Fearing mercury, Nunatsiavut Inuit fight planned Labrador dam

For the 2,000 Inuit living near Lake Melville, in Nunatsiavut, Labrador, the choice has come down to taking risk into their own hands or letting Nalcor Energy, a provincial energy corporation, take a risk for them.

The risk (to use Nalcor Energy’s own term) they are willing to take is putting themselves in physical danger by occupying the construction site of an C$11.4 billion ($8.54 billion), 824 megawatt hydroelectric dam at Muskrat Falls, on the lower part of the Churchill River.

The dam is downstream of Lake Melville, and, the protestors say, presents a risk they are not willing to let their community take: increasing the amount of mercury pollution in the lake, the primary source of food for many of the area’s residents, by between 20 percent and 200 percent, according to a 2015 Harvard University study.

Occupation of the site began on Sunday, when a group of about 50 people broke through a gate in the surrounding fence. The group had been taking part in months-long protests gathered outside the construction site.

Those protests had already resulted in a Labrador court issuing a temporary injunction on October 16, ordering those taking part to disperse on the grounds that they were delaying work. The crowds did not leave, and, after Sunday’s incident, the court has now toughened its language. In a new injunction it names 22 people known to be inside company buildings, including a journalist covering the protests,

The injunction authorises law-enforcement officials to arrest and detain the individuals, or “any other persons found unlawfully occupying the project site”, until they can be taken before a judge on charges of violating a court order. Those involved, encouraged, in part, by what they said was the support of workers, have responded by saying they have no intention of leaving the site until their concerns were addressed.

At the same time, a group of three individuals staging a hunger strike say they are prepared to continue until their list of demands (see tweet at right) are met.

For its part, Nalcor admits that mercury levels (in the form of a substance known as methylmercury) will temporarily increase once the river is dammed, and that residents will be instructed to limit their consumption of animals caught upstream from the dam, including fish, seal and other animals Inuit eat, for a period of 15 years or so.

Likewise, the protestors are not disputing construction of the dam itself. In June, Perry Timper, Labrador’s environment minister, proposed paying financial compensation to residents to allow them to purchase food. Although Nunatsiavut officials have not turned down the offer, what residents want most is for steps to be taken that will limit the amount of mercury that builds up in the dammed-up waters. This, everyone agrees, can be done by removing topsoil and trees from the area to be flooded.

Timper had initially ruled out any possibility of trees being removed. Nalcor Energy, on the other hand, appears to be in more of a mood to compromise: after first agreeing to cut down some trees, it now says it will expand that number. It still refuses to meet Inuit demands to remove the soil from the 11-square-kilometer area where flooding is expected to begin later this year, however. It argues that doing so would be “unprecedented” in connection with construction of a hydroelectric dam.