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A 120m aerial view of the massive tailings pile found by the ghost town of Cassiar, British Columbia. The tailings pile itself is nearly 90m in height!
The discovery of asbestos in the area in 1950 led to the founding of the Cassiar Asbestos Company in the following year. The town was established in 1952, the same year the mining operation began. By the 1970s Cassiar had a population of 1,500 and had two schools, two churches, a small hospital, theatre, swimming pool, recreation centre and hockey rink.
By the early 1990s, diminished demand for asbestos and expensive complications faced after converting from an open-pit mine to an underground mine made the continued operation of the mine unprofitable. In 1992, Cassiar Asbestos decided to close the mine and liquidate its assets, including the town of Cassiar itself.
Most of the contents of the town, including a few houses, were auctioned off and trucked away. Most of the remaining dwellings were bulldozed and burned to the ground. The mill was briefly reactivated in 1999 by Cassiar Chrysotile Inc which had a reclamation permit to clean up the site. 11,000 tons of asbestos were exported before the mill burned down on Christmas Day of 2000, effectively halting all production. Today the streets are bare and flowers bloom where the houses once stood. Residents living between the townsite and the Stewart-Cassiar Highway, and on the highway itself, who originally obtained phone service from the Cassiar exchange, were moved to the nearby Good Hope Lake exchange in the fall of 2006 and the Cassiar exchange shut down.
More info here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cassiar,_British_Columbia
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