Monday, April 29 saw the last load of coal removed from the Wolverine Mine.
While there are still people on-site, bringing the mine to a close, Conuma’s efforts have now turned towards Quintette, where they are working on restarting the mine.
While they were hoping to have everything up and running by now, Conuma CEO Brian Sullivan says they’re still waiting for their permits. “What we have done is we’ve applied for two things,” says Sullivan. “One is a permit for the overall restart of the entire Quintette mine. That will take a bit longer, probably into Q4 of this year, but what we’ve applied for is an interim permit for a limited restart of the Little Windy Pit, essentially where Teck had gone and done their bulk sample back in 2014. That area was permitted and so we’ve applied for a limited restart of just that area. We’re expecting that to be granted imminently so that people can continue working.”
How imminent is imminent? “We’re hoping to get that this month,” says Sullivan. “What we’ve been doing out there for the last six, seven months is constructing a lot of the infrastructure. So that’s the work in the preparation plant, the overland conveyor, and a lot of rail-related facilities. We’ve also had work done on the water management system. There’s probably been eight major scopes of work that have been underway for the better part of six, seven months now. Our plant should be up and ready to run on June 1. The rail loadout may be a few weeks beyond that. The conveyor should be ready by the end of the summer.”
At the same time, he says, Wolverine has hit the end of its life. “We knew two and a half years ago that we were going to hit this point where we were going to have no more coal recoverable at the Perry Creek pit. As we got down to the bottom of that reserve, we needed less equipment, less people. So we started transferring those people in groups of usually 20. And we’ve been doing that for the better part of four or five months. And so those people that have been coming over from Wolverine have been operating equipment that we brought over from Wolverine or new equipment. And they’ve been doing construction work over there, mainly getting the water management and the coal handling facilities ready. And it’s using the same equipment that we use for mining. So most of those people are already trained on shovels and trucks and dozers and support equipment. So that’s what we’re doing.
Ideally, he says, they would have finished mining at Wolverine at the end of April and had all the people go over to Quintette. “We didn’t quite hit that landing,” he admits.
And that, he says, is the reason that a group of people were let go. “We don’t have room for everybody right now at Quintette,” he says. “In fact, we’re probably overstaffed at Quintette while we’re waiting on the limited restart.”
Because of that, says Chief Operating Officer Brian Marshall, 22 people have been terminated by the company in the last few weeks.
Stu Bell is one of those. The former Conuma welder says he’s not sure why he was terminated. “The whole thing came as quite a surprise,” says Bell. “Since last summer at least we’ve been told that there was room for everyone at Quintette. Six days before my layoff, our Superintendent attended our safety meeting and informed us that there was work for everyone over at Quintette. Upon confronting him on this he corrected and claimed that yes there was enough work for everyone over there, but not the positions.
Bell says the welding department at Wolverine had 16 welding positions in maintenance when fully staffed. “Quintette is moving to 12 positions, in spite of having more equipment on the mine site. When I inquired about that, I was told that the department was downsized to meet contracts with Industrial Metal Works.”
This, says Marshall, is not the case. “The problem we have is basically we have too many welders and we didn’t need them all. And with Wolverine winding down now and Brule winding down by the end of the year, we displaced those people. We told them all if they want a job in the future, they’re welcome to reapply.”
And, says Sullivan, the equipment at Quintette is newer. “We have almost brand new infrastructure over at Quintette, so a lot of the welding work that you expect to be done is not going to need to be done at Quintette for the first several years. We’re going to be operating a brand new plant, a brand new spread of equipment so the amount of welding work that we had to keep older equipment is declining. Even the trucks we brought over, we have put lighter kits on them, and they’re as good as new trucks. We just don’t have the work.”
Bell says he’s also heard that it’s because of Workers’ Compensation Board (WCB) claims. “I personally know eight people that got laid off, and five of them have had WCB claims,” he says.
