A general view of wildfire smoke is seen in Ottawa, on June 5. According to Environment Canada a special air quality statement has been issued as a result of local forest fires in Quebec with poor air quality persisting throughout the day and possibly into Tuesday.Spencer Colby/The Canadian Press
Canada’s most destructive spring wildfire season to date is hitting the operations of Quebec mining and forestry companies as the blazes continue to take their toll on industry.
Mining giant Rio Tinto Group’s RIO-N majority-owned Iron Ore Company of Canada has suspended transport on its 418-kilometre Quebec North Shore and Labrador Railway, which links its Labrador operations to port facilities in Sept-Iles, as fires rage in the Sept-Iles area. The company is now also starting to idle the mine, concentrator and pellet plant sites in Labrador City that feed the port installations, it said in an update Monday.
“We have a certain capacity to stockpile up in Labrador City, but at a certain point, if we can’t bring product down to Sept-Iles, we just can’t stockpile forever,” Rio Tinto spokesman Simon Letendre said. The mining operations had been scheduled for an annual maintenance break in coming days, which will minimize the impact, he said.
Canada is currently experiencing its worst spring ever for wildfires as measured by the size of area burned, Natural Resources Canada said Monday. The impact is being felt across the country, from Alberta’s oil patch to Ontario’s lumber producers and Atlantic Canada’s seafood sector. Some 3.3 million hectares have been burned, according to federal estimates.
In Quebec, 164 wildfires are currently burning across the province, and 114 of them are out of control, according to the government. Kateri Champagne Jourdain, the minister responsible for the Cote-Nord region, told reporters in Sept-Iles that the fires in her region northeast of Quebec City are unprecedented.
Smoke has engulfed vast areas, and the QNS & L railway operations will remain offline until at least Friday, Rio Tinto said. There’s been damage to the company’s telecommunications infrastructure and power line along the track.
The miner is also closely watching a bridge and tower just north of Sept-Iles on the railway. Its teams have installed a temporary sprinkler system on the site as a precaution.
Other companies are also facing the fallout from the fires.
Osisko Mining Inc. said Monday it has withdrawn its employees and suspended work at its Windfall gold project owing to forest fires affecting communities in Abitibi and Eeyou Istchee James Bay.
Wallbridge Mining Company Ltd. said it has temporarily evacuated the camp at its Fenelon Gold project and suspended exploration activities on its Detour-Fenelon Gold Trend property in Quebec’s northern Abitibi region.
The Quebec government last week issued an emergency order prohibiting access to forested Crown land and limiting road access in seven sectors of the province until further notice. Efforts to fight the fires have been directed to populated areas and those where essential infrastructure is located, because the government lacks the capacity to deal with all the blazes.
Resolute Forest Products, a pulp and paper company controlled by Richmond, B.C.-based Paper Excellence Group, said its Quebec tree harvesting operations have been interrupted and it’s trying to repatriate machinery that could help fight the fires. The company’s sawmill operations could also be interrupted if the supply of wood were to run out, spokesman Louis Bouchard said.
“We are monitoring the situation to the nearest second,” Mr. Bouchard said via e-mail. “I don’t want to speculate on what could be the mid to long-term impacts because the situation can evolve rapidly in any direction.”
Alberta experienced many of Canada’s earliest and biggest blazes this spring, with oil and gas producers cutting back significant amounts of output in response.
In Nova Scotia, wildfires have set the seafood industry on edge, with lobster fishers scrambling to retrieve traps and fears that millions of dollars’ worth of food at processing and holding facilities along Nova Scotia’s South Shore could be lost because they fall within wildfire evacuation order areas, the CBC reported.
With a report from The Canadian Press
Nicolas Van Praet