Goldcorp’s blog: Above Ground Online

It has been going for about a year, and features one to two postings per month. That will not make it a favorite with Google and its search engines. Regardless, it is wonderful to see a mining company running a blog.

The postings are well written. Understandably they are carefully written: none of the impromptu opinions that you will find on my blog. Goldcorp has a reputation to uphold and shareholder value to maintain. I have a “reputation” to uphold, but no money considerations on the scene.

The skill and courage of the blog compilers is evident in this extract that I copy from one of the postings in which they address the issue of women in a man’s mining world:

Kaeli Gattens was only two weeks into her internship in the corporate communications department at Goldcorp when she heard about Creating Choices, an internal training program for women. Still a shy intern, Gattens gathered the courage to approach the program’s founder, Anna Tudela, Goldcorp’s Vice-President, Regulatory Affairs & Corporate Secretary, to ask for more information.

Tudela, who has been a mentor and role model for many women over the years, immediately invited her to an upcoming training workshop. For Gattens, the course offered the kind of encouragement and inspiration she needed to enter and develop in the male-dominated mining industry. In fact, Gattens says it was the skills highlighted in Creating Choices that helped her gain full-time employment at Goldcorp just a few months later.

Creating Choices is celebrating its one-year anniversary from implementation, which we’d like to point out coincides with another big event that celebrates empowerment of women — Oprah’s visit to Canada this week. Oprah will inspire audiences in Edmonton, Calgary and Vancouver to take control of their own lives so that they can reach their full potential. It’s the same message Creating Choices brings to its participants, while strengthening their abilities in areas such as skill development, networking and mentoring.

Another posting writes of something I have and still fear for a long time: namely damage to houses in the area of the mine as a result of earthquakes. The posting notes:

The major impact of Wednesday’s 7.4 magnitude earthquake was felt in San Marcos and neighboring regions, located close to Goldcorp’s Marlin mine. To date, the aftermath includes an estimated 50 fatalities, many injured and missing as well as damages to highway infrastructure, phone, cellular and electrical power lines. The mine’s major infrastructure remained intact and a preliminary assessment noted that both the spillway and the Tailing Storage Facility (TSF) did not sustain any damage — both are of critical importance for maintaining the quality of any water outputs from the site. Monitoring to ensure the safety and integrity of these two important structures is ongoing.

I missed this report from November 2012. But it is inevitable. I do hope that none of those killed lived in cracked houses I inspected. I wrote the posting at this link after the earthquake; I was not aware of the deaths at the time I wrote. Sad. And no comment from the ladies noted at this posting. I should have been following the Goldcorp blog then. Now I have an automatic feed.

If you know of any other genuine mining company blogs, please let us know.

For more from Jack Caldwell, see his blog, I Think Mining

Photo: Jack Caldwell