NOME -- It's been a long and unproductive road for the Rock Creek Mine, but now that its being liquidated, money will finally flow into the pockets of its current owner, Bering Straits Native Corp.
The mine was originally owned by Canadian company NovaGold and operated by its subsidiary, Alaska Gold. It opened in 2008 before shutting its doors just a few weeks later. In the two years of preproduction and the two months of actual production, the mine went more than $20 million over budget, lost two of its workers in a construction-related accident, and violated the Clean Water Act, resulting in over $800,000 in federal fines.
There was a glimmer of hope the mine's doors would reopen when Bering Straits bought it from NovaGold in 2012. CEO Gail Shubert told KNOM in an interview at the time that the company planned to bring the mine back into production, albeit on a much smaller scale.
"Economic development opportunities are few and far between in rural Alaska, and given the fact that this mine site has already been developed -- that NovaGold put several hundred million dollars into developing this site -- we just really felt that it was a good opportunity and kind of our responsibility to look closely at it to see whether it couldn't be made operational," Shubert said.
At the time, Shubert hoped the mine could be an economic engine for the region.
"You know we want to be able to provide some jobs and other opportunities to our shareholders and descendants and other folks that live in region."
But what they hoped would be a source of revenue for locals turned out instead to be a continuation of cleanup and reclamation. Now, it seems that along with ridding the land of toxins, Bering Straits will also be clearing out equipment.
A news release from another Canadian mining company, Almaden Minerals, revealed it was entering into an agreement with Bering Strait to purchase much of the mine's equipment.
The mine's minimally used equipment will be shipped to a gold mine in Mexico.
Over the span of two and a half years, Almaden will pay Bering Straits $6.5 million for the equipment. Jerald Brown, Bering Straits' vice president of Nome operations, has been working on the sale for a little over a year and says the initial investment in the failed mine turned out to be quite profitable.
"We've actually recovered 100 percent of the purchase price to date without including the proceeds from selling this equipment so it actually was a very good investment decision that Gail Shubert worked on and negotiated."
Along with the profitability of the purchase, Brown is optimistic the land will eventually give back to Nome residents, though this time in a different way.
"The land will be reclaimed, in fact it already has been, and it will go back to being an area where people can go berry-picking and look at the musk ox and everything they were doing before the mine was there."
This article has been reprinted with permission from the original copy from KNOM.org.