This is not necessarily the best way to start a sober piece on the topic of women in mining, but what other way is appropriate when last night my older daughter had a baby daughter? Both are well and I am stuck babysitting the older brother, so here goes an attempt at a serious piece.
I know I will never be able to make this new granddaughter as rich as Gina Rinehart. She is reportedly Australia’s richest woman as a result of mining. The report continues:
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Ms Rinehart, the daughter of the late mining magnate Lang Hancock, signed a deal last year with global miner Rio Tinto to develop her Hope Downs iron ore mine in Western Australia at a cost of $1.3 billion. The mine is due to start producing early in 2008. “She (Ms Rinehart) is very conservatively valued this year,” Mr Thomson said. “We’ve applied a bit of a discount to her because the mine’s not in production, but when the iron ore starts leaving on the boats, that discount will have to come off. “Ms Rinehart really looms as the best candidate to overtake James Packer as Australia’s richest person.”
These manuals, that are available for free download off the internet, have nothing to do with mining. Yet I submit they may constitute a valuable resourse for the new mines proposed in proximity to the cities for which these manuals are written. I make this submission on the basis that prudent policy dictates that every mine have a surface water management plan. Each of these references contains valuable information and design and practice guidance that should facilitate compilation of a mine’s surface water management plan:
In 1870 the population of the United States was about 30 million–more or less the current population of Canada. By 1900 the United States population had doubled. Gold mining had something to do with this increase. In the early years of the 1900s, Chinese workers came to Canada (and the US.) Is the Canadian population about to double in the next thirty years by Chinese immigration to work the mines? These thoughts are prompted by the following news report:
For a while now, we have grown used to the perpetual wails that there are not enough people to do all the mining work that needs be done. We have heard professors call for more money to train miners; we have seen governments fund glossy brochures to lure kids into the mines; we have even encouraged our son-in-law to go to north-east Wyoming to earn more on the coal mines than he earns as a cable installer for MediaCom in Iowa. Now I wonder if we have all been wrong. Is the writing on the wall? Is the thin edge of the wedge revealed in these two stories in today’s news reports? I quote:
