Drillers

Finding a mine is a lengthy and difficult process. It takes years of hard work and lots of shareholders’ money to turn a mineral discovery into a an economic catastrophe profitable mine, and the contribution geologists make to this process is crucial. Without our polymath-like genius there would be no mines, and the engineers we sadly rely on to blow shit up and move it around in trucks (seriously, how hard can that be?) would still be stacking shelves at the local corner store.

A vital step on the long road to production happens when a geologist spuds the first drill hole into a discovery to see if there’s anything there worth mining. This brings them into contact with a rather unique group of “professionals”, the diamond drillers; primitive beasts who thrive on diesel, violence and booze. The stereotypes come thick and fast with drillers. They like to fight and will brain geologists with a wrench if they get half a chance. They’re uncouth potty-mouthed drunks. They’re not very smart. They crash trucks.

And as with all stereotypes, you don’t have to scratch too far below the surface to find a hint of truth staring back at you. As one article puts it:

” …geologists view drillers as most people view their home dishwasher: useful when working, messy when broken, but don’t try to get a meaningful conversation out of them.”

My First Time

As a 21-year-old geologist on Vaal Reefs gold mine in South Africa my first dealings with drillers were quite favourable -hardly surprising as I was a total moron at that age (I’m still a moron just not quite as innocent.) I was the senior geologist on Vaal Reef’s 2 shaft and for our routine production drilling we used Anglo American’s then-subsidiary, Boart Drilling, for all our core drilling on the 10 active mining shafts. At one point we had 7 drill machines turning on 2 shaft and it was a hugely stressful business scheduling where each machine would go next after it completed a hole. The stress got worse when one of our drillers was killed in a nasty accident servicing equipment on a hole that I’d planned.

They’re Not So Smart

Eggs On Steroids

Boart’s supervisor for 2 Shaft was a chap we called “Oom” Piet -Uncle Pete. He was a barrel chested, hunched older man with a buzz cut who swore constantly in Afrikaans: my foreign swear-word vocabulary improved massively working with him. Piet was the one who handled the underground drill crews. I rarely met them.

The first time I personally ran across any of the guys who actually slung the rods, pulled the levers and messed up my core was in the summer of 1988 when I came to Canada for post-grad work. That first summer, I was based on an exploration camp near Faro in Yukon Territory where I planned to study an epithermal gold system called Grew Creek. It was being explored by Noranda if memory serves.

Two drills were working when I got there, testing a sequence of volcanic rocks – a complex package of tuffs, flows and sediments- for gold-bearing veins. One of the drillers was a muscle-bound ginger gorilla of a man from Calgary who drank 6 raw eggs mixed with milk and tobasco every morning for breakfast and spent the rest of each day regretting his food choices. He told me he was planning to head back to Calgary that Fall to blow his cash on a course of steroids to bulk up even more over the winter because “chicks in bars dig muscles, man, know what I’m saying?” Well… no. In my mid-20s I had twiggy arms and legs; muscles are largely absent in the Rushton male lineage, so I didn’t get it, but I nodded and muttered “yeah man” unsure whether to be jealous or horrified.

A Call To Prayer*

A couple of years later I found myself working for Rio Tinto in northern Türkiye (the country formerly known as Turkey) on the Black Sea Coast, spending weeks at a time exploring the glorious Pontide mountains for porphyries and VMS-style mineralization.

A few years before my time there, a western company had brought in a bunch of Australian drillers to test an epithermal gold system near the town of Gumushane. Every village up there has a white domed mosque with tall, pointy minarets equipped with speakers to broadcast the call to prayer; an evocative sound known as “Ezan” in Turkish.

Devout Muslims pray 5 times in a 24-hour period. The specific times vary slightly with the seasons, as the days shorten and lengthen through the year, but the time known as Fajr happens just before dawn, a peaceful time for an act of devotion to the prophet. Some mosques use pre-recorded prayer calls for Ezan, particularly in the middle of the night, so instead of the sound of someone blowing into a microphone ahead of the call, you’ll hear a moment of hissing as a tape machine switches on before Allahu Ackba booms out over the speaker. It takes some of the mystery out of the it but it’s a practical solution for a sleepy imam.

