The Many Faces of Mining
[This article orignially appeared in MiningVoice magazine and appears here courtesy of the National Mining Association.]
Although their titles, tasks, backgrounds and ages vary widely, mining industry employees find the same thing a sense of community wherever they go.
By Deborah Dasch
Deborah Dasch is a writer based in Baltimore, Md. Her book Find Your Calling, Love Your Life can be found on www.amazon.com. NMA members and staffers also contributed to this article.
The work we choose to do is a powerful identifier of who we are. Especially in America. For most of us, how we spend our hours, using our minds and bodies to perform work tasks, is as vital as breathing. "I work, therefore I am" may be more applicable tha n we think.
But work without purpose is an empty, meaningless occupation. Anyone with a computer, television set, radio, or library card already knows this fact thanks in part to the countless "career gurus" who claim to have the solutions to our unending quest fo r job fulfillment. It's enough to make you wonder, Can anyone ever be truly happy at work?
According to the individuals you'll meet in these pages, yes, there are people who are truly happy at work. At least they are in mining. Why? Some say it's the challenges they get to tackle every day on the job. Others cite the flexibility of their sch edules that allows them the freedom to pursue outside passions. Still others talk about the variety their work provides. After all, how many jobs have you combining desk work with a hardhat descent into the belly of a coal mine or complex negotiations wit h local environmental agencies?
Following are personal glimpses of the men and women who make mining happen. Their stories will reveal all the commitment and compassion that lie behind the machinery and technology, painting a human portrait of the world of mining today.
These 13 people four women and nine men have worked in the mining industry, or some industry directly related to mining, for lengths of time varying from one to 40 years. And their jobs cover almost every aspect of mining production, community re lations, environmental protection, engineering and administration.
Without exception, they're happy in what they do. And they're glad to share their experiences with others.
Bitten by the Bug
Wanda Burget, age 42, says she was bitten by the mining bug when she spent a summer interning as a surveyor in Arco's Black Thunder Mine. She had been working toward a degree in biology with her sights set on a career in medicine. A resident of northeaste rn Wyoming, as soon as she graduated she went to work at the mine.
"When a job came open in the environmental area, I went after it," she says. And that's what she's been doing for Peabody for the last 15 years. She's now manager of environmental engineering for Peabody's Powder River Basin. "I'm responsible for the l ong-term permitting for all of our operations," she says, "but I also concentrate on regulatory affairs issues."
Burget's expertise in the often thorny debates surrounding mining regulations keeps her on the move, not only inspecting and offering technical support for Powder River operations but also working closely with a variety of regulatory agencies.
"I think much of our success here at Powder River is due to our team approach, both internally and externally," Burget says. The people she works with are loyal and committed, she adds, and "It's really rewarding when you can build positive alliances with regulatory agencies."
Burget hails from a family of ranchers in Wyoming. "They still have a cattle ranch and raise some hogs," she says. But Burget hasn't been up on a horse in a long while; she's more likely to be on a plane going from site to site.
Teamwork also is a concept described by two other environmental employees. At 28, Melissa Monk is fairly new to the industry, even though she's been around mining all her life. "My dad worked for the Sunshine Mining Co. in Silver Valley, Idaho, so I wa s born and raised in mining," she says.
She is environmental coordinator at Barrick Gold's Cunningham Hill site in New Mexico, and currently she is overseeing the fall planting program at Cunningham. "Our ongoing reclamation includes growing ponderosa and juniper trees in the tens of thousands, " she says. She's the only mining employee here; everyone else is contract labor.
"There are no typical days in this job," she explains. In addition to overseeing the field technicians at Cunningham, Monk also monitors a reclamation project in California. But there, it's a different story because it's a closure project. "There's not even a building remaining, just the site," she says. Sometimes, Monk adds, her job entails more creative tasks, like making sure people aren't camping out on the site.
Before coming out to New Mexico last October, Monk was the site environmental manager for the Bullfrog mine in Nevada. "I was responsible for the testing and monitoring operations, and making sure that miners were complying with permit regulations. The y called me Little Missy' at Bullfrog," she says, perhaps because she was a young person telling miners more than twice her age not to dump their oil or contaminate the water.
