Boy O Boy....I’m suprised no-one was killed.
The copper mining company was aware of the impending slide and had warned residents near the mine Wednesday that a slide was possible any day. Kennecott engineers had been detecting ground movement as far back as February.
At the time, the movement amounted to just fractions of an inch, but it was enough for the company to close and relocate the mine’s visitors center. The visitors center will not open in 2013, the company announced Thursday.
“This is something that we had anticipated,” Bennett said of the slide. “We knew the slide was imminent. We had relocated machinery, we had rerouted roads, we had rerouted utilities, we had rerouted buildings.”
Over the past few days, engineers started seeing movement of up to 2 inches per day.
“We’ve seen acceleration rates increase until where we landed (Wednesday night),” Bennett said. “When it reaches 2 inches per day, that’s certainly a time when we want to take steps that we have been planning for a number of weeks in order to make sure people are out of the way.”