Anchorage Daily News

The British knight who chairs Anglo American, the London-based mining giant investing millions in the Pebble mine prospect, received a crash course last weekend in volcanoes, village life and what it is like to be at the center of an epic Alaska resource battle.

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Mark Moody-Stuart, chairman of Anglo American's board.

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Mark Moody-Stuart, a geologist in his late 60s who worked in the oil industry before coming to London-based Anglo, traveled to Iliamna and Dillingham on Saturday and Sunday for his first-ever Alaska visit. Bad weather and volcanic eruptions prevented him from getting to several additional Southwest villages, he said.

The meeting in Iliamna, 15 miles from the Pebble prospect, was small -- about 12 attended -- and polite, according to people who were there. But hours later in the fishing town of Dillingham, a throng of protesters waving signs greeted Moody-Stuart and other mining officials as they walked into a local hall to discuss Pebble with about 40 community leaders. Before the meeting started, Moody-Stuart invited the protesters inside to participate.

Thanks to outbursts from the Redoubt volcano, Moody-Stuart spent an extra day in Dillingham, a hotbed of opposition to developing the huge Pebble copper and gold deposit. The prospect straddles the headwaters of two of the five rivers that feed Bristol Bay's world-class salmon fisheries, and Dillingham is a hub city for the Bristol Bay commercial fishing fleets.

Because of the unexpected layover in the town, the conversations stretched beyond the meeting hall to lunch and coffee klatches at a cafe, Moody-Stuart said in a phone interview on Sunday night.

"I enjoyed meeting the people," he said.

In Iliamna, villagers talked to him about improving communication between the mining companies and residents who have come to depend on Pebble jobs, said Charisse Arce, a Newhalen math tutor who attended the meeting.

In Dillingham, residents shared their fears about Pebble's possible impacts on Bristol Bay's salmon-based economy, said Frank Woods, a Dillingham gillnet fisherman.

"The heartburn for me is, every question we asked them in this meeting, the answer was, 'We'll get back to you,' " Woods said.

During Sunday's phone interview, Moody-Stuart gave a few observations about the Pebble controversy and Anglo's mining track record.

Here are some excerpts.

Q. People in Dillingham and Iliamna and some of the other villages near the Pebble prospect have differing opinions about the potential mine. If your company needs community approval before building it, how do you expect to get it?

A. We have to make sure that people have up-to-date and accurate information. We have to have two-way communication. We have to give people time to absorb and think about the information. It can be frustrating (to people) when you talk about theoretical things, without the specifics. We can have a period of some months of publishing our studies, and the community able to question and talk about it before we go to the permitting agencies.

Q. Anglo American has had trouble with safety and employee deaths at some of its mines. The type of mining involved might be different at Pebble than some of the Anglo mines having these problems, but can we expect the same trouble here?

A. The conditions are quite different but there's no reason why you can't operate a perfectly safe mine under any conditions. That was one of the issues: There was a tendency in the industry to say that deep mining is a dangerous business and try to accept some kind of inevitability in accidents. I think that is unacceptable. Safety in any workplace is based on relationship and trust with the people running the organization. (He went on to discuss the social history and employment at some Anglo mines in South Africa.) That's a social-transformational process that takes time. But in many of our mines, we operate for the whole year without lost-time injury.

Q. Has Anglo ever stepped back from a mine project due to controversy or environmental problems?

A. The example I would use of Anglo's willingness to step away from something is in the safety area. Because of poor performance, Anglo chief executive Cynthia Carroll shut a mine down for a period of time while we retrained the people. It probably cost us 15,000 ounces of platinum production (roughly $20 million, at the time). Part of the signal we gave there is that ... safety will not be compromised.

Q. What did you think of your Alaska visit?

A. People were extremely polite. When they spoke in the meetings, they were respectful of each other. It's a very calm and almost philosophical approach to life. One of their concerns was that they did have differences of opinion (on Pebble) and they weren't used to having differences.

Of course, it's a very beautiful environment. As a field geologist, I have spent much of my life working in beautiful places.

Find Elizabeth Bluemink online at adn.com/contact/ebluemink or call 257-4317.

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