"I'm not exactly built like a miner," Monk says, "but I believe mining is essential to our way of life and the environmental area is a good fit for me."
She feels very strongly about the importance of mining, but cautions, "Mining will continue to go away if we don't take a long, hard look at the environment."
Part of the solution, she believes, lies in educating the general public about mining. "At the Cunningham site, we overlook Santa Fe," she says. "The environmentalists here are very radical they believe nature is hands off and refer to Cunningham a s the scar.'"
Monk is convinced the environmentalists feel this way because they haven't been enlightened about mining. And so she spends a good part of her time giving tours of the site for community college classes and local citizens.
"They wouldn't call Cunningham the scar' if they came up here and saw what we were growing on the site," she says, "and began to understand, for example, that the cyanide levels in the water are at the same acceptable levels in their drinking water."
Closing a mine site can mean that there is almost as much work to be done as when the mine was operational. At least that's how Walt Shubert is finding his work as environmental closure project coordinator at Barrick Gold's Mercer Mine Reclamation Proj ect in Salt Lake City.
"When I took over the coordination of the reclamation at Mercer, I thought I was going to sit back and relax," he says, "but I'm busier now than when the mine was operating."
Walt found that out quickly, with the de-watering, fencing, water evaporation, monitoring of wells and the growth on vegetation just a few examples of what goes into closing a mine and reclaiming the site. "The erosion has to be taken care of," he ad ds as though lost in thought, "and then there's the reshaping and recovering of waste dumps."
The 62-year-old Shubert has a long history with Mercer, since Barrick Gold first came to town to break ground. You see, he was the Tooele County sheriff, and "because these mining folks had to have their license plates changed, I got to know them over time. They asked me to be their security man when somebody broke open the site," he says.
Safety security supervisor was a good fit for someone with 14 years of experience as a deputy and 6 years as an elected county sheriff. There were other benefits too. "Mining offers good money and benefits, but more importantly the employees here are g ood, down-to-earth, personable people," he says, "and they put a lot back into the community."
Despite all the work to be done, there's still some sadness when a mine shuts down. "I don't know one of the 262 here who didn't hate to leave," he says, "but it seems in mining you always have a job with the company."
Shubert won't be leaving, at least not right now. After work he heads back to his cabin in an old mining town named Ophir, where he also happens to be the mayor.
Feeling of Family
This sense of camaraderie and doing work that is important isn't exclusive to people who work in the environmental end of a mining operation, however. It spills over into the production side of the equation, and not strictly in mining, either.
With a background in process innovation and management, especially as it relates to manufacturing problems, Marshall Ellis is helping Rotary Drill Division in Texas find new ways to succeed and grow. "This company hasn't been very innovative in the pas t," he says, "but now we're using processes like demand flow technology that will reduce our cycle time by 50 percent."
Ellis, who is the company's operations manager, says he likes working with people and changing existing processes "to make the company more competitive in responding to customers."
Process management? Demand flow technology? Where did he pick up this lingo? It may have started as far back as childhood on the family farm in Mississippi. "I was driving a tractor at the age of six and was largely responsible for the farm by the time I was 11," he says. Undoubtedly, Ellis became very familiar with all types of farm equipment, including troubleshooting technical and mechanical breakdowns.
He continued farming as an adult, running his own farm to run and his own business. But in 1985 he moved to North Carolina "to work for a company with new plant start-ups."
Ellis, now 49, says he likes the challenge of being connected to mining and coming up with innovative solutions to the ongoing challenges of this industry.
One thing, though "I do get claustrophobic at the entrance of a mine," he confesses. The feeling of family within the industry has inspired Armando B. "A. B." Gonzalez to want to start a hall of fame for the miners. "They're what I call the real gladiators the ones who get up at 5 a.m. every morning for 30 years and do the real hands-on underground work." These are the people, he says, who have given the rest of us the lifestyle we enjoy and rely upon. "We don't really know who these miners are; that's why I want this hall of fame to show our respect and gratitude for all they've accomp lished."
