So the water test results from the Mount Polley dam breach show that the water is within guidelines for drinking water. Fortunately this means aquatic life is not expected to be affected.

There's still a lot of damage to the physical environment to deal with and I'm sure Imperial Metals will have some significant clean-up costs.

It has been suggested that this will delay Schaft Creek for years, although I'm not sure exactly why. Maybe now that the water itself is not actually toxic as has been reported, this kind of hysterical (over)reaction will dissipate.

I can't see how this will change anything with SC because it's not like they were planning on building a dodgy dam in the first place.

I have heard that one of the improvements in the optimization studies is to use a sand dam instead of a rock dam. In S. America Teck is used to building sand dams and they work very well.

As I said the other day, the biggest fall-out from this could be the monitoring of these older mines along with stricter enforcement.