One of those is Keith Hahn. Hahn is from Tomslake, and worked for the company for four years. 14 months ago, he says, he hurt his knee. He says he went back to work after nine months off, but back in February, he told them his knee was too sore working on the concrete. “They put me on modified duties until basically I got a layoff. But it’s okay. Whatever the company’s going to do is what they’re going to do, right? I mean I’m not mad at them for laying me off. I just wish they were more transparent. They there weren’t going to be any layoffs, but yet then they go and lay off a bunch of people.”
He says he’s heard that the issue is that it might be difficult to transfer a WCB claim from one mine to the other.
“That’s not an issue,” says Marshall. I’m not sure how many people have WCB claims because I haven’t looked at it. I’ll admit that if you’ve had past issues with safety, and we think you’ll be a safety risk, that will be considered. We got down to…I think it was 22 people… that we didn’t have places for right now. That’s not to say that we won’t have a place for them in the future. They’re welcome to reapply. The reason why we went with a termination is that we don’t know when we’re going to get the permits. We don’t know when that shovel is going to go into the dirt yet.”
Marshall says that moving forward, the company is starting a program to see if they can bring back people who might have even been previously let go with cause.
So why would the current group of people have been let go? While he can’t discuss any individual case, one reason people might have got laid off is lack of technical skills, or skills not lining up with any of the jobs available. “There’s some people that all they want to do is come in and drive a truck, but I would say a majority of our employees come in they want us to show them a path of advancement for training. They want to get from a truck to an operator. They want to end up on a shovel as a shifter or a supervisor. We’ve spent a lot of time training so that we have a resilient workforce. If we do have somebody who misses a shift, then we can have someone else jump off the dozer and jump on the shovel because they’re trained on it. That makes all the difference in the world for a resilient workforce if we’ve got people that are cross-trained. But if you’re one of those people who for one reason or another said ‘I don’t want that training or I’m not good at it’, that very well could have been a reason they got downsized.”
Another possible reason, says Sullivan is that, coming out of Covid, the company had a huge attendance problem. “We would have a 40-person crew and there were days where we would be missing 12 to 15 people who were not showing up on the first day of the set or they were leaving saying they were sick and going home on the last day of the set and that put a tremendous strain on the business. It was a relatively small proportion of our overall workforce, but we saw this becoming a trend and it made the morale suffer because the people who were coming in every day doing their shifts were seeing some of their co-workers had attendance problems…It’s a potential safety issue making people cover overtime shifts.”
Because of these attendance issues, the company instituted a program.
But, says Bell, he doesn’t fit any of these categories. “Going off my personal case: I am certified, I am local, and I had one of the best attendance records in my department. I was the longest active welder employed by the company. June would’ve been my seventh anniversary there. Some of the welders they kept over me are not certified nor do they live in town, and some are on Conuma’s ‘attendance program’. I think that reflects poorly on the company. Giving up local certified guys for guys who are the opposite.”
But with Wolverine now finished extracting coal and Brule destined to be finished by the end of the year, the company is trying to juggle their employees.
Over at Brule, for instance, they are currently moving employees to Quintette or Willow Creek, and filling in those positions with contractors. “We will get to a point where we’ll probably have a 60% contract workforce. When we get down to the end of the mine, we’re trying to find places for everybody.”
And, while there’s no coal coming out of Quintette, the company still has lots of work to finish before the mine is ready to run at full capacity. One of the big jobs they’re working on is moving rocks to create an underdrain to help mitigate selenium run-off. Marshall says that should be done by July, and they should have their mining permit by then. In the meantime, rail loadout should be ready to go by June. A new transfer station to move coal into the clean coal silo is under construction, but should be ready to go by July, if they can get the steel to build it.
A new Komatsu shovel is expected to arrive in June, and both Brians hope that the permits will be in place and the shovel can start working as soon as it arrives. “That shovel will join the one we moved from Wolverine. We intended it to start mining coal and paying bills. And we have a third one coming in August. So each of those three shovels can do probably close to a million and a half tons clean each. Two of them will be in production and a third one will be developing out ahead of it into the Big Windy pit and ultimately the Window Pit.”
A much smaller crew than was there for the first load poses in front of the last load of coal to be mined at Wolverine.
Above Photo supplied
Trent is the publisher of Tumbler RidgeLines.