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Around this time, work began on Lucky Friday’s Silver Shaft, a 6,200-foot-deep, concrete-lined, cylindrical shaft with a hoisting speed of 2,250 feet per minute. The $30 million project was in lieu of deepening the existing
#2 Shaft, which was of the conventional rectangular, timber-supported design.
Workers bested industry records for speed and safety with the shaft’s sinking. Nothing like it had ever been accomplished before in Hecla’s history – or that of the Silver Valley. In fact, it was the first of its kind in the Coeur d’Alene Mining District. And despite what the naysayers pronounced – that only a crazy company would sink a cylindrical concrete shaft through the active faults of the Coeur d’Alene Mining District –
the Silver Shaft, completed in 1984, continues to run smoothly, as advertised, hauling men and ore every day.
Hecla closed out its first century in business with growth across a number of sectors. A 1981 merger with Day Mines turned the company into a gold miner; in 1984, another merger with Ranchers Exploration and Development Corporation brought Hecla into the industrial minerals business and ball clay and volcanic scoria mining. That segment expanded yet again with the 1989 acquisition of the kaolin division of Cyprus Minerals, and, in 1990, the addition of a feldspar processing plant and two mines.
But it was the purchase of 28 percent of Greens Creek mine in Alaska in 1987, just four years before Hecla’s centennial, that arguably set the company up for continued success in the new millennium. One of the largest silver-producing mine in the world, Greens Creek has been a consistent cash flow generator for the company since day one. Perhaps more significantly, though, the mine is an example of Hecla’s long-time commitment to modern, sustainable mining practices.
Located in the Tongass National Forest in Alaska’s Admiralty Island National Monument, Greens Creek has been operating adjacent to a pristine wilderness for nearly 30 years – a wilderness that’s home to the highest density of brown bears and nesting bald eagles in the world, as well as robust populations of five species of Pacific salmon in the waters surrounding the island.
The success at Greens Creek is evidence of the mining industry as a whole becoming ever more creative, innovative, and diligent on the environmental front in order to continue to prosper in the future. And it marked a shift in perception. Long the target of environmental activists, Hecla and the mining industry began to see themselves as active environmentalists: engineering solutions and paying for improvements to actually care for and protect the land.
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