Lexington Mine
The BC Ministry of Environment has given the Company the go ahead to dewater the Lexington mine upon giving 72 hours' notice, following the conditions outlined in the discharge permit and the Water Management Plan that was recently submitted. The Company is now working with its contractors to schedule the mine work and necessary environmental monitoring.
The dewatering program is estimated to take approximately four weeks and will be followed by an evaluation/mining program. Both of these programs will be carried out by a mining contractor. The dewatering program is expected to commence shortly, upon awarding the contract to a suitable Mining Contractor. Contractor bids have been received and are being reviewed by the company's consultants. Dewatering will consist of initial pumping at up to 1,000 cubic metres per day for 30 days, followed by continual pumping at 35 cubic meters per day.
Concurrent with dewatering, rehabilitation of the two ramps and surface mine infrastructure will take place. The ground support, mine electrical and ventilation services will be re-established to enable mining operations. The dewatering program will provide access to mine workings that were previously developed by Merit Mining in 2008. After dewatering, rehabilitation of mine workings will continue as will definition drilling, mapping and sampling of the workings toward assembling a test mine program.
Mining operations are planned to commence once the mine is dewatered to a sufficient level and services are installed. Test mining will target the mineralized zones between the 1,210m and 1,175m elevations, and the mining methods of longhole open stoping, jumbo mining and jackleg/slusher mining will be evaluated. Very little waste or zone development will be required to access the areas of the proposed test mining. During the test mining period, Golden Dawn will continue to evaluate the resources between these elevations, which could provide mill feed after the rehabilitation and dewatering of the Lexington Mine.
The Company plans to extract this material and process it in the Greenwood Process Plant. As the test mining takes place, preparation of the mill will be carried out at the company's facility located approximately 17 kilometres northeast of the Lexington mine. The Greenwood facility is a 200 (expandable to 400) tonne per day flotation plant with a gold gravity circuit and associated assay laboratory, which successfully treated Lexington mineralized material in the past. The mill and crushing equipment will require some minor upgrades and equipment refurbishing in order to ready them for the Lexington -run of mine feed material anticipated approximately in mid-November.
The Company is currently evaluating automated pre-concentration (sorting) of feed material. If technically and economically feasible, pre-concentration could possibly upgrade the tenor of mill feed to be processed in the plant.
The estimated costs of rehabilitating the Lexington mine, accumulating 5000 tonnes of mill feed and refurbishing the mill is approximately CAD $ 3,000,000 to $3,500,000.
