For the better part of 13-to-14 years, the company provided open-pit contract mining, site services, and transportation for operations including Anaconda Mining’s gold mine. They also ran a fleet of 10-to-12 tractor-trailers hauling ore from a nearby copper mine to their processing plant 50 kilometres away – a contract that lasted another 12 years. The scope of work was substantial and kept the company well occupied, but it was a byproduct of that long relationship with Anaconda that would ultimately change the direction of the business entirely. Over the course of Anaconda’s open-pit gold mining operations, approximately eight million tonnes of waste rock had accumulated across the site – the inevitable result of chasing veins of ore through solid ground. The rock had no designated use. Once the mine shut down, it would have been covered with topsoil and reclaimed. But in 2016, a Newfoundland company approached Scott with an unusual question: could he supply rock for a large-scale project on the Eastern Seaboard? The project was in Charleston, South Carolina, and it called for three million tons of infill rock – to be delivered within 14-to-16 months of contract award. Scott looked at the waste rock sitting on Anaconda’s site and saw the raw material. What he didn’t have was everything else. “There was no port, no crushing circuit, no laydown area – just a lot of rock,” he says. “We were on tidal water, there was an inlet coming into the bay with deep water, but we would have had to build a port, build a laydown, and buy crushers to do this project.” Despite the scale of what was required, Scott and his team submitted a proposal. The proponent THE CONSTRUCTION SOURCE CANADA
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