Mark Bowater’s Post

Transcript

Hello and welcome to another episode of mine, Planning Matters, a podcast where we talk about where the industry gets at both right and wrong when it comes to mind planning and mining engineering. This podcast is not just for mine planners. It's for everyone who has anything to do with mine plans, from those who create them, to those who execute them and all the way up to those who endorse or sign off on them. My name is Mark Bowater, director and founder of Australian mining consultancy Insignia Mining, and I speak from experience, having been involved in mine planning for over 30 years. Hi everyone welcome to episode 7 of mine Planning matters and today we're going to start something new. So my Co director and Insignia mine it was his idea Glenn Splat after watching Micro Mine Momentum 2023 this year which was primarily had a series of people in their stories. Glenn said, why don't we do some stories as part of my impending matters? They're entertaining to listen, they listen to. And you know, sometimes you get some good learnings from them. And I thought that was a good idea. And actually reminds me of I spent ten years in an organization called Entrepreneurs Organization, EO for short, and one of the rules in the EO was that you were not allowed to give advice. You were only allowed to share from experience. Share your experiences. Now, the interesting thing about sharing experiences, when you think about it, is that really is actually just storytelling. And so anyhow, we were only allowed to share experiences. And so, you know, for me, it actually resonated. It's been a good idea. And so I'm gonna start with one of my stories first. But the other thing that I like about this sharing stories idea is that it allows me to collect other people's stories and for you to watch other people on this podcast instead of just listening to me all the time. So I'm going to start with with my story first, but I'm going to pretty quickly look to get other people's stories. So this is a story from when I was a young engineer working in a strip coal mine with a dragline. And I was lucky that I was not a central or key player in this story. I was sort of a bit more of a spectator. And what happened was that this mine one end of one of the strips was was fair bit lower. And so therefore, water pooled in that area and we'd had a fair bit of rain and we had about 15 metres or so of water in this area. And the drag line was approaching that area and we were getting towards having to blast the waste on top of the coal, which was then just going to go into the overburden and create basically a pile of mud. Now as we were approaching this in our weekly planning meeting, every week we kept pointing out we've gotta do water this area, we've got to do water this area, we've got to do water this area week after week. We don't do water this area. We're going to blast into that water that is going to be a problem seem to fall on deaf ears and we we didn't seem to get anywhere with it. What happened was that the dragline eventually crossed the ramp, so it blocked off access to this area and we still had 10 to 15 metres of water there. There was no pump in there, there was no dewatering happening and then it became a case of doses required to put a track in, but the pump crew to get in there and so on. Game week after week, we kept saying we've got to do something, We can't blast into that water, never say nothing happened. The pub didn't go in there and we didn't water that area and we finished up having no choice. With the blast the overburden about 30 metres of waste into about 10 to 15 metres of water. Now what happened was that was fairly spectacular in terms of the tidal wave that it's set up and over the low wall and so on. But of course, pretty much as we expected, once the drag line got there and effectively the material was wet, was more like mud than than solid material. The dragon couldn't bridge out and couldn't build a bridge that it could sit on. The bridge just kept cracking and failing all the time. So at this point in time, we had an issue. We had a significant issue in terms of needing the dragline to uncover that coal and what is it that we're going to do? Like I say, from my point of view, I was lucky. That's sort of a spectator. I wasn't the dragline engineer or the drill and blast engineer to this. Tell me what we finished up happening was that the tech services had to come up with a solution whereby we walked the dragline around into the low wall on the other side of the pit, had to dig a fairly significant hole to put the mud into, then had to sit on the low wall side, and then just pull the mud out and drop it into this hole that we had created. We then walked back around, uncover the coal again and of course we had an issue whereby we now now did not have enough waste to build a bridge. So then we had to come up with a solution for that to actually allow the cult to be uncovered. Now a couple of interesting learnings for me out of the story. First one was I was intrigued that somehow rather this became tech services fault. You know, the whole walking the drag on around doing something really different and very radical with the with the dragline because we were forced into it, we had no choice. But it all seemed to be that was tech services idea that was, you know, tech services come up with a stupid design and all those sort of things that was fascinating and I've seen that. The number of times since instead of, you know, 20 years of mining and so on is how easy some things become the mind planners or mine designers that it takes services spot. Second, learning out, it was really about control and about who controls what and when. I think back about it now, we had planning meetings every week with the series of supervisors and one of those was the MOD services supervisor and that was the guy that we kept telling that we've got to do waters area, we've got to do water this area and so on, right. And we would get frustrated at the fact that none of this was happening. When I look back about it now, one of the issues was that he wasn't in control of the equipment that he needed to. And this is, this is sort of relatively common where you'll have a mind services supervisor who is in charge of the pump crew, other sorts of things, but they don't have equipment such as dozers, graders and so on. And in this case we needed a dozer to get dose of tracking to sort of get the pump in there and so on. And what happened of course was that the doses were controlled by production supervisors and the doses were always busy, you know looking after the dragline or keeping the shovel. Knowing we're keeping a tip head going and so on. And so there was always an excuse why it Dozer wasn't available and so it wasn't necessarily the mine services supervisors fault because he couldn't access the equipment and he needed to to get the job done. And I again I have seen that on numerous cases and someone as well you know and another classic example of that is, is, is drill bench prep which requires equipment that often the drill and blast supervisor who's in charge of preparing the branch bench ready for the drill. Does not have access to. Here if you are, you hold someone accountable for something and you don't give them all of the tools and equipment etcetera that they need to to be able to make that happen. And so that was that was another sort of story here. Thank you. Thanks for listening to mine planning matters and my thoughts on mine planning. This podcast is for the benefit of the mining industry and that's you. So I'd love to hear from you through the comment section and please feel free to let me know any topics you'd like discussed in future episodes. You'll find much more content at our Insignia Mining website. And if you find any of our content valuable, please let your mining colleagues know so they can benefit as well.