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Planning for a winter road resupply and backhaul program typically begins the day after the current program finishes.
That wasn’t the case for the team of employees who managed the Snap Lake Mine’s 2017 winter road backhaul program in support of the mine moving into Extended Care and Maintenance. They had an extremely short timeframe to plan and prepare hundreds of loads of equipment and supplies required to be removed from the mine. When the program was complete, 498 loads had been organized and removed from site, more than any other year in De Beers Canada’s history.
“We were told in mid-December that we needed to run a winter road schedule and get the contracts and logistics managed for an accelerated backhaul program, “said Nancy Lehouiller, Business Improvement Section Manager for De Beers Canada.
“Normally you have a full year’s preparation but we only had a few weeks and a small team to identify what equipment was going to come off the road, what contractors we were going to work with and how to maximize our freight capacity so we could meet the available ice thickness.”
Some Snap Lake equipment was moved to De Beers’ Victor Mine in Northern Ontario and the Gahcho Kué Mine about 80 km away in the NWT, while the rest was delivered to Yellowknife to be made available for resale. Those items included sea cans full of inventory, underground gear and pumps, electrical reels and belting, heavy equipment designed for underground mining and more.
The team worked with Det’on Cho Logistics and Det’on Cho Landtran to identify, prepare and move the equipment, and also to manage a small northbound fuel program which saw five million litres of fuel brought up to the mine.
They also had to oversee construction of the 30 km spur road that connects Snap Lake to the main Tibbitt to Contwoyto Winter Road.
Most members of the Snap Lake team had never worked on the winter road before and had no experience with backhaul programs but pulled together with the contractors and took on new roles and responsibilities to get the work done on time, and on target.