Going Underground
I will start this post with a warning:
There are no pictures of Caleb in this post
If you are looking for pictures of Caleb, please move to the next post.
Yesterday, the Underground staff at the mine invited all of the bean counters out to the site to tour the underground (it gives us context on the nature of the beans we count). Myself and three of my co-workers went out to site and took a tour of the Underground mine and the Open Pit mine.
For those of you who I haven't spoken to about this before, the Diavik Diamond mine is currently undergoing a transition from mining all of the diamonds out of two big pits in the ground to mining the diamonds out of tunnels underground. The transition is pretty exciting for the mine because it extends the life of the mine from 2013 to 2020 and beyond (the pits are almost all mined out).
Here is a giant picture of what the mine looks like. Click the picture to get the full sized version, but I caution you that the picture is huge.
Once we got underground, the mine managers took us around to see all of the equipment and some of the infrastructure. It is pretty impressive the amount of work they have done. The tunnels are drilled into solid granite, so the mine is quite stable; however, one of the biggest challenges of the mine is that the ore is all under a lake. As a result, it feels like it is constantly raining when you are underground. In order to prevent the mine from flooding, there are some very large pumping stations and a very large water treatment plant that could provide water to a city of a few hundred thousand people.
We also saw a few of the pieces of underground heavy equipment. This is a picture of me pretending to drive one of the big shovels.
We then took a tour of the Open Pit and saw some of the large shovels and haul trucks.
For reference, the tires on the truck below are twice as tall as I am.
After that, it was time to hang up our hard hats and head back to Yellowknife.
Anyways, this is a bit of a short post, as I am on my way out.
Merry Christmas.
There are no pictures of Caleb in this post
If you are looking for pictures of Caleb, please move to the next post.
Yesterday, the Underground staff at the mine invited all of the bean counters out to the site to tour the underground (it gives us context on the nature of the beans we count). Myself and three of my co-workers went out to site and took a tour of the Underground mine and the Open Pit mine.
For those of you who I haven't spoken to about this before, the Diavik Diamond mine is currently undergoing a transition from mining all of the diamonds out of two big pits in the ground to mining the diamonds out of tunnels underground. The transition is pretty exciting for the mine because it extends the life of the mine from 2013 to 2020 and beyond (the pits are almost all mined out).
Here is a giant picture of what the mine looks like. Click the picture to get the full sized version, but I caution you that the picture is huge.
Once we got underground, the mine managers took us around to see all of the equipment and some of the infrastructure. It is pretty impressive the amount of work they have done. The tunnels are drilled into solid granite, so the mine is quite stable; however, one of the biggest challenges of the mine is that the ore is all under a lake. As a result, it feels like it is constantly raining when you are underground. In order to prevent the mine from flooding, there are some very large pumping stations and a very large water treatment plant that could provide water to a city of a few hundred thousand people.
We also saw a few of the pieces of underground heavy equipment. This is a picture of me pretending to drive one of the big shovels.
We then took a tour of the Open Pit and saw some of the large shovels and haul trucks.
For reference, the tires on the truck below are twice as tall as I am.
After that, it was time to hang up our hard hats and head back to Yellowknife.
Anyways, this is a bit of a short post, as I am on my way out.
Merry Christmas.
posted by Byron at 4:45 PM
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