Another Gonzalez passion is metallurgy, which he's pursued all his life. As a little boy, Gonzalez went into the Arizona mountains with his father, panning for gold and listening to his father's tales of life in the mines and the lure of precious metal s. "Every once in a while we would hit what my dad would call collars," he says, "these little nuggets that were the size of a grain of rice."
His father was always sure they were going to "hit it big," but the most memorable part of these father-son excursions were the conversations they had about minerals. "He was in mining all of his life and worked for a number of small mining companies, finally retiring from Salmon Well," says Gonzalez, who at 57 is Asarco's general supervisor of operations in Tucson.
His father's love of metallurgy rubbed off on Gonzalez. Except for a brief stint in the Navy after high school, Gonzalez has pursued his passion for metallurgy all of his life. Since 1966 he's been in the industry, from working underground to toiling i n the metallurgy lab to his current position of supervising Asarco's crushing and milling operations.
"I enjoy both metallurgy and working with people," he says. "This has been my calling for over 30 years, and I've put my heart, body, and soul into it."
When Asarco and Cyprus announced plans to merge, Gonzalez wasn't worried. He said the proposed merger would "make us much larger so we need to learn the different methods others use and be able to incorporate those changes."
He didn't worry about a period of adjustment because, he says, mining is like one big family. "You can go from Arizona to Nevada and it seems the whole industry knows you," he adds.
Scheduling Allows Freedom
One of the more unusual types of mining, but still part of the family, is sulphur mining as it's practiced in the Gulf of Mexico. R. L. Hilburn is production foreman on Freeport Sulphur Co.'s Main Pass Mine, located 20 miles east of the Mississippi Riv er offshore Louisiana, some 100 miles south of New Orleans.
Hilburn hunts deer with a bow and arrow and mines for sulphur in the watery depths of the Gulf, courtesy of that modern marvel of work called "seven days on seven days off." He relates that "it was the seven-and-seven that attracted me to the offshor e industry," Hilburn recalls. "I was employed by Litton Industries in Pascagoula [Miss.] working on nuclear submarines, overhauling nuclear reactors. I had heard about this seven-and-seven thing and I thought that would be pretty good. It would give me a chance to move back to my home and have more time with my family."
A 47-year-old native of Mississippi, he started working for Freeport in 1979 as a rig helper. He previously has worked on two other offshore Freeport sulphur mines.
When his week-long shift is completed, he helicopters 20 minutes from the mine to the landing pad in Boothville, La., and then drives to home. He has no outside business interests, as do some seven-and-seven people, but he still finds plenty to keep hi m busy, including work around the house and hunting and fishing.
During deer season, there is a specific season for bows and arrows. Hilburn says he started playing with bows and arrows as a kid and says he's become quite adept at bagging deer this way. He also uses a musket. When fishing, he catches mostly catfish and brim, which his wife, Jamie, fixes in the family kitchen.
When he's at the mine, which is a mile-long platform situated in 210 feet of water, Hilburn is responsible for the safety of the personnel, environmental concerns and sulphur production. What's the biggest difference in sulphur mining in the last 20 years? "That's easy to answer," Hilburn says. "It's computerization. A person can sit at one screen and monitor 35 wells as one time. When I first joined the company, instead of one screen, th ere was a whole room full of gauge instruments and the supervisor had to be constantly looking at the different gauges.
"One thing hasn't changed. You still need strong backs out there on the rigs."
Scheduling also plays a large part in the life of Tony Greene, a 24-year-old control room operator at Kinross Gold's Fort Knox Mine, 15 miles northwest of Fairbanks, Alaska. The work is on a 28-day schedule, with 12-hour rotating shifts: four nights on , three off; three days on, one off; three nights on, three off, four days on, seven off. It sounds complicated to keep track of, but Greene enjoys it. "It works out good," he says. "You only work 14 out of every 28 days, although you do work more than 40 hours each week." The extended period of time off allows Greene an opportunity to enjoy hobbies like fishing, hunting, motocross racing and, in the winter, snow machine riding. Also, as he points out, getting from one place to another in Alaska "takes at least a day to drive," which his schedule can accommodate.
