Ice safety is paramount: ice programs require planning and thinking ahead.

• Author: Larmour, Adelle
• Position: MINING

There is no room for complacency when it comes to working on ice.

"Ice is dangerous," said Allan MacTavish, exploration manager, Magma Metals.

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"You always have to be thinking ahead."

During his 30-year mining career, MacTavish has been involved in about a dozen ice programs, including four with Magma Metals, a precious and base-metals junior miner located an hour north of Thunder Bay

Despite the dangers of working on ice, there is no formal training "out there" other than what companies have created from their own safety guidelines, and what is provided in the common core training for diamond drillers. The latter are a provincially approved series of modules offered at Kirkland Lake's Northern College campus by the Apprenticeship, Workforce Development and Training Division of the Ministry of Training, Colleges and Universities.

MacTavish follows Ministry of Labour (MOL) protocols for working on ice and the environment. As well, he plans his ice drilling program months in advance, and submits them to the MOL. Government inspectors also visit the site monthly.

"The problem is that ice plans in mineral exploration tend to change, so you try to account for that," he said, explaining that last winter's warmer temperatures delayed the company's drilling program by three weeks. "Environmentally, we follow to the letter and better. When you're drilling on ice, you have to be very careful."

In addition to going through the regulations with employees, Magma Metals hires formally trained drilling contractors, and as an added precaution, it contracts its ice preparation out to Fladgate Exploration Consulting Corp., a Thunder Bay junior with ice-building expertise.

Although there have been no ice-related deaths in the mining sector within the last 10 years, according to the Ministry of Labour (MOL), the health care, construction and industrial sectors have not been as fortunate.

There were 10 ice-related fatalities between 2000 and 2010 in those sectors: five in construction, four in industrial and one in health care.

Last year, gold exploration firm Conquest Resources was fined $130,000 for violations under the Occupational Health and Safety Act leading to the 2007 death of an independent contractor during the construction of an ice road.

However, the MOL classified this fatality as construction-related.

The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat provides a document for fresh water called Safety Guide for Operations Over Ice upon...