Day number six began with our group jumping on the bus at
6:45am
off to Mosaic Esterhazy's K2 mining operation. I’ve been both excited and a
little nervous about this day ever since hearing that we would actually drop
over one KM down to the mining face. As excited as I was… it all just
seemed a little surreal to think that we’d really be doing that!
We quickly signed in, geared up with our safety glasses,
hard hats, reflective vests and steel toed boots, and were briefed on what we’d
see. Many thanks to the incredible and knowledgeable staff at the K2
site!
As we stepped into the skip (the elevator), I found my heart
in my throat. The cage to go down was very dark. The miner with us
thankfully put his light down as we descended. It only took about 3
minutes to descend the 1100 meters or so. Upon arrival, I was immediately
struck with how warm it was underground. Thankfully Helen from above had
thought to send water bottles with us all. We all boarded three vehicles
to make the 40 min drive to the face of the mining operation. I kept imagining
myself as Ms. Frizzle from “The Magic Schoolbus” saying, “Seatbelts everyone!!”.
The trip there was bumpy, and as we went in and out of the tunnels, past
big blowers of air and the conveyor belts full of potash, it all seemed a
little surreal. Were we really so far under the earth? This was
amazing. How does someone like me ever get a chance to see something like
this? Wow.
After a couple stops, we arrived at the face of the mining
operation, the room in which active mining was going on. The miners
stopped the machine, and in the quiet, we could hear a strange sound—kind of
like a “Snap, Crackle, Pop” of rice crispies. In fact it was the freshly
mined potash - the rock reacting to pressure changes as the space is opened up. Wow! Apparently,
within the first day, the pressure changes actually result in the walls closing in
about 4 inches because of expansion. Afterwards, this expansion slows
down. The earth is amazing.
I was struck by the sparseness of refuge station #6—the spot
where several miners spent many hours, trapped after a fire in January
2006. Despite its seeming sparseness, the station did what it needed to
do, and very thankfully they were kept safe and sound when the rescuers found
them. In every mine we visited, safety was a vital concern, and this was
the very room that saved the lives of the miners who were trapped.
Shortly thereafter, we travelled back up the skip for
lunch. I think we were all hungry and thirsty after this
experience! An overview of the milling process was provided to us,
followed by a tour of the above-ground operation. This process turned the
underground mined ore, into a finished product. I was struck by the
immenseness of the machinery in the mill. It was huge, and hot and the
entire process was very interesting.
After leaving the K2 mine in Esterhazy, we all boarded the
bus for the final leg of our journey back to Saskatoon. It was a long
ride that day, and we were all tired. We made our final stop at Tim Horton's in Yorkton. It’s been a full week, but I
wouldn’t trade one moment of it.
What a day. Thank you to the staff at K2 for letting
us see the operation close up, and to the Saskatchewan Mining Association
for allowing us to come this week. It was just incredible. I feel
like I can bring to life the images found in lessons within textbooks now, and
tell my students first-hand how the process works. This week has given me
so much more insight into how mining works in our province. I’m going to
honour your investment in us, and I can’t wait to tell my students all
about it. It’s been one of the highlights of my summer, and definitely
one of the best professional development I’ve ever done. THANK YOU!
Cheryl Prefontaine - Saskatoon Public Schools
Riding back to Saskatoon today and thinking about the distance traveled on our trip, I realized we've also been traveling back in time in a sense. We might not have been hopping into our time machines but we've visited places that started forming hundreds of millions of years ago. Today's adventures transported us back to remnants of when Saskatchewan was covered by a shallow inland sea. Once upon a geological time we were quite the tropical locale and salt deposits in our former sea became the source of our famous potash reserves. We visited the Prairie Evaporite formation approximately 3000 feet underground that dates back to origins of 400 million years ago. This particular formation is where our province's reserves of potash can be found.
Underground we made four main stops to tour a small portion of the complex underground network that is in Esterhazy.
expansion site
one of the shops where they were assembling a four rotor miner
a miner in action
refuge station
Eugene Pawliw - Yorkton Regional High School
Occupations in Underground Construction As Seen at a Conventional Potash Mine Site
The headframe which straddled the shaft supports the winch and cables which transport workers the 3150 feet up and down; to and from the actual work areas in an "elevator" like cage. In a similar fashion, the headframe has two suspended, alternately elevated skips or containers which raise ore to the surface for mill processing. This handling system also lowered vehicles, conveyors, motors, and the components from which to assemble the four rotor miners.
There are a variety of trades represented in a project such as the ore handling system. Mechanical miners would have been used to excavate two vertically parallel drifts, after which professional miners would have drilled and blasted the four hoppers which connect the two drifts. Structural iron workers would have assembled the frameworks of the hopper tops and the structural framework for the upper belt conveyor. Welders would have fabricated the hopper chutes below the storage area. Millwrights would have installed the mechanical components of the conveyor and the maintenance platforms. These tradespeople would have been accompanied by electricians who install the heavy electrical components which operate the conveyors. A group of tradespeople who are essential to the operation of the remote ore storage system are the instrumentation technicians who set up the sensors and monitors through which the conveyor's operations could be monitored.
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