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Responsibly managing water at De Beers Canada’s three remote mine sites takes plenty of pumps, people and careful planning. It’s an important task made even more challenging each spring when melting snow results in the need to handle millions of additional cubic metres of water.

“You have to fight to contain the water and get it out,” explained George Hagerty, mining supervisor at Victor Mine – located in the James Bay lowlands of Northern Ontario. In preparation for freshet, as it’s called, Haggerty has to redirect up to a quarter of his mining crew to clean ice and snow from water collection ditches and install and monitor pumps that move the clean water away from the pit and into the surrounding wetlands.

The snow pack on the Victor Mine site is above average this year, an equivalent of 14.9 million cubic metres of water. This year, the weather is good for a successful melt – with warm days and cold nights in late March and much of April.

The mine’s dewatering team is already tasked with managing over 60,000 cubic metres of water pumped to keep the pit dry each day at Victor, making it that much more important to keep melting snow from draining into the pit. Snow on the pit wall’s benches is collected in ditches that direct the flow over the more competent kimberlite walls, rather than over the limestone sections, which could result in erosion, a safety hazard.

Across the country in the Northwest Territories, freshet preparations are also under way for the melt that’s expected to begin in mid-May.

At Snap Lake Mine, located 220 km northeast of Yellowknife in the Northwest Territories, the care and maintenance team has been busy on snowshoes, measuring the snowpack at 67 different locations.

“At these points we do a snow core depth measurement and at certain points we also take snow samples in order to determine the density of the snow, to derive a volume (of water),” said Michelle Peters, Superintendent of Environment and Permitting at Snap Lake Mine. At Snap Lake, spring melt will mean an additional 186,000 cubic metres of water from the highest snow pack recorded during the past four years.

The story’s much the same at Gahcho Kué Mine, where hydrogeologist Georges Moukodi said “all available resources” are dedicated to ensuring water from melting snow stays out of the mining pit.

This will be the first time the mine’s production team has had to manage freshet. That includes creating ditches, berms and retention ponds to manage water. In addition, they are constructing a 1.5 km long pipeline to move water. At the same time, site services’ millwrights are tuning up the pumps that will keep water flowing away from the pit and safely discharged.

“Keeping the pit dry from the spring run-off is our number one priority,” explained Moukodi.