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My take on Snow Lake - Jan. 3, 2013

Hudbay consults on Reed

The Reminder is making its archives back to 2003 available on our website. Please note that, due to technical limitations, archive articles are presented without the usual formatting.

Snow Lake recently hosted a public consultation on Hudbay's Reed mine, now under construction outside the northern town. To look at the empty chairs in the Lawrie Marsh Hall on the evening of Feb. 11, one would think that there is no controversy over this project. Yet a week prior to the consultation, the Manitoba-based Wilderness Committee issued a news release calling into question the building of a mine in a provincial park. Add to this a common feeling within Snow Lake that residents should be apprised of any and all industrial development in the area, and one wonders why there were only four members of the public in attendance. Went forward Nevertheless, the consultation went forward as if there were a full house. Jay Cooper, Hudbay's assistant environmental superintendent, noted he was there to discuss the environmental assessment of the Reed mine and that public consultation and input is an aspect of the process. Cooper said the mine is projected to hold 2.16 million tonnes of copper ore and at full production will produce 1,300 tonnes a day, all of which will be hauled by truck to Flin Flon for processing. See 'Park...' on pg. 9 Continued from pg. 1 The mine has an approximate life of five years _ beginning in 2013 _ and is expected to provide 88 jobs at full production. Cooper also laid out the location of the mine, which is about 80 kilometres from Snow Lake and some 150 metres off of the highway, in the Grass River Provincial Park. It is accessed by way of an existing logging road, which is about 1.5 kilometres long. In talking about the Grass River park, Cooper said it is a natural park and categorized for resource management. Manitoba government literature notes that a 'natural park' preserves areas of a natural region to accommodate a diversity of recreational opportunities and resource uses. The 'resource management' category permits commercial resource development or extraction in a manner that does not compromise the main purpose of the park classification. Continuing on, Cooper went over work done to date on the advanced exploration project (AEP) at Reed and spoke of the mine closure plan that was accepted by the province in 2011. In preparing the site for the AEP, it was revealed that just seven hectares of land were cleared, and wood that was felled and deemed burnable was donated to camping areas within the park. Cooper pointed out the area between the mine and the road is still well treed and that in addition to providing a sound barrier, it is aesthetically pleasing. Blocks of trees Additionally, blocks of trees were left within the mine site itself, as was much of the natural limestone cover. It was also explained that waste rock brought to surface will be environmentally managed while there and then used as backfill in the mine upon closure. The Reed mine's ore will be accessed by a 2,000-metre ramp descending at a 15 per cent grade, with a bulk sample extracted from three zones prior to production. The three zones of the mine are numbered from surface down as Zone 30, Zone 20 and Zone 10, with 200 metres of ramp developed to date. The lay of the ore body lends itself well to a longhole stope mining method, a point on which Cooper ended his portion of the presentation. Next to speak was Cliff Samoiloff, environmental lead for AECOM, a consulting and engineering firm hired to assist with the Reed project. Samoiloff explained that other than it being in a provincial park, Reed was easy to develop from an operational and environmental standpoint. 'One of the advantages on the environmental side is that this area was historically used as a logging area, so a lot of the impacts that occurÉhave already occurred at this site,' he said. Samoiloff showed that there were no major bodies of water in the area that could be influenced. 'There are a couple of small water bodies there,' he said, 'but based on the environmental studies that we have conducted, there's not very much with respect to environmental impacts associated with those water bodies.' Samoiloff talked about the environmental baseline studies done on the project. He said there were several bird and mammal species in the area and no doubt caribou in the region. But Samoiloff said it is not within an area of migration corridors or calving grounds. He also acknowledged the assessment of creeks, rivers and lakes in the region. Samoiloff noted that the mine has been planned so there will be no impact to surface water and sediments; aquatic resources; terrestrial resources; groundwater; heritage resources; and resource use. 'Our baseline assessments were completed in 2010-11,' he said. 'There were no significant adverse impacts, (either) environmentally or socio-economically, that were determined as a result of both construction and operation of the project. It is anticipated, based upon current closure procedures and experience closing similar mines in the region, it would take about five to 10 years for the mine to return back to its pre-mining condition.' Some of the economic benefits of the Reed mine, as well as the Lalor mine also outside Snow Lake, were noted. Among them: the Lalor Mine and concentrator will employ some 430 people at full production; the Reed mine will employ 88 people at full production; concentrate produced at each mine will be processed in Flin Flon, providing additional economic benefit; and northern contractors, supply services and other businesses will have opportunities as a result of the projects. Prior to the end of the presentation there were several questions in regard to highway traffic generated by the mine and the size and number of trucks on the road. The increased traffic is considered negligible and trucks are to be essentially the same size as those currently traveling from Lalor to the Snow Lake concentrator and those that travel from the concentrator on to Flin Flon. This has been this week's installment of My Take on Snow Lake, which runs Fridays.

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