Greene's responsibilities at Fort Knox include regulating the flow of tonnage coming through the mill "Our main job is to get as much tonnage as we can within the tonnage parameters" that have been set, he explains. During his shifts he's the only pe rson in the control room, with another six employees working throughout the mill. Although the night shift might not be for everyone, Greene affirms a preference for it: "It's quieter, there's not as many people around . . . I get a lot more done."
Greene has lived in Alaska since the second grade, when his father, a military man, was posted there. He was attending college as an anthropology major when he saw a posting for the job at Fort Knox and decided "to take a semester off to try something new." Three years later, he's still there, and intends to stay. "It's the kind of job where you don't mind coming in in the morning," he says. He's considering returning to college on a part-time basis, but says he'd never quit the mine to go back full ti me. His ambition, he says, is eventually to become "shift or general foreman . . . but the control room is good for now."
Working for the mining industry also gives a certain freedom to aerial and industrial photographer Mickey Prim, who at 62 refers to himself as "The best dirty picture taker there is."
Prim is speaking tongue in cheek, but he isn't joking when he says, "If it's dirty, remote or hard to photograph, they call me." Since entering the photography profession in 1955, he's worked for most U.S. mining companies, equipment suppliers and cons truction companies and estimates he's visited "over 200 properties . . . Just about every kind of mining property there is," including mines, smelters and fabricating plants. He's visited sites throughout the United States and around the world and has "be en around the world" three times, averaging 100,000 miles of travel per year for the last 38 years. Prim counts 18 different countries where he's worked, including South Africa, Botswana, Zambia, Turkey, Guatemala, Brazil, Peru and Argentina often retur ning more than once.
The adventurous side of Prim's job doesn't stop with travel to remote locations. He became a licensed pilot in 1959 and has used both his own and rented planes from which to photograph. Although flying and taking photos simultaneously sounds more than challenging, Prim says, "Oh, it's easy. I make the plane work with me." When he's flying over a city Prim takes another pilot with him, who does most of the flying. But when they reach his target Prim takes control of the plane himself, opens his window, and shoots. Even this doesn't faze him: "I've been doing it so many years I just don't think about it." His master of photography degree and numerous other accolades speak to the skill he has achieved in his years of practice.
Prim, the owner of Manley-Prim Photography in Tucson, Ariz., believes his location gives him an advantage over eastern-based photographers. Because the state is widely known for its mining industry and because Prim himself has a mining background, wi th a stepfather who worked for Phelps Dodge mining companies trust him to maneuver around their properties with a minimum of fuss. He's not a demanding worker, either, saying that his philosophy is, "I don't work for you, I work with you." "We keep it l ight," he says. "It makes the day go fast, and we have better results . . . I like to get in, get it, and get out the less disruption the better." His photographs are used in annual reports, sales reports, as slides in presentations or as large prints f or trade shows. Environmental photographs, he says, are used by mining companies to show the good results of their hard work. A downside of the recent mergers in the industry, he notes, is that "Photography has been cut back badly this year." Even so, "The biggest plus i s I don't have to work with any Madison Avenue flakes. Let me have my good old industrial mining people any day."
Knowledge Enriches Lives
Working in an "extended family" might be one way to define the work of Alan Balok in his position as manager of community relations at Pittsburgh & Midway's McKinley Mine in Gallup, N.M. According to Balok, "Anyone in the extractive industries who is presented with the opportunity to hire a Native American workforce should jump at the chance. Native Americans have a fantastic work ethic and quickly become a very skilled workforce."
Balok, age 48, should know whereof he speaks. He has spent the last decade as the cultural liaison with the Navajo Tribe, who comprise 86 percent of the workforce at McKinley Mine. He's actually worked at McKinley for 20 years and says he "was probably do ing community relations work the whole time, although I've had the actual title since 1989."
