Highway closure through Gold Hill was the work of amateurs
Submitted by Carson Now Reader on Mon, 02/23/2015 - 3:39pm
Now that the highway through Gold Canyon has been closed to vehicle traffic, forcing us to use the much longer and quite dangerous truck route, perhaps it's time to question the value of CMI's presence on the Comstock.
The company has subjected residents and visitors to a long list of irritations, insults and disruptions since it arrived; this is only the latest and worst. Regardless of its engineering aspects, allowing this to happen was a huge mistake by CMI, caused as much by inexperience, greed and desperation as by any instability of the ground. Who crossed his fingers and okayed that steep, deep, already-eroding pit so close to the road?
Whoever it was has cost the company a major amount of money. It wasn't the pleasant young fellow now serving as Project Manager at the Lucerne Pit however. He is the third person on that job on the last 14 months, and he has no mining experience. Neither does CEO Corrado De Gasperis and neither does John V. Winfield. This is the result when the Commissioners turn amateurs loose to do as they please without oversight.
CMI is liable for the cost of moving the road, a process which may take months, although the present road may go back into use with a wide detour around the unstable mine shaft. That sounds like months of stalled or redirected mining activity for CMI, with no access to the east side of the road until it's done. This lost production combined with the actual cost of moving the road might be enough to bankrupt the company. It has limped along on stock sales up until now — $188 million the last time I noticed — and has never made a profit after five years of trying.
The share price of CMI is down below a dollar again as I write this. The company has cut "more than 30" of the jobs everyone was praising it for creating. The layoffs were for the same reason the pit was dug so dangerously close to the road: the money is running out. For a failing company with no plausible source of revenue in sight, it was a desperate gamble to get enough gold and silver production to keep operating.
And it lost. Is this the end for CMI?
A Virginia City neighbor tells me there is a group of angry business people on C Street called SORE (Save Our Road Everybody) preparing a petition calling on the Commissioners to get serious about doing their job and actually regulating this out-of-control company. Motto: "We're SORE and We Vote!"
I'll sign it and I'll vote too.
David Toll
Gold Hill
- activity
- Business
- C
- City
- closed
- Comstock Mining Inc
- Engineering
- Experience
- Gamble
- gold
- Gold Hill
- highway
- Highway 342
- Job
- Latest
- lost
- Lucerne Pit
- May
- mining
- money
- Opinion
- revenue
- running
- sales
- silver
- Silver City
- Storey County Commission
- the Comstock
- truck
- vehicle
- Virginia City
- vote
- Comstock
- jobs
- layoffs
- Traffic
