Britannia Mines - Where Pennies Came From...

 Alrightee!!! Here we are! We are going to visit the Britannia Mines National Historic Site!!

If you're a history buff... this is the place for you!

We've driven by here many times and that big tiered building is huge feature of the place. It is the concentrator building... we'll talk more about that later...

Can you see me??? In the R? Back in the late 1800s, a Scottish prospector went poking around the mountains inland from here and found an excellent mining spot!

Copper was the big find but it was remote from any smelters (nearest ones in Crofton on Vancouver Island and Tacoma WA). So they needed to build an ore concentrator so they weren't spending a lot of $$$ shipping excess rocks around.

They built a town down where we are... and then there was another village/town way up the mountain... Lots of the miners lived up there and then ore was sent down to the concentrator... 

It was dirty, dark and noisy work but the mine was pretty successful back in the day.

They still have a ginormous truck sitting out there!! Can you see me??? 

These tires are huge!!!

We wandered through the museum part... you can do gold panning here and they do sprinkle gold in the sediment so some people actually find some!

This is one of the old machine rooms. After WW2, with a decline in the demand for copper, the mine switched to processing zinc... but even that eventually dwindled and the mine shut down in 1974 for good. At its peak, Britannia was once the largest copper mine in the world!

This was a little rail car that transported mine workers deep into the mines. After the mine closed, it became a museum... and they've done really well. During the 70 years it was open... the mine produced 640,000 tonnes of copper... along with zinc, lead, cadmium, silver and gold!

Lots of old buildings are still here...

They had a pretty narrow gauge railway!! For all those ore carts... and miners.

But in the years after the mine shut... they discovered a problem. You see there are over 200 km of tunnels in the mountain. And it rains a lot here... so all that water seeped through the rocks and then over all the exposed mineral-ore and picked up copper and stuff and then flowed into creeks and out into Howe Sound where it was not good. Not good at all. It's called acid rock drainage and it is a HUGE environmental disaster... So back in the 1990s... the government and the mine owners came up with a plan to catch the runoff and treat it...

Because this drainage was killing all the aquatic life in Howe Sound, including salmon...

They tried different things and now...

There's a huge treatment plant up in the mountains and EPCOR annually treats 4.2 billion litres of runoff... And Howe Sound is slowly recovering...