News

April 02, 2009

Equinox Minerals Survives Multiple Baptisms To Deliver On A Ten Year Old Promise

By Our Man in Oz

Fires, floods, and the financial crisis. All that Equinox Minerals needs to fill its cabinet of catastrophes is an outbreak of the plague, or something equally Biblical. That observation is not an original thought from Minesite’s Man in Oz. It came up while he was chatting with the Australian-based boss of Equinox, Craig Williams, who described a recent conversation with his wife. “She actually said we’re probably due for a dose of pestilence”, Williams said. That remark followed a recent “one-in-100 year” rain event at Equinox’s Lumwana copper mine in Zambia, which followed the copper-price crash which came as a result of the Global Financial Crisis, which followed a fire at site just as commissioning was getting underway in the middle of last year.

In theory, and with fingers crossed, that should be all the rotten luck out of the way as Equinox moves to with two weeks of the formal opening of Lumwana, an event which has been 10 years in the making. On April 17 a cast of top government officials and corporate executives will converge on the Lumwana mine to snip ribbons, raise glasses, to formally launch one of the most important projects in Zambia, and unquestionably the most important event in the life of Equinox. The mine will become one...