The Australian drillers, culturally sensitive types, Godblessemandkeepem, weren’t impressed by the night-time prayer calls disturbing their downtime and decided that they had to act. In a covert operation, one of them managed to find the tape recorder in the mosque and flipped in his own AC/DC casette which duly kicked in at the sunrise call to prayer. Funny enough, the drillers had to leave town rather hastily and the mining company had some work to do to rebuild relationships with the local population.

(*I’ve heard this story a couple of times over the years but never directly from anyone who was there. This is a hazy recollection of the tale, so any factual errors are mine and mine alone.)

Waffle Stomper

My friend Rory has had much more experience than me dealing with eccentric drillers, lucky him. During one campaign, he discovered -God knows how, I’m loath to ask- that one of the drillers was morbidly afraid of using the camp outhouse. He was so terrified of using the camp dunny that he took his routine morning dump in the shower and would then stomp his logs down the drain. They reckoned he’d been doing it for at least 3 weeks before he was rumbled. He was christened the Waffle Stomper by the crew before he was removed from camp for some obvious basic hygiene failings.

Don’t Drink The Water.

The Nadaleen project in Yukon Territory was -for a while- a very high-profile and very profitable exploration play. ATAC Resources had discovered a belt of Carlin-type gold deposits akin to some of the Nevadan gold systems -a testament to some solid geological thinking- and their shares soared to over C$10 on a steady stream of stellar drill results.

Your average economic geologist (i.e. me) will tell you that the gold in Carlin-type deposits is usually associated with high levels of various nasty metals like arsenic and thallium (I sampled one once that returned 2 Oz/T gold but also 40% Arsenic.) I’ve touched on arsenic toxicity in a previous piece on sulphide minerals; it’s not a pleasant way to die. So, sensibly, ATAC’s management held regular safety meetings and the entire team were told specifically NOT to drink the ground water near the drills because it was draining off a zone of high arsenic enichment. Most of the team took the safety warnings seriously, but as the summer progressed one driller and his helper started to become very ill. They were vomiting, passing blood from places you’re not meant to pass blood, and tried to blame the camp food, pointing their sickly white fingers at the cooks. But with nobody else showing any symptoms despite eating the same chow, it didn’t make sense. Finally, somebody asked the right question:

You aren’t drinking the water at the rig, are you?

Well yeah, we’re using it for our coffee but we’re making sure to boil it first…

Oh, for fuck’s sake.

The drillers were evacuated immediately to hospital in Whitehorse where they were treated for chronic arsenic poisoning.

They’re Violent Bastards

Kill.

And last but not least, I can’t leave the subject of drillers without tackling the thorny issue of their supposed propensity toward casual violence; the stereotype of drillers enjoying a quick punch up after a pint or two. The closest I’ve come to it was dealing with a very frustrated driller from New Zealand who’d spent 2 stagnant months in a dull hotel in Tehran waiting for Iranian customs to clear their rigs and tools for import. About 4-5 weeks into our residency in the hotel I noticed he was coming to breakfast every day with new band aids on his knuckles, covering up the cuts he got from punching holes in his bathroom wall as his frustration boiled over every night.

Another friend experienced it first-hand in Australia many years back while drilling a diatreme complex for gold. One of the drillers, named Red, was 6ft 5 tall and didn’t like geologists. He disliked them so much that he was training his Rottweiler dog to go after the closest person whenever he said “Geologist”. Luckily the dog was quite social and preferred a nice head rub to a bloody, flesh-tearing frenzy. Brent notes nostalgically that this program was in the days before projects were buried under mounds of safety and HR regulations or cell phones. The crew worked, drank beer at night and called up the boss in Sydney from a phone box once a week during the supply run to the local town. Those were the days…

Anyways

And with that… this post is me testing the blog waters for the first time in ages. It’s going to take me a while to get back up to speed and find some good stuff to write about, but I’m determined to publish more regularly and stop being such a lazy gobshite. It’s been soooo long since I wrote anything that my Mail Chimp account expired without me noticing and I’ve lost my subscribers’ list. It was 350 subscribers, including my late departed mother who signed up twice, so I guess it was 348. Ho hum.