From the ground up...Engineering a Mine !

Imagine designing a building that encompasses over seven square miles. Imagine the building has a height of 800 feet, and basement that is over 1000 feet deep. Now imagine that trucks weighing over 430 tons each need to drive in and out of nearly all of this building, and that these trucks will relocate around 60 million tons of the building’s materials every year!

This thought experiment provides a good way to consider what a mining engineer does. Of course, he or she, is not designing a building but a surface mine.

How to engineer a mine? It’s as simple as understanding the details: geological exploration targets, understanding of all cost variables (fuel, labor, equipment), permitted mine boundary, ore and overburden removal, transportation and storage, rock mechanics, gold market conditions, grade of ore, and the use of sophisticated high-tech mapping tools. Spread out over seven square miles at the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Company.  That’s all it takes to design a surface mine.

If you want to learn more about the intriguing responsibilities of a mining engineer, join us for the Cripple Creek & Victor Gold Mining Company’s next “Mine Shots” Presentation: 10:00 a.m., Saturday, April 18, 2015, speaker: CC&V, Mine Engineering Manager, Jim Vandermeer.  Call 719-689-2341 or 719-689-4052 to reserve your seat today!