Earthworks Industries Inc. has the following update of the significant progress that has been made over the previous year and the first part of 2017.
The successful reinstatement of our lease at Cortina allowed the Company to not only be in a position to re-initiate efforts with respect to our Cortina Project, but also achieve a major accomplishment in the negotiation of an amendment of the Agreement with North Bay.
Between spring 2016 and today the Company has raised in excess of $2,000,000 through private placements and exercise of share purchase warrants. This has enabled the Company to facilitate re-mobilization with respect to the Cortina Project. This has included SCS, our project engineers updating the status of all Tribal Permits and Approvals that they were working on prior to the BIA appeal and develop a timeline for the flow of work required. In January 2017, after meeting with the U.S. EPA, we received our long awaited Seismic report confirming regulatory requirements had been met on design. This put us in a position to move forward.
While it has continued to take much more time than expected we are now targeting critical items to meet a spring 2018 construction start. This includes additional field reconnaissance for placement of an additional monitoring well, a revised Water Monitoring and Compliance Plan and submitting documents (which EPA has reviewed), for final approval. Other tasks, including county requirements, will be completed as we proceed as the federal requirements had always been a priority.
We plan to immediately start marketing the facility for a fall 2018 operation date.