Darwin Slept Here - Eric N. Simons [75]
Josh and I sat back, awed. Not quite the same as miners hauling rock out on their backs.
“It should have been more,” he said, almost to himself. “But we had two days of rain. Still, that’s 15,000 tons of rock with mineral and 20,000 we call waste. We have to crush 15,000 tons a day, otherwise it’s not economical. It sounds exotic, but gold is very expensive to mine. You make more money in an iron mine.”
In Darwin’s time, the miners carried their gold-bearing rock to a mill, where it was ground into powder. Although the equipment was vastly different, the process remained the same—at Andacollo, the rocks were taken from the pit to a series of gigantic industrial crushing machines. In the 1800s, miners washed the crushed rock to leach out the gold.
“How is that done now?” I asked.
“Cyanide,” Pardo told me.
Cyanide use turns out to be industry standard for gold mining. You spray the rocks with cyanide solution, and the cyanide picks up the gold, grabbing it out of the rock, and then drains down into a big pool. Then you run some kind of reverse filter type thing on it, using something like carbon that will pick the gold out of the cyanide, and then you refine it a bit more and end up with solid gold. Future students of Josh: ask him about this.
“We use 180 tons of cyanide a month, highly diluted,” Pardo said. “It’s a one-percent cyanide-in-water solution. People hear cyanide and go ‘oooh,’ but really, if you drink this, it won’t kill you. Seriously. We had someone drink it a while ago by accident, and he was fine. It might kill a small bird, maybe. But not even a seagull.”
Pardo’s phone rang. “I’ve got a conference call with the American investors who own the mine,” he said. “But I’ll tell someone to give you a tour.”
A few minutes later, the mine’s Risk Prevention Supervisor, Oscar Urbina Valdes, came out and rescued us from the office-cubicle hell. (I kept thinking back to Jean, the Brazilian forest guide, telling me, “I could not work in some place with four walls.”) I took “risk prevention supervisor” to mean security guard, and that’s what Oscar looked like. Stocky, muscle-bound, neck-challenged, and sporting a shaved head and goatee, hardhat and sunglasses, the guy looked seriously intimidating. But Oscar was polite and pleasant. He found us hardhats and polarized safety glasses, and we climbed into his air conditioned, four-wheel-drive truck.
“Some people look as though they belong in a hardhat,” Josh said, after checking himself out in the car’s window. “I am not one of those people.” He climbed uncomplainingly into the back seat, allowing me to ride shotgun.
We never exceeded fifteen miles an hour, on a nice, flat road. “I’m driving slowly as one of our agreements with Andacollo,” Oscar explained. “To keep the dust down. We try very hard not to have an environmental impact. Of course we have one. It is a mine. But we have lots of agreements with the town to reduce our impact.”
Nearly seventy percent of the mine’s three hundred workers came from Andacollo, he told me, so I imagined that the mine would be popular in town regardless of its environmental condition. But Oscar seemed to be trying to head off any arguments we might make about the mine’s environmental, social, or health impact. Having never heard of the mine before we had arrived a few hours ago, I hadn’t come prepared to argue.
I vaguely understood that cyanide-leaching mines were not very popular around the world because in some places the waste cyanide—the stuff left over after the gold has been taken out—leaks into the ground and, despite what Pardo told us, at this point it gets quite dangerous. I knew that large-scale business operations run by American investors in relatively poor areas of South America were often rapacious, ruthless, and deceptive, and that they chose these places because they didn’t have the environmental regulations and wage laws that North American governments might impose. And I knew that corporate protestations of environmental right-doing were usually