[BCMA] Vancouver Sun May 11, 2012 - Hail Britannia

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Hail Britannia
vancouversun.com 
Fri May 11  2012 
Section: OnLine 
Byline: Scott Simpson

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UNDATED - VANCOUVER, BC - Submitted March 14, 2011 The Britannia Mine Museum
will offer a variety of spring break activities for families, such as an
underground train ride through the Britannia mine tunnel. (With story on
Spring Break, by Amanda Ash.) Handout [PNG Merlin Archive]
Photograph by: Graham Ballantyne , Vancouver Sun
Marshall Tichauer was still in his teens when his father decided it was time
for him to make his own way in the world.

"I turned 18. My father said, 'Get a job' and kicked me out," Tichauer
recalled. 

Jobs weren't difficult to find in the early 1960s. Tichauer lived in West
Vancouver. He landed a job just up the highway at Britannia mine, which was
still very much the Howe Sound company town it had been in its heyday in the
1920s and '30s as the largest copper mine in the then-British Empire.

Like many of British Columbia's major early industrial mines, Britannia got
its start after a series of gold rushes that began in the Fraser River
system in 1858 before spreading east and north to Rossland and Barkerville.

Those early prospecting opportunities threw open the door to waves of
European and Asian adventurers across the British Columbia mainland -
mining, not fish, furs or timber, was the catalyst for the settlement of the
province. 

Cumberland, on Vancouver Island, was one of B.C.'s earliest mining towns,
with a coal mine from the late 1880s until 1966.

But it was gold that pulled prospectors to Yale in the Fraser Canyon, to
wild and woolly Barkerville in the Cariboo, to Granby, Kimberley, Rossland
and Trail - and to the serious business of building industrial-scale mines
and smelters. 

Gold prospectors were the first on the scene at Britannia, but it was an
abundance of copper that led - by 1905 - to the development of a mine and a
company town accessible only by ship.

There were good times and rough times.

An avalanche in March 1915 killed 60 men, women and children, and a
landslide in 1921 claimed 37 lives.

The mine closed for a few years, but by 1963 - with copper prices improving
on world markets - new owner Anaconda Mining was taking it on a final run
that would last until 1974.

"I lived in the bunkhouse here. It cost me $20 a month. There was two men to
a room and you were still responsible for your own food," Tichauer recalled.

"I started out as a sampler underground. I used to have to take a sample of
the rock and bring it out to the assay lab. Then I was a geologist's helper,
then an engineer's helper - went up through the ranks.

"I was the mine rescue captain here for a while. I was a mine clerk and
worked in the warehouse. I was a safety officer and employment officer when
I left - and I was only 27 at the time."

In the course of nine years at Britannia, Tichauer also met and married his
wife, Marianne. They had two children and eventually moved to Squamish.

When they lived in a company house in Britannia, Tichauer made $1,200 a
month and paid monthly rent of $120.

"And electricity was free," he added.

"There were advantages to living here. There was community spirit. When we
had a dance, everybody went. The company was good for the community. They
sponsored a lot of adult education programs. They would bring in the
instructors and all that stuff. If you passed, they paid the whole shot.

"We had floor hockey teams, baseball, and then of course people would go
skiing. There was fishing out front. There were hikers' cabins at the top."

Today, with its iconic 20storey milling building overlooking the Sea to Sky
Highway, Britannia is a National Heritage Site.

It's also host to the award-winning Britannia Mine Museum - although the
road to its current status was bumpy.

When they departed for good in 1974, the miners who had worked Britannia for
three-quarters of a century left behind 210 kilometres of tunnels threading
through the mountain.

When Anaconda closed the mine it walked away from a problem that turned
Britannia into an international poster child for environmental disaster:
acid mine drainage.

Streams running through the mountain, fed by rain and snow, were combining
with residual sulphides in the rock to form an acid that leached copper and
other metals into the water.

The resulting streams were toxic enough to kill fish, and their outfall in
Howe Sound was a marine dead zone.

It was more than just a problem for Howe Sound. The public's lingering
impression of Britannia was that mining was ultimately a Pandora's box and
that any mine's eventual legacy would be a long-term environ-mental
disaster. 

It took until 2001 for researchers working through the University of British
Columbia's mining department to plug one of two streams running out of the
mountain, narrowing the pollution source to a single, manageable stream, and
until 2005 for the province to finance a water treatment facility that
precipitates all the metal - up to a half-tonne a day - out of the water and
traps it in a sludge that's removed from the site.

The treatment facility, by some estimates, will need to operate for a
millennium. 

After the pollution abated, the transformation of Britannia into a museum to
celebrate B.C.'s mining industry began in earnest.

Last year, the Canadian Museum Association honoured Britannia Mining Museum
with an award for outstanding achievement in facility development and
design. 

"There are other [mining] museums in B.C.," Britannia museum executive
director Kirsten Clausen said. "But it's fair to say we are the largest
museum functioning on an industrial site in British Columbia, possibly in
Western Canada. 

"The turnaround for Britannia, and for the museum, and for our ability to
engage visitors around the story and relevance and importance of our
history, was the remediation effort."

It is an issue the museum does not avoid, Clausen said.

"A museum shouldn't be any-thing less than a safe place to discuss and
explore things. You try to find a way to do all the perspectives. When I
speak to my board, who are a great number of industry leaders, they value
that, too. 

"That's not to say there aren't conversations around how you portray some of
the more difficult subjects but certainly the museum's board and industry
leaders respect that you can't ignore that as a value."

ssimpson at vancouversun.com Twitter.com/ScottSimpsun



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Key facts about Britannia Mine
vancouversun.com 
Fri May 11  2012 
Section: OnLine 

Source: Britannia Mine Museum

- Ore was discovered by chance in 1888, by a gold prospector.

- The mine operated from 1904 to 1974, reopening as the British Columbia
Museum of Mining in 1975.

- Metal produced included copper (650,000 tons), zinc (137,000 tons), lead
(17,000 tons), cadmium (500 tons), silver (188 tons), gold (15.6
tons/500,000 ounces).

- Underground workings include 210 kilometres of tunnels, the longest of
which was 16 km. 
- There were an estimated 178 underground fatalities at the mine over 70
years.



 


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