Mayor Cal Huntley does not foresee a “devastating effect” on the community with 777 Mine expected to close in four to five years.
Hudbay formally announced last week that it has abandoned hopes of extending the life of 777 beyond 2020, which has long been the mine’s projected end date.
“We’ve been here before,” Huntley said at Tuesday’s city council meeting when asked to comment on the news. “It’s certainly a significant announcement. We’ve closed mines before in this area. 777 Mine has a life of four to five years, depending on metal prices, and during that period of time we’ll have to see what happens. It’s certainly something we need to consider when we plan for the future.
“777 Mine isn’t tied directly to the [Flin Flon] metallurgical plant. The metallurgical plant as well is fed from a long-term mine that we have up in Snow Lake [Lalor] at this point in time. So as long as the zinc [concentrate] is coming in and can feed that, then that will extend.”
Huntley said he believes Hudbay is looking for employees in Snow Lake, adding, “So who knows where we are in four or five years?”
“But I don’t see a devastating effect with 777 going down,” he said, “but it’s certainly significant and something we need to consider in our planning going forward.”
Huntley said he personally believes “there will be a next mine, but whether the timing is exactly right, nobody knows about that.”
There will probably be a “shift in population to a certain degree,” he said, adding that mines as big as 777 have closed before and the workforce was managed “accordingly.”
Flin Flon MLA Clarence Pettersen said he was “obviously very disappointed” by the news.
“I don’t like to hear anything negative, but the reality is if there’s no ore in 777 we’ve got to find ore some place else,” he said, adding that other companies are searching for ore in the region.
In a Reminder interview last week, outgoing Hudbay president and CEO David Garofalo said northern Manitoba remains “very prospective geologically” and that Hudbay’s three concentrators in Flin Flon-Snow Lake, and the Flin Flon zinc refinery, represent a “huge competitive advantage.”
In other words, any potential interruption in operations would not necessarily be permanent.
“If we do find deposits in the area, we can reutilize that infrastructure much like we did with the…Stall Lake mill [near Snow Lake],” Garofalo said.
Hudbay will be in northern Manitoba for many more years thanks to Lalor, he said, adding that he believes the deposit will last “much longer” than its initial 20-year projected lifespan.
For Flin Flon, the good news in that scenario is that many Lalor employees live in the Flin Flon area. According to one unofficial estimate from 2014, about half of Lalor’s employees were commuting from outside Snow Lake, most of them from Flin Flon.
777 was originally projected to run out of ore in 2014-15, but successful exploration added extra years of life to the mine.
