Late protest against GRD mine

Friday 10th August 2001

By Chris Hutching

Proposals for a GRD gold mine on the West Coast have been attacked at the 11th hour by the Royal Forest & Bird Protection Society.

An announcement giving approval for the project has been keenly awaitied from Conservation Minister Sandra Lee for several weeks.

She is involved because the mine would be on 550ha of Department of Conservation land.

GRD successfully obtained resource consents for the project during a resource management hearing which is an expanded version of one that it obtained consent for in 1993 near Reefton.

The latter proposal will create the largest open cast mine in the southern hemisphere and the ore would be railed to the Macraes Flat area where GRD has processing equipment.

The final consent order is the subject of an internal political battle with Ms Lee reluctant to ratify the project while Deputy Prime Minister Jim Anderton and Labour MPs Jim Sutton and Damien O'Conner are keen for it go ahead to replace some of the jobs being lost in the forestry sector on the West Coast.

This week Forest & Bird field officer Eurgenie Sage said the mine would create New Zealand's largest toxic waste dump because the proposal includes 75ha of tailings dumps contaminated by heavy metals, and additional sources of acid mine drainage in the 105ha of waste rock stacks and the 46ha open pit.

She said the area was highly earthquake prone and heavy metals such as arsenic, copper, cadmium, lead, and zinc could enter streams feeding the Buller river system (recently the subject of a conservation order).

A recent report commissioned by the Department of Conservation by URS Woodward Clyde Dames and Moore noted concerns about the level of design, inadequate information to asses risks of stream contamination and water leakage and discharges from tailings. "The company is likely to have under-stated the capacity of the waste rock stacks to generate runoff contaminated by arsenic because it has changed the definition of what constitutes low arsenic rock, the report says.

Hard-rock mining causes very different runoff from traditional West Coast alluvial gold mining and was also the subject of a recent report to territorial authorities on the Coast in relation to coal mining, whose effects have destroyed some river fisheries north of Westport.

Ms Sage says the Department of Conservation as landholder, and the Buller District Council and West Coast Regional Council would be responsible for rehabilitation.

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