CASSIAR: THE END OF A MINING LEGEND | eT 7 he mine that made the north" is what the industry . called it for 20 years. Now the community that grew up around - it is looking for somewhere else to go. Cassiar Asbestos, after a desperate attempt at financial - reorganization, is closing down on its 40th anniversary of operation. The 400 miners and the town’s 1,400 residents are looking for work, folding up their lives and preparing for the unknown. | Cassiar knew from the beginning that the economically mineable reserves of asbestos would give out and had expected — to wind up the operation some time in 1990, But exploration of the area in the late 1970’s revealed that a previously unknown -. deposit of the mineral lay in the strata beneath the original open pit mine area. The geology, however, dictated that it would have to be extracted by underground shaft mining rather than by the kind of open-pit, surface operation used to date. The technique the mine required, due to the extreme soft- ness of the ground, is called block caving. It is a rarely used method that calls for carefully planned shafts to be sent into the target ore at a low level; once the mineral ahead of the shaft is extracted, the shaft is reinforced and the ceiling at the end is carefully dropped in a controlled cave-in, leaving more ore at the end of the shaft. It is an exacting, precision type of mining. And setting it up cost a lot more than the company had estimated, and last year Cassiar found itself looking for money. B.C. Mining Week {Terrace Review —~ February 28, 1992