General Discussion
Related: Editorials & Other Articles, Issue Forums, Alliance Forums, Region ForumsMost Expensive Landslide Ever?
BY LARRY O'HANLON
Landslide experts are already calling last weeks remarkable landslide in a Utah copper mine perhaps the most expensive in history. Part of the Kennecott Utah Coppers Bingham Canyon mine let loose the massive slide on April 10, registering as a 5.1 magnitude earthquake on seismographs and engulfing tens of millions of dollars in mining equipment and infrastructure. The most recent company estimates put the mass movement at more than 165 million tons. The output of the mine has halted and will take months to get started again, which caused the company to estimate that the production of the mine will be only half of what was planned for 2013.
The good news is that not a single life was lost a fact that Kennecott Utah Copper has every reason to be proud of. Just a few weeks ago a similar landslide at a mine in Tibet cost 83 lives. Unlike similar mines in other parts of the world, Bingham Canyon is equipped with state-of-the-art monitoring equipment which gave plenty of warning that the slope was about to fail. A lot more on this can be found on landslide researcher Dave Petleys blog.
Petley, writes, My interpretation of this is a loss of $770 million,
There are also some concerns that the event might cause an increase in global copper prices, but so far this does not seem to have occurred.
There are many more amazing images of this landslide as well on the Kennecott Utah Copper Flickr website. Look especially for the ore trucks at the bottom of the slide. They look like Tonka toy trucks from a playground, but are in fact gigantic machines, each worth millions of dollars.
http://news.discovery.com/earth/weather-extreme-events/most-expensive-landslide-ever-130418.htm#mkcpgn=rssnws1
sakabatou
(42,152 posts)SamKnause
(13,101 posts)Thanks for posting.
I did not hear about this landslide in any news outlets.
morningfog
(18,115 posts)when the landslide was a product of raping the earth.
El Supremo
(20,365 posts)You want to go back to the paleolithic?
morningfog
(18,115 posts)pintobean
(18,101 posts)We're still paying for it, and will be for a long time.
defacto7
(13,485 posts)You can't imagine how huge it is. It's like a man made canyon or a meteor crater... but ugly.
Arctic Dave
(13,812 posts)of the largest fish spawning grounds in Alaska.