PERTH (miningweekly.com) – Gold miner Kingsrose Mining has warned of an interruption to production at its Way Linggo mine, in Indonesia, after remediation works were unable to rectify the cause of a wall slippage last week.

The miner on Friday said that a fault that had recently been identified in the north-east pit wall was being closely monitored by the site geotechnical team and prior to its failure, material movement had been detected for some days.

A response plan was developed to ensure the mining team proactively managed and responded to the risk.

The wall slippage occurred during normal working hours, however, the mining activities had already been stood down and personnel and equipment had been removed from the mapped potential sliding zone.

While there were no injuries or property damage resulting, the incident has resulted in the Way Linggo pit being temporarily inaccessible to normal mining activities. Kingsrose said on Friday that the company was working on an alternative haul road in the pit and expected mining production to recommence in the second half of July in the southern end of the Way Linggo pit.

“Due to the delay and change in planned schedule in mining from Way Linggo we anticipate the processing plant to be stopped for a period of four to five weeks in July and into August.

“Talang Santo is in a stripping phase in these months and we were scheduled to rely on Way Linggo tonnes, however, the impact to planned production in the six months to December 31 will be minimal as we will catch up once the plant resumes in August,” CEO Karen O'Neill told shareholders

The incident is likely to have sterilised an estimated 3 500 oz of gold from the Way Linggo pit.

“It is disappointing that we will have this production interruption after running the processing plant at capacity for the last three months, but we will use the time efficiently and bring forward planned fixed plant maintenance. We will continually refine the schedule to try to improve on our initial impact assessment. The incident is manageable and no significant consequence to Kingsrose Mining is expected,” O’Neill said.