In July and August, we’re focusing on organizing and maintaining our site, as well as restoring old drill pads.
An assessment is underway for a tree planting program on old drill pads from historic drilling of the Blackbird deposit. We are ensuring that the drill pads are regrowing local vegetation such as spruce and tamarack.
Analysis completed by a forester has shown that because the pads are small, the vegetation is regenerating naturally. On some pads where we find insufficient regrowth, our team will be planting trees.
Given Esker has been operational since around 2008 with Noront and other companies, there is some scrap equipment that needs to be removed. One of our initiatives is to organize and complete removal of the scrap equipment that has accumulated over the years. It’s important to us that Esker is safe and tidy, and that we minimize disturbance to the environment.
We hope to have the waste material ready to go by the end of August for the backhaul in the winter. We ship out waste on a Basler plane from the ice strip near Esker (a frozen lake called Koper) to Pickle Lake where it is taken to a registered waste facility to be properly disposed of.
Our Esker team also recently received training on forest fire suppression. The training provides our team with the skills required to deal with forest fire situations. We look forward to a great (and hopefully, not too hot) summer season at Esker!