Alan hails from the Gallup area, where his family homesteaded and his dad spoke fluent Zuni and Navajo. Balok taught school in one of the McKinley communities before becoming an agricultural extension agent for the county. After working briefly as a haule r for a small coal mine, Balok applied to P&M "to work in the areas of seed mixtures and land reclamation."
That's when he became well aquatinted with the Navajos' culture and their reverence for the land. The McKinley Mine lease falls within the boundaries of three chapter areas of the Navajo tribal system. "It's much like a network of small county governments with representatives from each one, and they all belong to the Navajo Tribal Government," he says.
His job title encompasses three functions he's the government liaison with the Navajo Tribal Government, he manages a contributions program that assists those communities affected by mining and he operates the cultural relations program.
"I tell people I have the most interesting job at McKinley because I have the opportunity to work with Native Americans I've learned so much from their association with the land, their history, their culture," he says. As a workforce, the Navajos must d eal with the pros and cons of mining and the necessary use of the land. It doesn't always jell with how they value the environment. "I spend a lot of time listening to their struggles with these issues and feel such respect for what they value in life," h e adds.
"People talk about the white man teaching the Indian, but it's really the reverse," he says. "You learn from them and as a result you enrich your own life."
As with other aspects of the mining process, the feeling of teamwork and family extends to the engineering side of the equation. For instance, Karon Jury is part of an underground team where she works with seven engineers. As an engineering tech 1 at Glam is D Mining Co. in Nevada, she "does everything because we're such a small mine." That includes surveying the property, pit plans, underground slopes and drifts that enables the drillers to know what direction to go.
This scenario was not exactly what she had in mind when she was growing up in Arizona. "I wanted to twirl a baton," she admits, "but you can't twirl a baton forever."
Jury's first career was as wife and mother to six children. Along the way, she was introduced to mining and she hated it. "My first husband worked in a mine and was always away because of shift work," she says.
But when she went back to work outside the home, she found herself in the mining industry. "I was offered a job in the lab of a barite mine and spent the next 13 years there," she says. While there, she started taking classes in auto CAT and applied for a position at Marigold D, which eventually became Glamis D. At the age of 46, she plans to take more classes in drafting and engineering because "with the variety of what I'm doing now I could go in a number of different directions with the company."
Her colleagues seem to share her thirst for knowledge. "I learn something new every day," she says. "The people here are so knowledgeable, and they are happy to share what they know with you." But at the same time Jury has some worries about young people who go to work in a mine right after high school. "So many kids get jobs in the mine because their parents work there. The pay is good and they get spoiled," she says. "But they don't go on to complete an education. What happens when the mine closes and you're in your 40s with no other job skills?" she asks. Jury knows this dilemma firsthand and has seen it in other families. She stopped her formal education after high school. Throughout the years, she has taken courses to further her career as well as fuel her other interests. But as a widow who is head of t he household, she knows what she's talking about when she "encourages young people to wait a little longer before going into mining." Rebecca Kelemen, on the other hand, knew when she went to college that she wanted to be in engineering, but hadn't decided on which field to pursue. "What did it for me," she says, "is when I participated in a work/study co-op program at the University of Kentucky." Kelemen is a mine engineer at Arch Coal's Samples Mine in West Virginia.
Rebecca, 25, said she was a cheerleader all through high school in Bell County, Ky. Her father was a high school principal and knew the mining industry was active in providing both scholarships and internships to students.
Kelemen worked for a mining consulting firm and enjoyed the mining and reclamation design work. "It was so much more challenging and creative than designing sewer lines for a planned community." After graduation, she continued at the consulting firm for a year, then took an engineering job at Arch Coal in West Virginia. Perhaps she also was influenced in part by her uncle, who worked at an Arch mine in Kentucky.
Now Kelemen's days start early and last long. "I try to get here at 5:45 a.m. because our production meeting is at 6:15 a.m.," she says. "I don't mind though, because this isn't one of those numbers-crunching jobs there are so many creative approaches t o problem-solving and I spend a lot of time out on the site and away from the desk." According to her, the reclamation work she does is "as important and complicated as the mining itself."
