Some people leave school with a clear plan to work in mining. Others find their way into the industry almost by accident. Richard Campbell was one of them. Now Director and Principal Rock Mechanics Engineer at Blackrock Mining, he has spent years working in mines In Australia and across the ditch.
Richard was living in Christchurch when he finished school and decided to go into demolition work. After doing that for a little while, he thought perhaps he’d better go to university and get a degree under his belt.
“I was enrolled to become a mechanical engineer and I was at the enrolment day at the university and I had some time to kill before catching up with some mates, I was walking past the geology department and went in, sat and listened to what they had to say and thought ‘that sounds so much better than mechanical engineering!’
“So I walked out the door, unenrolled in mechanical engineering, signed up to geology and never looked back!”
Essentially, a geologist’s role is to look at all the rocks and work out what you can do with them. Whether it’s making tunnels, building foundations or digging holes and then working out how to do it to ensure its stable and suitable for what is needed.
“I figure out how strong or how weak the rocks are and how they might behave and design something from there,” Richard explained.
Richard’s first mining job was at Huntly Mine in the North Island of New Zealand working underground. He was responsible for tunnel, roof bolting, and all the usual Geotech duties at the mine.
Richard had always wanted to go underground so it worked out in his favour and he vividly remembers his first time going deep into the earth in the challenging New Zealand conditions.
“After doing the induction and all that stuff at the mine site I walked in the next day and they gave me a hard hat, rescuer, all the safety gear, and just pointed me at the drift and said ‘here’s a map, go down there and you’ll figure out where you’re going’.
“Away I went! It was good, I got to look around the mine by myself wandering around with no problems at all. I found the place I was looking for and started putting roof bolts in, actually it was easy.
“It certainly wouldn’t happen like that today! Not even close these days, it was a different time 25 years ago!
“The underground mines in New Zealand are some of the most challenging conditions you’ll ever see for coal mining. In the Huntly coal basin, the coal was the strongest rock in the whole sequence all the way to the surface. If you go out of the seam you’re in some pretty bad ground. There are lots of faults, lots of earthquakes and roof falls as a result.
“It just became the norm. It was scary at the start but we dealt with it every day. I must admit we did run for our lives a couple of times, but that happens!”
The North Island mines are mainly in the Waikato and Taranaki regions and the West Coast, Otago and Southland regions of the South Island. The latest NZ Government data said National in-ground resources of all coals are over 16 billion tonnes, but 80 per cent of this is lignite, or brown coal, in the South Island.
“It’s all bord and pillar mining on the North Island. Extracting the coal seam there was 14 to 28 metres thick. We used to extract most of it with continuous miners which was challenging when you’re at that thickness. In the South Island we used massive water blasters on that thick coal seam.
“That water blaster was strong enough to cut steel, it was something you just wouldn’t believe unless you saw it.”
Richard worked at that site for two years looking after two underground mines and an open cut and then came across the ditch to Australia working for a consultancy company.
He was working in Australia when the Pike River Mine disaster unfolded in November 2010.
“It was the nail in the coffin for underground coal mining in New Zealand at the time. Most of the coal mines were owned by the government and the Pike River one wasn’t, it was privately owned.
“The Pike River mine was on one side of a hill and I worked in a mine called Spring Creek on the other side. We knew a lot of the guys who worked there, some had come from Spring Creek. Their kids went to school with my kids, all that sort of stuff so it was disastrous when it happened and we realised who was there.
“It was heartbreaking, it should have never happened,” Richard reflected.
Not long after, Richard was sitting with some mates around a table in Bunbury, Western Australia, having a few beers and they were tossing around the idea of doing something a bit different.
“So we came up with the name Blackrock, registered it then and there on the laptop, made some phone calls and we were off and running.
“We were probably a little naive at the time, to be honest. We quit our jobs, jumped on a plane and went for it. Luckily, it worked out well. Looking back, it was a big risk, but it was also an opportunity, and we jumped on it.”
For Richard, the first job they did as Blackrock is the most memorable. It was called the Secret Drift at Carborough Downs Mine.
“It was called the Secret Drift because the owners of the mine, which was a Brazilian company at the time, hadn’t approved the budget for this drift. It was a few million dollars worth of gear that was put it, and it’s forever been called that.
“I worked at Carborough Downs when it was nothing but a cow paddock so to see it go from a paddock to an operating bord and pillar mine, the whole life cycle – it’s pretty cool, I’m proud of that.”
