Good for BKM? Kennecott Shuts Down The world's largest man-made excavation - a US copper mine - has been shut down by an enormous landslide that smashed roads and buildings and left two-thirds of the pit base buried.
Nobody was hurt in the collapse at the massive open-cast Bingham Canyon Mine, run by Rio Tinto-owned Kennecott Utah Copper - largely because workers had been evacuated amid several weeks of warning signs the ground was going to shift.
"This is something that we had anticipated," Bennett told Desert News.
"We knew the slide was imminent. We had relocated machinery, we had rerouted roads, we had rerouted utilities, we had rerouted buildings."
In 2011, Kennecott produced 237,000 tons of copper, 379,000 troy ounces of gold, 3.2 million troy ounces of silver [10% of U.S. annual supply*], 30 million pounds of molybdenum and other products. [*] % calculated from Kennecott mine data and USGS data for 2011.
This story made my skin crawl when I first found out about it, as it occurred last Wednesday night...but it never showed up anywhere until reader U.D. sent me a link on Saturday night...and the story wasn't on an American website, it came from Perth, Australia. Not even the always watchful legion of GSD readers that scour the Internet on our behalf didn't come up with it sooner.
I Googled it to see what other news stories there were on it...and drew a complete blank. Except for a few local stories out of Salt Lake City that one reader sent me later, this story never made it into the national news anywhere in North America for more than three days. You have to ask yourself why that was...and how it could happen?
Almost 25 percent of U.S. copper production...along with 10 percent of U.S. silver production vanished in a few minutes...and the prices of both got killed on Friday and Monday.
Anyway, this story was posted on the perthnow.com.au Internet site on Friday in Australia...which is Thursday in North America, the day after it happened. The mineweb.com didn't post the story until Saturday night, so you can see that most of North America had no clue that this had happened until long after the fact. It's a must read...and the photo is stunning. It looks almost Photoshopped. I'd guess that the mine will be shut for a year or more.
https://www.perthnow.com.au/huge-landslide-shuts-kennecott-utah-coppers-bingham-canyon-mine/story-fnhocq8b-1226619124124