TIMMINS – With Glencore’s Kidd Mine in Timmins being the deepest base metal mine in the world, innovation has become a way of life there. The most recent change is the delivery of a tricked-out Toyota truck that can bring mine rescue teams to the most remote areas of the massive mine more quickly than ever before.
The Mine Rescue Emergency Response Vehicle (MRERV) is being put through its paces these days as mine rescuers get training on driving the truck and learning to drive it onto the mine’s huge elevator known as the cage.
Normally the cage is used to transport miners, mining materials, tools and explosives from surface into the depths of the mine. But the cage is also big enough and robust enough to carry a vehicle.
In this case, the former Toyota Land Cruiser was “chopped” to a shorter length to allow the truck to fit onto the cage deck. The truck was also designed to allow space for a stretcher to carry a sick or injured patient out the mine, instead of having to drive up the ramp, a time-consuming process.
Iain McKillip, is Kidd’s superintendent of production engineer. He is also a mine rescue incident commander who has been involved in the design and creation of the new vehicle in the past two years.
McKillip is a member of the Technical Advisory Committee (TAC) for mine rescue across Ontario, which is faced with the challenge of travelling through very large mines. He said the concern could be for a deep mine, which is vertically expansive. Or it can apply to a horizontally expansive mine, such as the Goderich salt mine, which has tunnels and galleries several kilometres long.
For the rest of this article: http://www.timminspress.com/2017/11/06/vehicle-offers-quicker-response-for-kidd-mine-rescue-team