Restoration plan for Westray site

The Westray coal mine in Nova Scotia will be sealed, its silo removed and the land restored, beginning this spring.

In the meantime, the Nova Scotia government will finance a study to see whether a training centre for industrial safety can be profitably run on the site as a monument to the 26 miners who died in the 1992 explosion, Canadian Press reports.

The recommendations — to dismantle the mine and consider a training facility — were contained in the report of a local advisory committee. The provincial government is picking up the site restoration tab but has a $600,000 bond posted by the former mine operator, Curragh. The government agreed in December to spend nearly $200,000 on interim measures to prevent flooding and other damage during the winter.

The study will be paid for under a federal-provincial mineral development agreement.

Natural Resources Minister Donald Downe, who supports both suggestions, said the training school would have to pay for itself.

“We’ll have to see whether or not there are private-sector initiatives that are interested in moving forward,” he said. “It will not be a government project. It will not have government money.”