Ground Control, Part 3

Throughout the barrage of seismicity, I had to facilitate the University of Toronto geotechnical paste fill analysis study and install a series of stress meters as the Levels became available again. This took years.

The paste fill program began in 2008 and ran until 2010. I had little to do with it for the first year. My boss, Dave Counter, spent a fair amount of time in contact with the U of T and negotiating with Production Engineering and Operations, prepping the program. A suitable stope or two had to be found (the heir and the spare or two, so to speak), the stress cells designed, the cages built, the tech work and data streaming set up.

That was not my gig. Lots of math and politics, two things Dave loved and I could do without. I did what I did best, crawling over muck piles, taking pictures and doodling maps replete with dips, dumps and strikes, drawing up rehab plans and inspecting the work as it was done, and installing the stress and extensometers as needed.

Then one day I was introduced to Ben Thompson, an expat Brit from Durham, a PHD in geotechnical studies, articling at U of T, and now running the program I was to make happen and have no credit in. That’s okay, I really didn’t know what it did, how it did it, or what we hoped to gain from it. But I did know how to rig, set up pulleys, drive equipment, work like a tank in heat that would have dropped him and his revolving door of undergrads and understudies, and keep them from getting run over or falling down a raise. I was affectionately referred to as Sergeant-Major. I deserved that. I demanded obedience when we were underground. When I speak, you listen. When I tell you what to do, you do it. No questions, no arguments. Understand? They did. We got on fine.

Ben tagged along with me a lot in those early days of the project, growing familiar with underground and absorbing what I babbled on about, lucky to visit a few spots he wished to see while I went about my business. He contributed to my knowledge and skill, too. He’d comment on the instruments we saw in No.1 Mine, those installed years before to monitor if and how much the 50 million ton wedge was still creeping along, their state, their orientation, their overall usefulness. The long and short of that was that they’d had their day. Some were corroded, some had been installed wrong, or in the wrong direction. Some were broken. They were giving little to no useful information.

Was the wedge still moving? Yes. That much was obvious. I didn’t need any gauges to tell me that. I noted relatively freshly ground rock in the faults we were supposedly monitoring, paint flecks discharged from the coat applied by a previous wonder-boy EIT who apparently had little idea how to paint across a fault (he painted them along their full length when he should have applied it perpendicularly so that travel could be measured, but enough on that).

I pressed Dave to inspect them with me, pointing out Ben’s comments. Dave did, he accompanied me, gave me a rather long-winded history of the wedge that I already knew having lived through its influence, lecturing me on the instruments’ installations, none of which I cared about. I wanted him to see that they were useless and that we ought to install new ones, but nothing ever came of it. Not on my watch, anyways.

Ben and I did get on, though. He liked to go out. So did I. He liked to watch live music. So did I. He like a beer or two. Me, too. He could get a little caustic after a few, though. I recall the Contiki German girls and their description of BBC English and Island Monkey English. Ben began the night BBC. He did not end the night BBC. He was working class. He came from Durham, the coal mining town famous for its violent strikes during the 1980s, made even more famous by “Billy Elliot.” And we invariably had more than a few. Unfortunately, after a couple, his accent grew thick, indecipherable at times. But we got on. We got on for years. We got on so well that I always met up with him whenever I travelled to Toronto, at least until he got married and moved to Kingston and then London. We got on so well that Bev and I invited him and his revolving door or undergrads and understudies for barbeques.

But all good things come to an end. The stopes came on line, were mined and mucked and once they were emptied we set about installing the carefully crafted cages, filled with their barrage of meters and gauges, their loops of cables linking and trailing them. Unfortunately, Dave got involved, taking charge at the eleventh hour. Type-A personality and all that. I was nudged aside. You can guess how smoothly things went after that. But Dave was in charge. Dave was paying the bill. So, we did what Dave said.

Disaster! There was a small seismic event when we were hoisting them in the first stope. We had to stop mid-installation for a long-hole blast. When we returned we saw that a slab had fallen on the trailing cable. We pinged the instruments. Nothing. No response. Most of the wires within the cable had been crushed and severed. We had to pull the cages back out, a time consuming task that took twice as long as hoisting them in. Then the wee wires had to be spliced together. That only took all weekend. Despite all that work, only a few of the cages did their job, so we had to do it all over again. Then again, we were going to do it all over again, anyways.

All the while, the rehab of the collapsed levels was apace. I monitored the installation of new support types, pull-tested the new support, laid out cable-bolt prints, and inspected them, too. And then, two years after the litany of Level crushing bursts had all but shut us down, I began installing the newest stress cells. Once again, my boss did all the initial prep work, only bringing me in at the last minute. I had only two days to prep for the installation. I had to drop everything else to make the deadline.

Here’s a bit of wisdom: never let an engineer head an installation. Or I should say my boss, more specifically. He had to be there. He had to show me how it was done. And he had to bring one of his faves with him. That meant I had to work with a couple engineers who didn’t know how to perform manual labour. That didn’t stop them from marginalizing me, downgrading me to just the muscle. FYI: I’m not that big.

Dave meant well, but he grew impatient. He grew frustrated when things did not go his way. He barked orders. He yelled. He fumed. He placed me in a potentially lethal position, atop a narrow platform atop our Toyota, working at arms’ length. And when the rods slipped from his hands they came cascading out of the overhead borehole we were pushing them up. They whipped about like wet pasta as they fell. And everyone ran. Except me. I was on a raised platform, if you recall, working at arm’s length, with nowhere to go. I turned my back to the whipping rods and closed my eyes and hoped for the best. I was only stung once or twice.

I was furious. I bit my tongue, lest I say something career limiting.

We only installed the one.

I went down the next day with Annetta, a visiting engineer, and Iain McKillip, our EIT. Dave deemed me “good to go” now that he’d shown me how to do it. He did. He showed me how not to do it. The sergeant-major in me rose up. I had the two with me sit for a tailgate planning session before we began. We set the rods and cable as I wished, keeping our workplace orderly and clear. I repeated my instructions, making sure they were clear, and we set about installing the first cell.

We installed three that day.

Dave gave himself a huge pat on the back when I gave him my report at the end of the shift, congratulating himself on being such a great teacher.