And how does being a young woman in a mostly male environment play out? "The guys here are easy to work with," she says. She adds that her father had given her a piece of advice when she went into the mining industry. "He told me, Take what you want to, but not any more than you want.' But I've never had any problems," she says.
The only problems Kelemen has right now are getting to know her new community and explaining to certain family members and friends that "Mining is not the evil industry it's often portrayed to be. There is some education you have to do with family and fri ends about all of the good things in mining," she adds.
Where the Action Is
Even someone who works in the somewhat rarified atmosphere of mine finance talks about the friendliness, loyalty and desire to help each other shown by people in the mining industry. Victor Flores, born and raised in Mexico City, now works in Toronto, Can ada, as senior analyst for precious metals at HSBC Securities. He didn't leave his homeland until he attended the University of Texas, majoring in geology.
Flores, now 35, took a long look at the mining industry and "thought I'd be helping mining companies with corporate development work," he says. So he earned a master's degree in mining resource management.
Instead, Flores found himself spending the next 10 years "on the other side" in the fund management business, providing capital for companies interested in growth. At HSBC Securities, Flores stays on top of North American gold producers and provides recom mendations on those companies as investments for his institutional clients. "It's like two sides of the same coin," he says.
It's a time-consuming job, Flores says. "I'm either on the road visiting companies, writing reports, or on the phone with clients," he says. Or online, keeping up with the markets. "Personally, I like to be away," he says. "That's where the action is."
The action he's referring to are the mining companies he visits. "Mining is full of the nicest people," he says. "Even other businesses I've come in contact with say the same thing."
Even though gold is going through a bad cycle right now, "I see tremendous motivation, friendliness, and loyalty at the mines." He adds that mining folks tend to help each other out and have the patience and perspective for a better cycle to come around a gain.
Flores may work for clients who are considering gold as an investment, but he's particularly impressed with the commitment he sees in mining companies. "It really makes me appreciate what the other side does," he says.
According to Stan Dempsey, "Mining is worldwide, but at the same time it's small. You're building something constructive and yet you become seriously involved with the community where you're building." The 60-year-old Dempsey is chairman and CEO of Royal Gold, Inc. in Pennsylvania, and knew at an early age that mining was the ticket for him.
As a young boy, he rode atop what seemed like a mountain of coal as his father and great uncle drove the cart into town to sell coal. "My great uncle was an independent coal miner in Indiana, pulling pillars in abandoned coal mines," he says. "I used to f uss up a storm until they would let me go down in the mines with them and light the fuses to the black powder."
While earning his degree in geology, "I leased my own little mine the shaft was 100 feet deep and I mined gold and tungsten." Dempsey also did timbering assessments in Boulder County, Colo. He then went to work for Climax Molybdenum. "I went from the smallest mine to the largest outside site imaginable," he remembers. The company helped him through law school and he returned to Climax as a resident attorney. "So, half of my career in mining was spent as a lawyer," he adds.
His legal skills were put to the test when he played a major role in getting the Henderson Mine built with the cooperation of environmental activists. "This was before federal regulations on the environment were passed," he says, explaining that Climax wa s fortunate to be a part of that accomplishment.
This led to Amax Worldwide asking Dempsey to handle its environmental affairs worldwide. "I worked in Australia for 15 years," he says.
When Dempsey returned to the States in 1983, "Mining was faltering as an industry, so I joined a Denver law firm doing mining and corporate things." At the same time, he served on the board of a small oil company called Royal Resources. But like mining, o il was also beginning to falter, and Royal asked Dempsey to put together a plan for survival. "I advised them to get out of oil and go into gold," he says.
A large hint that his plan proved successful is the fact that Royal Resources became Royal Gold and Dempsey was offered the CEO slot in 1987.
So, is he now sitting behind a desk? "I'm working on a project in Greece," he says. "I never dreamed of this kind of life as a boy."
Dempsey says the mining industry has a dual nature that provides rewarding challenges. "When you can build aerial tramways in the mountains and shafts that descend 3,000 feet, you can't help but feel kind of special," he adds.