In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, Aurania Resources (TSXV: ARU) announced that management has decided to remove workers from its Lost Cities project located in Ecuador’s southeastern province of Morona-Santiago.
In a press release, the Canadian miner said the measure responds to the fact that Ecuador already has over 168 confirmed cases of COVID-19.
The Ecuadorian government has declared a state of emergency, which involves imposing limitations on the movement of people to reduce the rate of spread of new infections and encouraging people to self-isolate at home.
“Field investigation was already underway when we were forced by circumstances to curtail operations. It will take very little to restart the process once we can”
Aurania management
The country also imposed an international travel ban which affects all passenger flights, maritime and road traffic but does not apply to cargo and commercial goods.
Given all these measures, Aurania asked all its personnel on the Cordillera de Cutucu to return to their homes except for two field teams that were exploring very remote areas. Both of those teams are led by local Shuar geologists and they were scheduled to reach their pick-up point on Wednesday.
According to the company, permission has been granted by the authorities for a waiver of the travel restrictions so that these teams can be met and be transported to their homes.
“Our geologists will spend the next few weeks working through a backlog of geological information from the field. They will focus on the interpretation of this information and the refinement of exploration targets for gold-silver and copper-silver,” Aurania’s media statement reads. “We will be poring through seismic and well log data from Ecuador and Peru over the next few weeks to refine our sedimentary-hosted copper-silver targeting in both countries. In addition, our recently completed LiDAR survey indicated many potential historic mining and prospecting locations on our concessions in Ecuador.”
The Lost Cities – Cutucu project consists of 42 concessions located in the central part of the Cordillera de Cutucu. The concessions extend for approximately 95 kilometres along the mountain range, which is part of the Northern Andean Jurassic Metallogenic Belt. The area contains clusters of porphyry copper, gold-copper skarn and epithermal gold deposits.