The 2014 District Mine Rescue competitions are now on at the McIntyre Community Building in Timmins so that mine rescue teams from across Timmins and Kirkland Lake can hone their skills and win bragging rights.
For the Timmins District, the event will see teams from Lake Shore Gold, Goldcorp Porcupine Gold Mine, Glencore Kidd Mine and Dumas Mining contractors competing against each other for the various trophies and awards for things such as best technician, best first aid, best performance on exams and best overall in responding to the mock disaster scenario.
Incidentally, the 2013 team from Kidd Mine is not only the local champion, but also has the provincial bragging rights, having won the All-Ontario mine rescue event held last June in Windsor, Ontario.
Kirkland Lake will also be represented at the event with teams representing SAS St. Andrew’s Goldfields, AuRico Gold (Young Davidson), Kirkland Lake Gold and Primero Mining Group (Brigus Gold).
It is expected that the disaster scenario exercise will be wrapped up early Friday afternoon, to give judges time to make their final assessments.
The teams will be attending a formal banquet Friday evening, at which time the winners will be announced and trophies awarded.
The event is being managed by Mine Rescue Officer Manny Cabral, a member of Workplace Safety North, which is a not-for-profit provincial health and safety organization.
Previously Ontario Mine Rescue was part of the Ministry of Labour and before than, part of the old Ontario Department of Mines.
The competition exercise has transformed the arena floor at the Mac into a multi-level simulated mine where a mock disaster scenario has been created. Precise details of the scenario are kept secret so no one team, or team member, can take advantage of the knowledge. In the past such scenarios have included fires and explosions, multiple casualties, fuel spills, poison gasses and unsafe ground conditions.
The actual competitions test the mine rescue teams on their individual academic knowledge, their hands-on familiarity with their equipment and their ability to respond efficiently and effectively in a disaster situation.
This means the men and women of Mine Rescue will be sitting down to a written multiple-choice-question exam. The members are expected to know precise details of things such as explosive properties of underground gasses, how to knock down an oil fire or perhaps what first aid procedure is required for a punctured lung or a compound fracture.
This week’s event also requires the team members to move to the tables where all the basic apparatus of the mine rescue teams is laid out. This includes the various breathing devices, the instruments for testing poison gases and the specialized tools required to work underground.
Each team member is required to know how to use the equipment, how to test it and how to provide servicing in event of a breakdown in the field. The main piece of equipment for a mine rescuer is the Draeger BG4 breathing device. It’s an expensive but effective source of air for rescuers who have to spend long periods in poison atmospheres in enclosed spaces. It’s contained inside the “backpack” that mine rescuers wear.
The normal breathing time of a BG4 is set at two hours, but it can be longer if an emergency demands. This is a significantly longer time than the breathing devices used by firefighters for example, which usually have an air supply of 30 minutes or less. Firefighters working in a city can enter a smoky building and carry out their work in shorter periods of time and then exit the building.
It’s different for mine rescuers. It takes a lot longer entering a mine and then traveling along the shafts and tunnels until they reach the problem area. The BG4 works longer because it takes the exhaled breath of the user (CO2), runs it through a chemical scrubber, supplements that air with a small infusion of pure oxygen, and then returns it to the user as fresh air.
The mine rescuers also have strict rules regarding the amount of time they spend underground at the scene of a rescue event.
“The team members must allow themselves twice as much time to leave the mine rescue scene as it takes to get there,” Cabral explained at one event.
He said this is because when they are leaving a rescue scene, they will likely be carrying a patient, they will be far more fatigued and the underground situation may worsen with time; a fire will have produced more smoke and poison gas and the overall safety of the main escape route could be jeopardized.
MINE RESCUE BEGAN RIGHT HERE IN TIMMINS
The Mine Rescue community in Timmins and across Ontario is in mourning this week. The death of two miners in Sudbury is something that stays on the mind of most every person whose job it is to go underground, in times of peril, and rescue miners in trouble.
It is also because that mine rescuers are the ones called on to go underground to recover the bodies of those who have died in workplace accidents.
That’s because in many cases when there is an accident, it means the underground work environment has become hostile. There can be bad ground conditions with falling rock, there can be poison gasses, and worst of all there can be fire. These are conditions and hazards that mine rescuers train for and have the specialized equipment needed to overcome the hazards.
It wasn’t always that way.
There was a time in Ontario when mine workers did their jobs without the benefit of having mine rescue specialists nearby in case something went wrong.
Something did go wrong.
It was a cold winter day many years ago right here in Timmins.
Fire broke out on the 550 level at the Hollinger Mine. It was February 10, 1928. Before the day was out, 39 miners were dead, victims of carbon monoxide poisoning. Timmins, the mining community, indeed most people in Ontario were in shock over the loss of life.
A provincial inquiry was called.
The Ontario government ordered the creation of Ontario Mine Rescue so that if something terrible ever happened again, at least the miners would have some help in staying alive. The first ever Mine Station in Ontario opened in Timmins in 1929. There are now mine rescue stations, and sub-stations, in every mining community in the province. Ontario Mine Rescue is now considered one of the best health, safety and rescue organizations in the world.
For the original version of this article, click here: http://www.timminstimes.com/2014/05/07/mine-rescue-district-competitions-on-in-timmins