The Cassiar Road

Cassiar was a small company-owned asbestos mining town located in the Cassiar Mountains of Northern British Columbia in western Canada. After forty years of operation, starting in 1952, the mine was unexpectedly forced to close in 1992. Most employees were laid off. Efforts to attract new purchasers to keep the mine running company failed so in September 1992 the town, mine and mill infrastructure was auctioned off. The closure was driven by a combination of factors including diminished demand for asbestos and expensive complications faced after converting from an open-pit mine to an underground mine. Most of the contents of the town, including a few houses, were sold off and trucked away. Most of the houses were bull-dozed and burned to the ground in this resource town north of Dease Lake. 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, effect