Recent news that large amounts of coal from across the Interior will start moving though the area by rail has a local environmental expert raising concerns.
TRU professor Michael Mehta says it’s not just effects on people’s lungs to be worried about, we need to look at what coal dust can do to our ecosystems.
“One thing that we really haven’t talked a lot about are what are called the ecotoxicological effects, the effects on aquatic ecosystems including rivers and lakes,” he said. “They do spray them with a surface treatment, lots of questions about the effectiveness of that to suppress the dust.”
“You know a lot of the trains that go past rivers and lakes also pass hatcheries and they’re also very important salmon spawning grounds and other things so it’s a complex picture.”
Mehta says he has done some calculations on the potential damage.
“Figure it this way, you’ve got a 150 tons of finely ground coal in a train car, like a floury kind of texture. These aren’t rocks, these aren’t chunks of coal, they’re ground,” he added. “Studies suggest that about three percent of that coal on these trains will be lost from blowing off the train – that works out to about five to six tons of coal dust per day, per kilometre of track.”
“Over a year, it’s the same as dropping a two kilogram bag of sugar, every square metre going out about 500 metres from each side of the track. Of course, it doesn’t settle there, a lot of it runs off into water, a lot of it moves out into other areas through wind and other processes. This is a fair amount of coal that’s being dispersed all across the tracks, all along their neighbourhoods.”
As far as human impacts goes he says a lot of research comes from coal miners, whose life expectancy is only about 50 to 60 years.
“For people who are inhaling coal dust, it’s clear that this material, especially the very finely ground stuff can lodge in the lungs, it can create emphysema, and other disorders associated with COPD,” Mehta added. “It can exacerbate asthma, it can create heart problems, all the same sort of stuff we’ve talked about before when talking about wildfires.”
Mehta wanted to emphasize that importance of coal and coal mining in B.C.
“It’s the biggest exported mine commodity in the province. It works out to about $5-billion per year which is about 60 percent of all the mine commodities through the province,’ he said.
“It dwarfs copper and gold and all those sorts of things so this is big business and a lot of the province, especially the Kootenay region as well as up in the Peace region, rely on this so we really need to figure this out.”
Kamloops councillor Dale Bass previously told NL News that there are frustrations growing among her neighbours in Dallas because of plumes of coal dust coming off the top of train cars.
