Copper: Humanity’s first and most important future metal
Millions of feet of copper wiring will be required for strengthening the world’s power grids, and hundreds of thousands of tonnes more are needed to build wind and solar farms.
Chilean state mining firm Codelco said on Tuesday that there had been a landslide on one slope of its Ministro Hales copper mine, but that the incident had not impacted the safety of workers or damaged equipment and that operations were unaffected.
The world’s top copper producer said in a statement that “today there was a failure in the sector of the eastern slope of the pit, without consequences for the safety and integrity of people, equipment and infrastructure.”
The mining firm said that early warning systems and regular monitoring of the open pit’s slopes had allowed the company to identify the risk early, avoiding any impact.
“These controls, precisely, made it possible to determine in advance the occurrence of the event, so the area had been identified and segregated since the beginning of this year,” Codelco said in a statement.
“The operational event occurred in an area of sterile material and does not compromise the continuity of the division’s operation.”
The Ministro Hales mine, named after a former mining minister, produced 144,000 tonnes of copper in the first nine months of the year.
(By Fabian Cambero and Adam Jourdan; Editing by Michael Perry)
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