Rio Tinto wants to better respond to the needs of regional stakeholders as 2019 unfolds, a senior company director told a meeting of the Regional District of Bulkley-Nechako on Jan. 17.
As part of his Water Engagement Update talk, operations director Andrew Czornohalan presented the company’s vision and assessment of its work.
At the start, Czornohalan laid out the “length and breadth of the operation Rio Tinto is accountable for in British Columbia.”
That region “culminates in the watershed area, spanning 14,000 square kilometres of catchment area, from Prince George to the Kitimat/Kemano area” where the company’s generating facility and aluminum production plant are located.
“We’re very proud to say we produce the lowest carbon footprint aluminum in the world right here in the northwest of BC,” he said.
Rio Tinto was affected by last summer’s wildfires and “for the first time in the [aluminum] smelter’s history the Skins Lake Spillway was evacuated.”
Community feedback during and after the fires highlighted some needs the company wants to address, including weak cell phone coverage in remote areas, which caused many communication problems for families and firefighting authorities.
“We have our operation at Skins Lake Spillway and we thought it would be a fantastic opportunity to partner with the community, partner with First Nations and really use Rio Tinto’s contacts and resources to bring that community together and try to progress with cell phone connectivity on the Southside.”
Rio Tinto also wants to focus on boosting firefighting capacity and response capability.
“That’s something we can have a meaningful impact on in the community. With our contacts within Emergency Management BC and within the wildfire service we can help cut through the bureaucracy in those processes and create an improvement in that situation.”
The company’s water management initiatives comprise several areas, with climate change adaptation near the top of the list.
Rio Tinto has partnerships with the University of Victoria, UBC and UNBC to help it better understand how climate change affects the Nechako watershed, and has invested $9 million in research and development.
Other key areas of the company’s water management plans are sockeye and chinook salmon stocks, watershed flooding, reservoirs, safety of the Kenney Dam and Skins Lake Spillway, aquatic furbearers, ice jams and flow targets.
Czornohalan pointed out that the management scheme has room for improvement and there are areas that Rio Tinto hopes to include in the future: sturgeon, bank erosion, recreational uses of bodies of water and sediment issues, among others.
Looking to the future, the operations director said a guiding question is how to better allocate the water that’s already there?
“There’s 55 cubic metres per second that’s guaranteed for the Nechako River regardless of any other outside influence. How can we better allocate that across a year to represent those [community and stakeholder] interests?”
A big part of that effort, he said, is greater communication with the public, government regulators and Indigenous communities, of which the concerns of the Cheslatta, Skin Tyee, and Lheidli T’enneh First Nations will be included in Rio Tinto’s water engagement plan.
Roundtable discussions with relevant stakeholders are planned to take place in four to six weeks, Czornohalan added.
