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We had to get to the Ross Mining main office in Honiara for 8:00am so that Ken Ferris (believe it or not, the father of the guy who had taken us snorkelling in Fiji) could take us out to Gold Ridge, a gold mine that should be starting production in July this year. Ken’s job is that of public relations/ dispute settlement, and it keeps him very busy. Since they started developing the gold mine he has taken over 2,500 vistors to look around the 500 hectare development.

The site of the mine lies some 40km distance from Honiara, and once you leave the main road is a very fast journey. Ross Mining have spent huge sums of money developing a transport infrastructure that can cope with the equipment used by a mining company. Access is provided by what will become an agregate and gravel road 4 lanes wide that passes through what used to be a Lever Brothers palm nut and coconut plantation.

Before long the road starts to rise, and you leave the plantation and enter an area that has been cultivated by Solomon Islanders. Ken pointed out a village that the company is going to relocate 200 yards further away from the road, because the amount of dust being raised from the road will become intolerable once the mine starts operating.

The road then starts to rise and you come across the first signs of the mine itself, the tailings dam. This is where all the fine sediment created by processing the ore is left to collect, and is perhaps the most contentious part of any gold mine. One of the most attractive properties of gold is it’s inertness, the resistance to chemical attack. There are two main ways of extracting gold, one using cyanide and the other mercury, because these two chemical selectively react with gold, but unfortunately both are toxic. The method that will be used at Gold Ridge makes use of cyanide, and the tailings dam, a box valley, with a clay core earth dam at the opening and clay lined valley floor is where the tailings will collect. The sediment will settle out and the dilute cyanide solution will be collected and recycled.

Next stop was the visitors centre, where we were shown maps of the area being affected and gold concentrations of the surveyed areas. From here we headed to the processing plant makin use of more specially constructed road, in fact the graders were still leveling the road in places, and in others the edge of the road was still being shored up. At one point it traverses a ridge no wider than the road itself, with a thousand foot drop on one side and a four hundred foot drop on the other. The processing plant was still being built, but the power station was complete. It consists of 11 1MW generators and provides almost three times the generating capacity of the power station in Honiara and cost less than half as much to build.

Unfortunately mining had not commenced and although the three areas to be mined were pointed out to us, it was impossible to gain any impression of what the area would be like once it started.

When we returned to Honiara it was back to the FFA to carry on working with the intranet.