U.S. tour highlights environmental challenges

Environmental concerns that U.S. mining companies are grappling with today will probably be facing Canadian miners in the future. That prospect prompted the Canadian Institute of Mining and Metallurgy’s Toronto branch to organize a recent tour of six gold mining operations in Nevada and California to see how companies there are dealing with the issue.

The tour took 25 members, eight of whom were accompanied by their spouses, from Las Vegas, Nev., to San Francisco, Calif. Along the way the group visited the Castle Mountain project in California just across the border from Las Vegas, the Sterling mine in Nevada, Red Rock Mining’s heap leach operation at Goldfields, Nev., the Jamestown gold mine at Jamestown, Calif., the Yuba gold dredging operation on the Yuba River and the McLaughlin mine northwest of Sacramento, Calif.

While problems of land reclamation, water and air quality control and other environmental issues have been widely reported, the tour provided the members with a chance to see how companies in California and Nevada are dealing with specific problems.

“You can read a lot of material, but it’s not the same as seeing them first hand. It’s an invaluable opportunity,” said David Hutton, one of the members on the tour. Hutton, chairman of the CIM Toronto branch, is vice-president of exploration and development of Rayrock Yellowknife Resources.

He pointed out that companies can often accommodate government requirements but find it more difficult to deal with public concerns on specific projects. The tour gave participants the chance to see a wide variety of situations and provided them with an opportunity to hear key operations people discuss how they addressed problems that arose from different levels of regulatory compliance and public involvement.

For example, Homestake’s McLaughlin mine falls within three different counties, all of which require different regulatory compliance. One of the counties also takes in the city of San Francisco, so air quality monitoring at the mine has to be as stringent and must meet the same requirements as those for the metropolitan area even though the mine itself is in a relatively isolated part of the state.

The Jamestown mine is in a more built-up area and is surrounded on three sides by residential properties. While the mine is generally well accepted by the residents because of its contribution to the county’s tax base, employment and local purchases, it must deal with a small number of neighbors who vehemently oppose the operation and actively seek out the smallest infractions as a means of forcing the mine to cease operations. Its plans to expand are similarly being opposed by some residents living near the site of the expanded operation.

The tour was not all business, however. The group attended a nightclub floor show during the 2-night stay in Las Vegas, where guests stopped at Viceroy Resources’ Walking Box Ranch for a western barbecue, drove through Yosemite National Park while crossing the Sierra Nevada mountains and sampled some California wines while passing through the vineyards in the Napa Valley.