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Safety and Innovation Focus at NORCAT Mine

Oct 14, 2015


Tour highlights recent improvements and future plans for facility


NORCAT mine manager Greg Major emphasized health and safety during a
tour of the underground training and testing facility on Oct. 9. Photo by Jonathan
Migneault – Sudbury Northern Life.

 
During a recent visit to NORCAT’s underground training and testing mine in Onaping, Dan St. Onge, the organization’s manager of training and development, said he barely recognized the site.
 
St. Onge hadn’t visited the site – that Falconbridge formerly operated as Strathcona Mine (Fecunis Adit) – in a couple of months.
 
But he returned Friday, Oct. 8, after NORCAT had made significant recent investments to enhance the mine’s infrastructure.
 
Those investments included several new trailers, which formed a miniature office complex outside the mine, that St. Onge was seeing for the first time.
 
St. Onge accompanied me, my colleague Patrick Demers, and Krishana Michaud, the Prospectors and Developers Association of Canada’s manager of student programs, for a tour of the new and improved mine.
 
When we arrived at the site, after a scenic drive from NORCAT’s offices on Maley Drive, in New Sudbury, we joined a group of scientists with the National Research Council of Canada.
 
Some had traveled from Montreal to visit the mine, and learn what the only facility of its kind in the world, operated by a non-profit innovation centre, had to offer.


Thanks to upgrades to NORCAT’s ventilation system for its underground training
and testing mine in Onaping, the facility now has room for expansion if necessary.
Photo by Jonathan Migneault – Sudbury Northern Life.


Our guide that day was Greg Major, the mine manager.
 
A large man with a strong and confident handshake, Major made it clear no corners would be cut that morning as far as our collective health and safety was concerned.
 
After we were fitted in our personal protective equipment – which included a hard hat, gloves, waterproof boots with steel-toe tips and bright orange safety vests – Major told us the procedure in case we heard an alarm while underground.
 
In short, we were directed to calmly follow the exit signs, and return straight to the main office outside the mine.
 
“Do not head back to your vehicles,” Major said.
 
As we walked toward the mine’s adit – or entrance – Major proudly pointed to the new ventilation system NORCAT had installed outside.
 
The system, said Major, can pump around 33 per cent more air than the mine currently needs, and creates the possibility for future expansion.
 
While the mine is technically considered an underground facility, and meant to reproduce a working underground mining environment for training and testing purposes, the term “underground” is a a bit of a misnomer.
 
When you enter the mine you are essentially walking into a cliff face. There are no elevators to take you hundreds of metres underground, as there would be in most of Sudbury’s operating mines.
 
But once you escape the natural light from the opening, you may as well be hundreds of metres below the ground level.
 
The key difference, though, is that NORCAT’s mine is far cooler than a deep underground mine would be – where the temperature rises as you go deeper.
 
Once we were in the mine Major pointed to the lights above our heads.
 
NORCAT had purchased state-of-the-art LED strip-lighting from HALO Lighting Solutions, which Major said is superior in every way to the mine’s old lights.
 
The low-voltage lights created a surprising amount of visibility in a space that would have been pitch black otherwise (were it not for the lights attached to our helmets).
 
The lights also had a waterproof, and flexible outer shell, that made them easy to handle underground, and durable when coming into contact with heavy equipment.

As we traveled through the mine we eventually met up with a group of students (and their trainer) learning the ins and outs of underground mining through NORCAT’s common core program.
 
Major quizzed a few of the students on underground safety procedures to highlight the importance of health and safety in a mining environment.
 
“As a health and safety organization, safety has got to be job one,” St. Onge later told me during the drive back to the NORCAT offices.
 
Since NORCAT acquired the mine in the early 2000s it has served as a training facility for people entering the mining sector, and for working miners taking refresher courses.


NORCAT trainer John Nerpin, left, goes over proper procedures while working underground while a student watches. Photo by Jonathan Migneault – Sudbury Northern Life.
 
The month-long common core program takes someone with no mining experience and gives them the basic knowledge and skills they would need to work underground.
 
They learn to use a jackleg, drive a scoop, install explosives, and all the important safety procedures and best practices that are necessary in today’s modern mines.
 
More recently, NORCAT has allowed mining supply and services companies to rent drifts at the site, where they can test their new equipment.
 
The facility gives the companies more freedom and flexibility than they might have testing in a production mine, where their time might be more limited to avoid interfering with the mine’s day-to-day work.
 
Companies like Spectrum Group, Equipment World, Fuller Industrial and K4 Integration have recently tested their equipment in the mine.
 
With its new improvements to the mine’s ventilation system, lighting and communications, NORCAT hopes to expand it’s product testing and development services and open its doors to more companies in the future.

Source: http://www.norcat.org/safety-and-innovation-focus-at-norcat-mine/