Interview with:
Musselwhite Mine General Manager, Don Burke
AFTER
BEFORE
Picture of Fire Restoration
Picture of Fire Destruction
Mine expects to be 100% operational by Dec. 2020 By Kevin Vincent
It has been a challenging year and a half for Newmont’s Musselwhite Mine, located nearly 500km north of Thunder Bay. On March 29th of 2019, the company’s conveyor system caught fire, grinding production to a complete standstill. Then, to protect local First Nations communities from COVID-19, the mine was placed on care and maintenance on March 22, 2020 less than 1 year after the fire rendered its underground conveyor system
Pictured: Musselwhite Mine General Manager, Don Burke
inoperable. “All of the ore travels to surface via the conveyor system where it gets stockpiled for the mill.
On March 29th, in between shifts, the conveyor caught fire due to a failure of an underside roller on the conveyor and when the belt stopped rolling in between shifts, the belt caught fire,” explains Musselwhite General Manager, Don Burke in an interview with Mining Life. “Luckily no one was underground so there were no injuries, but approximately 3km of conveyor was burnt and our drifts were damaged as well,” he added. Utilizing the newest technology, the new conveyor system will have industry leading safety and fire controls. During the production shutdown and COVID-19 care and maintenance period, the company kept everyone employed. “I’m pretty happy to say that during the fire in 2019 we kept 100% of our employees all the way through that, so I’m pretty proud of the fact that we managed to find work, valuable work for everybody all the way up to present.” “We started to rebuild the mine,
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even with COVID we will have the conveyor completed by the end of 2020” said Burke. Burke has been with the company for 24 years, 19 in Red Lake and the rest in Timmins. He started with Musselwhite in January 2019. March 29, 2019 is when the big conveyor fire happened. “Since establishing the secondary egress a couple of months after the fire, we’ve been in limited production mode until we get the conveyor back up and running. At that time, our conveyor was our secondary egress out of the mine and in Ontario you can’t operate without a secondary egress so we had to put a plan together to focus on three key areas: flood control (because electric systems were damaged); restore power back into the mine; and re-establish our secondary egress,” said Burke. “We were also completing a material handling winze system underground which is now scheduled to come online at the exact same time as the new conveyor, so come December 2020, we’ll be 100% operational with the new COVID reality,” said Burke. Burke says during the fire, Newmont kept everybody on site for development and stoping.
