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Midas Gold’s Plan to Address Previous Water Contamination in Stibnite Mining District
VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 06, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Midas Gold Corp. (MAX:TSX / MDRPF:OTCQX) (“Midas Gold” or the “Company”) today announced that it
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[{"type":"text","content":" VANCOUVER, British Columbia, June 06, 2019 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Midas Gold Corp. (MAX:TSX / MDRPF:OTCQX) (“Midas Gold” or the “Company”) today announced that it has been advised that the Nez Perce Tribe intends to initiate legal action against the Company and its subsidiaries related to water quality impacts related to historical mining activity undertaken prior to Midas Gold’s involvement in the site. Water quality in the historical Stibnite Mining District (the “District”) has been impacted by more than a century of mining activity, most of which took place before modern environmental regulations existed. In 2016, Midas Gold Idaho, Inc., an Idaho-based mining company that has never operated in the District, submitted a Plan of Restoration and Operations to improve water quality and fix the long-standing environmental issues facing the site as part of its proposed Stibnite Gold Project. Despite this proposal, the Nez Perce Tribe recently announced its intent to sue Midas Gold over its concerns of high concentrations of arsenic and other contaminants in the water at the site. “We have long shared the Nez Perce Tribe’s concerns over water quality in the Stibnite Mining District and we are well aware of the site’s historically degraded water quality,” said Laurel Sayer, CEO of Midas Gold Idaho. “Filing a lawsuit will not fix the problem. Instead, the site needs to be cleaned up, a point on which we are certain the Tribe can agree with.” Midas Gold did not cause the current water quality issues at the site. Midas Gold has never conducted any mining operations at site and therefore has no control or responsibility for any pollutant discharges. The Company’s actions have been limited to studying current conditions in the District, evaluating the optimal solutions for remediation and restoration and presenting those solutions to the regulators responsible for the site. The Stibnite Mining District is a highly mineralized area and there are over three million tons of tailings from the World War II era laying unconstrained in the Meadow Creek valley, capped by an additional seven million tons of spent heap leach ore, and numerous other open pits and waste rock dumps across the site. It is therefore not unexpected to see elevated levels of metals in ground and surface water and it is likely that elevated levels of arsenic and antim...