A little material to move. Landslide at the Bingham Canyon Mine

Wow...

How does a mining company survive that kind of damage and halt to production? That is a huge slide. Thank goodness they were able to predict the impending slide and no one was hurt. Is this relatively rare in open pit mines or do they experience slides more often and we just don't hear about them?

Pat

Wow...

How does a mining company survive that kind of damage and halt to production? That is a huge slide. Thank goodness they were able to predict the impending slide and no one was hurt. Is this relatively rare in open pit mines or do they experience slides more often and we just don't hear about them?

Pat

One other story said that it looks like that is will take two years to clean up the mess. Not working at Kennecott this is my guess of what they will to. They will run out the ore that is stock pilled at the concentrator, they have known about this slide was coming for a couple of months so I hope that the ore storage shed, it is very large, is full. Then put everything the have through the rest of the process, the smelter and refinery. Clean up the scrap piles at the refinery and smelter. When my dad worked at the refinery they had piles of scrap copper from the process that they never had time to get back in the supply line, that might have changed in the last few years. Move up scheduled maintenance the requires shut down at the concentrator, smelter and refinery. At the mine get that side of the pit stabilized and get other parts of the pit back into production while cleaning out the bottom of the pit. I do not think that the slide took out the in pit crusher but it might have taken out some of the convayer line that exited the pit through an old railroad tunnel and then to the concentrator. There is two much money left in that hole to shut is down. The amount of material that slide into the pit is small compared to the amount of material that has been moved over the life of the mine to this point. The pit is about 2.5 miles wide at the top of it and .6 miles deep. There was a mountain over the top of the pit when mining started with two canyons extending along the north and east walls. The canyon split at about the point of the haul truck shop that is now half a shop.

Yes, that’s a large slide. Of course the best part is no employees were injured. When I worked there safety was yes a big deal and it appears by all accounts paid off this time, as it always does.

What surprised me at least, is why would they leave some equipment in the bottom of the pit? As I recall, the spokesman “said they didn’t know it was going to go that far down in the pit”. I wonder where they thought it was going to go. They could have at least drove the end-dumps out or moved to another location to work in while waiting out the end results of the slide.

If they would have giving the equipment as much attention as they did the employees and other building they could have saved whole spread, in my opinion? Things of this nature are totally unpredictable, why take the chance?

Kelly

Hi, Kelly.
The story that I heard was that the powers that be didn't think it was going to be as big as it is. Now how that could be, I have no idea as we both KNOW that engineers 'don't make mistakes'. In the past, it was a slide rule malfunction so I guess that it's a computer glitch these days.

It seems to be a bit of a habit amongst a LOT of people to underestimate the forces of nature but they do so at their own peril - - - - and many times at the peril of others as well.

As Naylorbros pointed out, that amount of material is but a VERY small drop in the bucket of what has been moved over the life of the mine to date and there seems to be still be a fair bit of recoverable ore remaining. How-wevver, it appears that there might need to be a fair bit of re-instatement of benches and haul roads in that area for it to ever be safe again. Which raises the question, "Was it safe before the slide?" Apparently not.

I have been doing some flood damage repair work on a creek about 100 kilometres inland from where I live and I'll BET that the next time that creek decides to come down in a flood anywhere near as big as the last one, all my handiwork will vanish downstream under the weight of 7 metres of water travelling at 30 kilometres per hour. But the engineers still say that they reckon it will survive the next big one. We will see - - - - IF I live long enough.

Just my 0.02.