Copper Flat Mine needs so much water to operate that it will have long term impacts on the water use in this county for decades to come. It also needs a huge amount of electricity. How will that consumption affect the rest of us electricity users?
Guest Contributor Norm Gaume is a water resources engineer, former director of the New Mexico Interstate Stream Commission and president of New Mexico Water Advocates. He has worked on New Mexico water policy and management for decades.
Those who think about the economy in Sierra County should be comfortable with dollars and sense. Here is a dollar and sense way to think about copper mining at Copper Flat.
Continuing to think about the 500 acres of stacked tailings and what can keep the tailings from sliding downhill, I turn to the mine’s submitted technical studies on this subject. These studies do not give assurance that the miners know the answer to that question either. This is dangerous.
Several months ago, a PAWA member asked me what kept the big stack of tailings (500 acres and 200 feet deep) proposed at Copper Flat Mine from sliding down the hill. I try to answer that question. This is the first of a two-part article.
We calculate whether NMCC has enough water to mine Copper Flat in the manner proposed in its application to mine. It does not. Why, then, has NMCC applied for a mining permit?
What was it like to work at Copper Flat Mine in 1982? Will that be what working at Copper Flat Mine will be like if the mine were reopened? This is a Labor Day meditation on working at the mine.
We in Sierra County are living in, and at long last, beginning to understand that we live day to day in a water crisis. What is the justification for allowing someone to withdraw and evaporate a million gallons of groundwater a day during that social and economic crisis?
The gross receipts and lodgers tax revenue figures for local governments don't bear out that low lake levels have caused that much economic damage. Are local governments' emergency declarations crying wolf?
A one-page budget, passed with no questions asked and turned into the Department of Finance and Administration three weeks late. That's the level of fiscal oversight our publicly-owned hospital is getting from our elected officials.
I predicted the City of T or C's collection center would be used to bilk citizens out of money instead of serving their interests, and that has certainly come to pass. I didn't foresee that T or C polycart customers would be exploited to pay for Elephant Butte's polycart customers.
I wrongly assumed T or C had about 1,000 acre feet a year to parlay to attract development. The state lost a decade-long lawsuit to Texas and the city's unused water rights could be reclaimed, especially since it's wasting up to 47 percent of its water due to infrastructure neglect.
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