What happens when you Send a Greenie to a Gold Mine?
Note: A greenie is Australian slang for a person with an environmental qualification or a person of the hippie persuasion. I'm the former and despise being mistaken for the latter.
If you've been following my posts for a little while you probably know that I am an environmental scientist who spent some time working in the mining sector (almost 10 years actually).
I completed my degree in Adelaide, South Australia. I was looking for degree related employment all throughout the 3rd and 4th years of my studies. I was actively searching during this time for the simple fact that gaining employment in Adelaide is a struggle. While Adelaide is the capital of South Australia, it's really not much more than a large country town. So the jobs are hard to come by.
By December of 2006 I was just completing my 4th year at university. I was halfway through a Masters Degree in ecology. I'd been chatting with a recruitment manager about a 5 week contract at the Adelaide based head office of a large gold mining company. They were keen to get me started on the contract which was extremely exciting as it would be my real paid and degree related position, even if it was only for 5 weeks.
We finalised start dates and pay, I was to start my new job in the first week of January 2007. A couple of weeks later, however, I received another call. They wanted me to take a 3 month contract in Charters Towers, North Queensland instead of the 5 week contract. Oh and I needed to start work on the 2nd of January.
This position wasn't just data entry, they actually wanted me to do the work of a site based environmental scientist. I would be working in a 2 man team looking after environment related stuff on a gold mine that is located just over 100km outside of Charters Towers which is located inland from Townsville, Queensland. Charters Towers has a population of about 4000 people. It isn't the smallest town in regional Australia, but it is certainly small.
Most mines employ environmental scientists to conduct environmental monitoring of their operations so that they can demonstrate compliance with environmental legislation and that their mines aren't impacting the environment outside of the mining footprint.
Naturally, I jumped at the opportunity, and told my wife (to be) about it after I excitedly said yes. It was only for 3 months after all. Or so I thought.
Charters Towers is known for 2 things - gold mines and cattle. When you drive in to town, the first thing you see is a giant bull statue.
And if you lived in this town, you probably either ran cattle for a living or worked on a gold mine. Failing that, you probably worked in a pub. For such a small town, this place had an incredible number of pubs. They are virtually on every street corner. So here I am, an introverted newly qualified environmental scientist moving to Charters Towers to work on a gold mine. I hadn't ever set foot on a gold mine before so literally had no idea what to expect.
My first trip to site was eye-opening. We had the perk of having a company car (well a company 4 Toyota Landcruiser, the standard car on any mine site in Australia is a Landcruiser or cruiser for short), so every morning about 4 of us would pile into the cruiser and we'd head in to site. I spoke as little as possible that morning. I had barely slept due to the excitement and fear of starting my new job, and it was bloody early. Who in their right mind would choose to start work at 6am?
Anyway, we've reached the mine's access road and are stuck behind the bus that most people take in to site. I'm nodding off in the back seat when I hear the guy driving (Les) let out a shout and swerve off the road to a stop. I jolt awake and look out the window. In the early dawn light I can see the bus heading away from us and see some black lumps on the road in front of us.
Les calls out to me to jump out, grab some gloves and give him a hand. I blindly follow and stumble up the road. At first it looks like the bus hit a pack of dogs. But when my grogginess leaves me, I realise it's hit a bunch of wild piglets. There's about half a dozen of them lying in a perfectly straight line along the centre of the road. And then I see the one at the end of the line, it's the mother, and she's huge, and very dead. I never knew pigs got so damn big. I also never knew that on mine sites, it's the enviro's who clean this shit up.
Les: Get your gloves on mate, welcome to mining!
Me: Oh crap.
The little ones were easy, we just hurled them into the bush by their rear legs. The mother sucked. And she stank. We both had to take a leg each and haul that fat bugger off the road. Welcome to mining indeed. It's a good thing I'd skipped breakfast.
We finally made it to site and I was able to start learning all about my new job. The most exciting part of my first week on the mine was getting to head underground. Part of my role was to take water samples down in the mine to make sure the guys working down there weren't exposed to any nasty chemicals. This meant that I needed a permit to drive underground.
Mining underground is insane, and I'm forever in awe of the conditions that the guys put up with down there. Underground is hot, humid, almost permanently wet, and the darkness is insane. Thankfully, they don't spend much time in the darkness, but you have never seen a darkness more complete when there is literally not a single source of light. It's enough to send a person insane if they spend too much time in that level of darkness.
