A worker has died at the Ascaro-operated Mission Mine near Sahuarita in Pima County, Arizona, following a vehicle collision at about 9.30 am on Thursday 27 July 2017. Gabriel Benitez, 41 was reportedly sitting in a Ford 550 truck when it was crushed by a much larger mine vehicle. The driver of the other vehicle has tested clean for drugs and alcohol, and the incident is being investigated by the Mine Safety and Health Administration and the Arizona State Mine Inspector’s Office.
Mine vehicles at the Mission Mine in Pima County, Arizona. Ascaro.
The Mission Mine consists of a complex of open pits covering an area roughly 4 km by 2.4 km, and about 365 m deep, located about 30 km to the south of Tuscon. The copper is extracted from a porphyry deposit (large grained igneous rock formed by the slow cooling of magma, usually in magma chambers beneath volcanoes on subductive plate margins) that also produces small amounts of zinc, lead and molybdenum minerals. This is intruded into a folded complex of Triassic sedimentary rocks and Palaeozoic limestones, and is associated with the Laramide Orogeny, a period of mountain building along the western margin of North America from Mexico to Canada, associated with the subduction of the Kulla and Fallaron Plates beneath the North American Plate, between about 80 and 35 million years ago.
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