PREVENTING Three Queen’s engineering graduate students are studying the how to reduce rockbursts, and save lives
Kris Gingras Little (right), working with a technologist on datalogger setup for the rock instrumentation
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he Ontario Ministry of Labour identified rockbursts as one of the top workplace hazards for miners in a 2015 report on mining health, safety and prevention. Lindsay Moreau-Verlaan, a part-time PhD student and full-time ground-control engineer at Vale’s Garson Mine in Sudbury, is working with two other Queen’s graduate students on an innovative practical research project to help prevent or reduce the hazards of strainbursts (a type of rockburst) in Ontario underground mines. Strainbursting is the unpredictable and often explosive ejection of rock from the faces, sidewalls or roofs of advancing tunnels in deep mines in hard rock. Strainbursts are particularly dangerous because miners work directly at the rock face or tunnel wall where activities, such as drilling, may trigger an event. “Strainbursts are very serious seismic events that can be devastating when they happen, and workers have died as a result of them in Ontario mines,” says Moreau-Verlaan, who is conducting this research to improve mining safety under the supervision of Dr. Steve McKinnon,
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THE COMPLETE ENGINEER
professor and Chair in Mine Design in the Robert M. Buchan Department of Mining. The project’s main goal is to develop scientifically based, practical guidelines for Vale and other mining companies to reliably design destress blasting techniques to prevent or mitigate the risks of strainbursts in underground mining tunnels. Destress blasting is thought to alter the properties of the rock mass so that high stresses are reduced, thereby reducing strainburst risk. But the technique has been used for decades based solely on experience rather than evidence; industry standards
vary widely, and some companies don’t use destress blasting because they don’t believe it works. “The current design of destress blasting is entirely based on experience, and there’s no hard evidence to say whether it’s truly effective. This research will give us a better scientific understanding of how destressing actually works and allow us to gauge its effectiveness. With an improved understanding, I believe the design of destress blasting can be engineered to improve performance, reduce risk and increase worker safety,” says MoreauVerlaan.
