Timmins Bell Creek shaft delivers immediate benefits, enhanced opportunities – by Ron Grech (Timmins Daily Press – February 13, 2019)

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The new shaft at Bell Creek Mine has been in operation since December, and management with Tahoe Resources Canada say the increase in productivity has been immediate.

The new shaft at Bell Creek Mine has been in operation since December, and management with Tahoe Resources Canada say the increase in productivity has been immediate.

“We currently are down to 1,200 metres below surface with our ramp but it’s become uneconomic to do that with trucks,” Peter Van Alphen, vice-president of operations for Tahoe Canada, who was in Timmins Tuesday for the official opening of the Bell Creek shaft.

“We’ve now taken the shaft down to a thousand (1,080) meters and that creates a whole new environment for us here at Bell Creek … Productivity will go up, costs will come down and we can increase our production rate.”

Van Alphen said Tahoe directly employs a little more than 200 at Bell Creek. Including contractors, they have about 670 workers in the camp as a whole. He doesn’t anticipate those numbers changing over the next while.

“We’re at our full production numbers now,” he said. “What happened is because we did a lot of this work ourselves, we hired people to sink the shaft, so we essentially hired contracting crews and we’ve been able to assimilate a lot of those people in our workforce and take them from shaft-sinkers and raise-miners and they are now in production here as well. We’ve been able to maintain most of the employees that we increased by to do the project in the beginning.”

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