I think they will need an engineers report and for this to be...

I think they will need an engineers report and for this to be reviewed and signed off by the appropriate local and state authorities before they can start pumping industrial waste into a hole they have dug. This will take time, weeks possibly months. How long have the ponds been there? Maybe weeks?

Pumping the brine into the ponds does not close the loop, it just moves the brine from one place to another. The loop will be closed once water is evaporated and the sold recovered from the bottom of the dry pond. I don't expect this to happen until sometime next year, depending on how full the ponds gets over winter. Maybe they are waiting for autumn before filling the ponds. Doing this may make the recovery of solids quicker than if they filled the ponds now. It would also reduce the risk of having full or near full ponds in the middle of winter. The ponds were designed to cope with 1 in 50 or 1 in 100 year rain events from memory.