The ore that we mined at this site was of a reasonable grade. It meant that, from time to time, we'd find visible nuggets. It was an exciting day when we came across visible gold. Sometimes the guys would bring a few people down to take a look at the gold in the wall and at other times people would bring some nuggets up to the surface to show some of the newbies what it looked like when it was fresh out of the ground.
No signs of visible gold doesn't mean it wasn't there. Our processing plant was designed to remove gold from the ore through chemical extraction. Some of the chemicals used were quite dangerous, which is why the mining companies needed people like me to monitor the environment and make sure these chemicals weren't getting into the groundwater systems or to places where it might cause problems for the people working in the mine.
And that's the most interesting part of the work I was doing (for a nerdy greenie at least). Monitoring groundwater, vegetation health, soil profiles etc. is all exciting and nerdy stuff. What I didn't realise though, was that my work also involved killing lots of things. No one told me at university that my work would include killing animals on a regular basis. Thankfully, most of the animals that I had to kill were feral cats.
Feral cats are a real problem in the mines. Since the mines are designed to house a lot of people, there's a lot of fresh water and food available about the place. This attracts a lot of invasive species, including cats. Part of my role was to run the cat trapping program on the mine. I don't mind saying that I was pretty good at trapping cats. It was pretty easy to pick the spots where these cats would be, and since the enviros before me weren't particularly good at their work, the cats hadn't gotten used to the types of traps I was using.
To this day, I'm the only person that I know of who has caught 2 cats in a single trap. I wouldn't recommend trapping two cats at once. It's hard enough dealing with one angry cat in a cage, let alone two. And the stench that they left in my cruiser... I couldn't ever wash it out.
Sadly, I learnt after some time that the cat trapping programs in the mining game are near useless. For trapping programs to be effective at reducing cat populations nation wide, you need to be doing broad scale trapping programs at an intensity that is greater than the breeding rate of the cats themselves. No-one knows how to do this effectively yet so the cat populations just keep increasing year on year. This was quite discouraging to learn, so I reduced the intensity of my trapping programs in the years to come since there isn't much point in killing something if it won't be of any real benefit to our native wildlife. The only reason I continued doing them was because the government enforced the activity, even though they knew that it was a useless condition to impose on the mining companies.
So far, my work involved killing cats, dragging dead things off roads and sampling lots of water. The last part of my work was the most entertaining. I had to teach underground miners about caring for the environment.
I'll make one thing clear about the types of people that work underground in the mining game. They are mostly a bunch of fantastic people, and often utterly hilarious. However many of these characters are poorly educated. In the courses that I ran, I dealt with a number of people who couldn't read or write, and we had to cater to them. Not only did we have to cater to them, we had to provide our training in a way that they would find entertaining and understand the messages we were communicating.
In my second week on site, I was told that I had to prepare a 4 hour course about environmental management that could be taught to the underground guys as part of their mining certification qualification. Let's be clear here, I had worked in the mining industry for all of two weeks, I was fresh out of university, and I had to design a course for the guys who had been working underground for years that taught them about environmental management in mining.
Well I got the job done. But was I ready for the heckling? No... no I wasn't. I won't go into detail on this other than to relay the very first thing that someone said to me when I stood up and spoke for the firs time.
Some background first - people who live in South Australia speak with an accent that is like a soft English accent. It's an accent that really stands out in a place where people speak with what can only be described as a nasal twang.
So, when I got up to present my course in front of about 80 underground miners for the first time ever, the first thing that I hear is some young character at the back of the room scream out:
Hey! What are ya? A f%$king pom? (pom is Aussie slang for an English person)
The comment stopped me in my tracks. I stood for a moment, couldn't think of anything intelligent to say, so came out with the amazing rebuke of:
No, I'm from Adelaide, this is what we sound like.
It's pretty obvious that I didn't get off to a great start. Thankfully, my course had some pretty interesting stories about environmental disasters, and that's what saved me from complete doom that day. And it also taught me to include a lot of interesting stories in my course, so from then on I had a lot of fun telling the guys all the interesting environmental stories that I learned about along the way. Hopefully they learned something interesting and useful too.
So my first environment job in mining was full of interesting, disturbing and challenging lessons. Let's take a look at what they were for for a laugh:
- Be prepared to deal with dirty and disgusting situations
- Don't get caught in the dark underground
- There's fun and nerdy stuff to do; but
- People are going to heckle you, so come with enough confidence to heckle back.
From here I moved on to a few other mines, all of which were in Western Australia. I'll have a think about some of the stories that might be entertaining enough to talk about on Steemit.
