Consolidated Mining & Civil Pty Ltd (CMC) has acquired a Maptek Sentry monitoring system, primarily for use at Havilah Resources Limited’s Portia gold mine in South Australia.
The Sentry solution is an active monitoring system for tracking movement and notifying stakeholders about potentially unsafe areas of an open pit operation. A long range I-Site 8820 laser scanner and dedicated software help sites measure and analyse unpredictable wall movement.
CMC is responsible for removing all of the overburden and bringing the ore to the surface at the Portia gold mine which lies 100 km northwest of the Broken Hill regional mining centre. At Portia the gold occurs in a 2-3 metre layer below 75 metres of clay overburden (about 7 million cubic metres), which is being removed to access the ore.
“Sentry provides a diagnostic tracking tool with clear visualisation and analysis capabilities so we can make reliable engineering decisions,” CMC Principal Steve Radford said in a press release.
“The Portia mine is very unusual as the gold deposit sits about 60m to 70m below a surface of soft clay material,” added Chris Giles, managing director of Havilah Resources, in an interview with Australian Mining about the product.
“To my knowledge no one has dug a mine through this material, at such a depth, before in Australia. Normally miners are cutting through more stable surface material, such as rock.
“As a result wall integrity accuracy is critical, especially for worker safety. The accuracy of this new system allows us to measure any movement in the mine walls down to a couple of millimetres.”