [email protected] and include Bylaw C8051-2020 in the subject line.
The deadline for submitting written letters for the public hearing is Wednesday (Feb. 17) at 4:30 p.m. The deadline for video submission is Monday (March 1) at 12 p.m.
