Posts from — April 2008

In May 2006 four people died at the Sullivan Mine, British Columbia.  They suffocated in a water-sampling shed.  There was not enough oxygen in the shed to keep them alive, and they died, one after the other.  It was a terrible accident–much of it due to barometric pressure variations. 

In the Sixth Australian Workshop on Acid and Metalliferous Drainage, held in mid-April 2008, M. Phillips, D. Hockley, and B. Dawson set out guidelines in their paper Sullivan Mine Fatalities Incident: Preliminary Technical Investigations and Findings to prevent a repeat of this type of accident. 

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Is it possible there is another parallel universe out there?  Something like what happens in the Golden Compass? 

 Another parallel universe accessible only by those with the subtle knife is the only explanation for newstories like this one: 

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My maternal grandmother was born in Windhoek in what was then German South West Africa.  She grew up speaking German on a dusty farm until the farm failed and she was orphaned and she went to an English-speaking refuge in South Africa.  She told me once of the time when South Africa invaded her land and Jannie Smuts encamped on the farm with his soldiers in full pursuit of the rebels. 

Then some twenty years ago, with my son, I wondered around a military base in Pretoria where we were shown mangled tanks retrieved from the theater of war between South Africa and the Cuban-supported Angolans.  Ever mindful of the kindness of my host, I looked at the messed metal in silence.  My son, with typical American bluntness, blurted to our host, an army Colonel: “The Cubans sure whipped your butt in that fight.”  The silence was stunning. 

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This is a picture of a scene I have enjoyed often: San Pedro Harbour, Vincent Thomas Bridge, Los Angeles, California.  I got a ticket for speeding across this bridge once; cost me all of $50. 

But that is nothing by what I have just been “fined.”  I have just had to cancel a stay with the Nomad Inn in Fort McMurray (the link to their site works intermittently–too busy charging cancellees.)  They charged me a whopping $216 cancellation fee.  Can’t say I have ever had that happen to me before: you know, cancel 36 hours before you sign in and you get whacked with a fee greater than the cost of your room.  True, the young girl was “new here”, and she also said sorry, but that hardly constitutes the kind of service intended to incline you to return to the hotel.

But then I suppose they just do not care.  This is the oil sands patch and there is no shortage of people wanting rooms and cars and services.  Screw the customer: make a buck of them and punish them if they do not come.   It kind of reminds you of the truth of the plea by the (obviously) old time Saskatchewan resident who writes with (obvious) horror:

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It is Friday, so a round up of the week’s top stories about mining.  No, I am not going to write another posting about natives who like mining, or natives who do not like mining and are going to disrupt the 2008 and 2010 Olympics to make their point.  It all gets to be terribly repetitive and boring.  How much sympathy do they think I have. 

In my opinion, the best mining news story of the week is at this link, under the heading “Mining company digs up ancient marine reptile.”  The article tells of the finding of the bones of a 75 million year old marine reptile (an Elasmosaur) at the Buffalo Rock Mine near Lethbridge, Alberta.  You just have to enjoy a story that ends:

As to the Buffalo Rock Mining find being a relative of the Loch Ness monster, Henderson says this isn’t possible.   The Elasmosaur required sub tropical or tropical conditions to exist, while the waters surrounding Scotland are cold. In addition, says Henderson, the earliest record of stories about the Loch Ness monster date back only 15,000 years, and for it to have been an Elasmosaur, the first recollections would have had to have occurred long before that time.

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Many vigorous e-mails come to my machine.  Here is one that just appeared.   

Hello R:   Thank you for getting in touch with me this morning and giving me a  brief overview of what services you provide and how ethics can be  applied.   In retrospect I would have liked to ask why you believe that the  private sector is a better avenue for career choices than the public  realm.  Could you forward me your thoughts on this when you have a  moment?   Regards,  E

Hi E:   The public sector (particularly federal and/or provincial governments) are like a rut.   A rut is just a long grave. Leave your creativity at home..as well as any notion you may have about personal ethics. There is no room or possible application in that rather mundane yet poisonous environment. Public service..sorry no such concept.   Service me — me me– mmmeeee— our clients are simply a nuisance and “why do we continue to fund our enemies”?    Oh well that pretty much describes how I feel and think about the “public sector.”    R.

They were not talking about India.  I suspect they were not even talking about politicians who ban uranium mining in the Canadian Atlantic provinces so they can send their lusty youth to Alberta and Saskatchewan.   But just maybe they were talking about Ontario and its currently unsuccessful attempt to clarify rights and/or title to lands where there might be uranium.  I refer of course to the Ardoch Algonquins thrown in jail for resisting a mining company.  Seem their only way out is thus:

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Can the mining industry do anything about the food shortage?  Here is the problem:

 

Mr Holmes, who is also the most senior UN official coordinating relief efforts, thinks we are just at the beginning of the crisis.  “What we are seeing so far is relatively limited, I’m glad to say, but there have been very severe protests in Haiti, for example. [There have been] riots and deaths in Egypt in bread queues and we’ve seen unrest in different counties in Africa. Most of the stapes of people’s diet - wheat and rice - have risen more than 50 per cent in the last 12 months and they’ve risen even more steeply than that very recently. There are some fundamental factors behind this. This is not just, I think, a sort of quick blip in prices which will return to normal shortly, it’s because there are these fundamental factors of the population rising, crops being used for bio-fuels, more sophisticated diets in places like India and China. [A] lack of strategic grain reserves and maybe also the effects of climate change and, for example, the drought in Australia affecting wheat production in recent years. That’s not helped either.”

I have not been able to find a correlation between the presence (or absence) of mines and the severity of food shortages.  Nor have I been able to find a correlation between the income of countries and their food-riot potential.  Although it is pretty obvious that in ill-governed countries like Haiti and too many places in Africa (Zimbabwe included) people are starving and will only get hungrier. 

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I spent the week in Saskatoon dealing with uranium mining waste disposal.  Confidentiality precludes me writing about it, so I will instead tell a story about my townhouse and buses.  The story has nothing to do with mining and everything to do with mining.  Every miner will recognize the people involved and the issues at stake. 

The sun has returned to Vancouver and it filters down through the tall trees onto the patio outside the townhouse.  This house is but one of a about 200 in a complex high up the hills of the North Shore.   When I bought the house in 1980, the trees were small and the sun came down directly onto the patio.  To the west, along the river was an active landfill where the gulls swooped as each new load of rubbish was dumped.  Today the landfill is a horse stable and a playing field and people amble along the river with excited dogs keen to nip the heals of the horses. 

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I despair. I have spent the last hour trying to write a serious article on how to make money mining.  I have tried to set out the important things you need to do to invest in mining and grow rich.  And now I read the following on the bloggersphere about EVE mining; and it is all so well stated and so obvious. 

This is how you make money mining: 

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The Vancouver Sun reports on Brian Gracey’s cash cow. This is not agriculture; this is Capella Resources. I could not believe the Sun that he is living in a $2.2 million British Properties home on a salary of about $150,000 a year, so I decided to poke around the internet and access the InfoMine Companies & Properties database. Here is what I found and what I think.

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