Massive Ore Truck Hits The Ditch In Salcha On Icy Richardson, Dumping Its Load
Truck Turns On Its Side After Wiping Out On Icy Road Ore truck on its side near Salcha (Photo, Advocates For Safe Alaska Highways) 60 Ore T...
Truck Turns On Its Side After Wiping Out On Icy Road
Ore truck on its side near Salcha (Photo, Advocates For Safe Alaska Highways)
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| Ore truck on its side near Salcha (Photo, Advocates For Safe Alaska Highways) |
60 Ore Trucks Travel Every Day – Each Way – Between Tetlin Gold Mines & Fort Knox Mill
The Route Is 247 Miles Long
On Friday, November 15th, 2024, a Black Gold two-trailer ore truck – one of at least 120 trucks going back and forth, day and night, between Tetlin and Fairbanks over the Alaska, Richardson and Steese Highways – hit a slippery, icy spot on the upper Richardson at Mile 302 near the little town of Salcha.
The truck flipped over on its side along the highway.
Black Gold, the trucking company, is an Alaskan firm that hauls gold ore between a new Canadian gold mine in Tetlin named Manh Choh, and the Kinross Fort Knox mill where it is processed. Kinross owns both the Tetlin mine and the Fairbanks mill, and is using the three highways to avoid having to build an on-site mill at the mine.
The ore route is 247 miles long, over Alaskan public roads. Sixty trucks head north every day to the mill. And sixty trucks head back south to the open pit mine at the village, for another pickup.
The truck route is arduous. Some people have been worried that winter weather will compound the already complicated situation of 120 ore trucks on the roads at any one time.
In the Fairbanks area and along the rural route to the Canada border, for years there has been extensive Facebook chatter, back and forth, about the trucks and their impact on the highways. Some have supported the effort, and some have not.
When the truck went off the road it turned on its side, dumping its load. According to reports in the Fairbanks Daily News-Miner, the Troopers and Salcha Fire & Rescue came to the scene.
Since the accident, which did not apparently hurt anyone, the ore rock has been picked up off the side of the Richardson and the retrieved rocks continued on to the processing plant in Fairbanks, reports say.
A Black Gold ore truck's loaded weight is almost 83 tons and its length is 95 feet long.
In the Copper Valley, tanker trucks and semis running off the Glenn Highway between Glennallen and Anchorage are a common enough, though distressing, occurrence.
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