State-of-the-art technology exchanged at open pit meet

Some 200 open pit mine engineers and operators met in Calgary, Nov 6 and 7, to exchange information and ideas with geotechnical consultants and university professors on the economic and safe design of open pit and highwall slopes, waste dumps, haulageways and tailings dams. The 2-day symposium, the third such meeting in the past three years, featured 53 presentations from Canada, Chile, India, Sri Lanka, France, the U.S., the U.K. and Australia.

“What John and Jane Q. Public don’t realize,” said Paul Gagnon, Calgary North M.P., in his opening address “is that an integral factor in keeping the Canadian coal industry and the oil sands projects viable, is the work that you do.”

Examples of this were given in the case history portion of the program. Researchers at the Alberta Research Council in Edmonton, for example, have studied air photos, numerous geologic sections, drill core and down-hole geophysical surveys to determine the location, structure and dimensions of bedrock terrains where the last great glaciers have weakened the rock through extensive thrust faulting. This type of deformed bedrock caused a series of significant highwall failures at the Highvale open pit coal mine, located 80 km west of Edmonton, owned by TransAlta Utilities. The slides occurred in 1983 and 1984.

By learning to identify this type of terrain in advance of mine planning, the researchers hope to avoid future problems.

Co-workers at Geo-Physi-Con in Calgary, and the Coal Mining Research Centre in Devon, Alta., are using down-hole sonic and dipmeter logging techniques to identify this type of potentially unstable ground well in advance of dragline mining.

A bound version of the papers presented at the meet is available from A. A. Balkema Publishers. The symposium was organized by canmet and the University of Calgary.

The next open pit mining symposium to be held in Alberta will be in 1988 on mine planning and equipment selection.