Joel Fossilo is an operations coordinator for Cadia Mines. His job is to ensure the mine has enough water in the plant for its day-to-day mining and the dams are kept to a certain level.
"Water is one of our most critical commodities on site. We can't operate without it. It's pretty integral to our operation of the whole site. Without water we can't run"
Water is pumped from the Orange effluent plant, and also from Blayney, through a series of tanks and feeds into our plant just below Cadiangullong dam and we feed it into the plant for our processes. It's about four to seven megalitres a day. This 'grey' water allows us to keep Cadiangullong dam as a storage dam for times of real need.
The water is fully tested – we get the test results every month as it's got to meet a certain standard for us. We have a raw water tank for effluent and a process tank for the process pond. When the ore comes into us from the open cut, we add water to make a slurry and then it moves on down for processing so we can float all the minerals.
We recover water from the tailings dams. We also use it for clean-up, hose-up, dust suppression and mixing chemicals.
We recycle all the water in the plant. Recycled water for the filter process gets pumped back here as well. We maximise our use of return water for our tailings dams.
Water is one of our most critical commodities on site. We can't operate without it. It's pretty integral to our operation of the whole site. Without water we can't run.