Skip to content
Join our Newsletter

New Gold celebrates safety milestone

The gold mine exploration company New Gold has some glitter on their health and safety record. Their Blackwater project south of Vanderhoof and west of Prince George has passed a milestone that has the rest of the heavy-industry sector talking.
new-gold-safety-celebration.jpg
NewGold's exploration clearcut sits above the company's village and field analysis centre below. Citizen photo by Frank Peebles June 22 2012

The gold mine exploration company New Gold has some glitter on their health and safety record. Their Blackwater project south of Vanderhoof and west of Prince George has passed a milestone that has the rest of the heavy-industry sector talking.

In addition to accolades already gathered in, in the past year or so - named one of Canada "Top Socially Responsible Corporations" by Sustainalytics-Maclean's and then winning the June Warren Nickel's Energy Group Award for top safety culture - the Blackwater project passed a milestone worthy of a party.

"On October 6, New Gold will be celebrating its achievement of three years of no lost time incidents and two years without a single reportable incident at the Blackwater Project," said Tim Bekhuys, the project director for Blackwater. "This is a significant milestone for any exploration project. Over the last three years, 500,000 work-hours have been performed at the Blackwater site, which is only accessible by roads frequently used by logging trucks or by air, and experiences temperatures as low as minus-47 degrees and as high as plus-40 degrees."

Hundreds of people work at the site they are hoping to turn into a fully operational gold mine sometime in the next three years. A lot of that work requires operating power tools, hand tool, heavy equipment, and in all kinds of environments. Also, the exploration site is a combination of company employees and those on the payroll of contracted companies. All of them count against the Blackwater project's safety data, but all records were clean.

"Mining is one of the safest of the heavy industries to work in," said Bekhuys. "I think New Gold and mining in general takes safety as job number one. Part of that is to imbed a culture througout our organization and with the contractors we work with, and that has to come from the top down, from the president down."

Bekhuys said one of the most important parts of having a clean safety record is being above reproach with their employees. The company adheres to a "whistle-blowers are welcome" policy, meaning if an employee or a contractor spots a hazard, they are backed up by management to bring it to the attention of their supervisors instead of imperiling others and potentially costing the company untold amounts of money and resources to deal with a preventable incident.

"We've certainly had minor cuts and bruises, but nothing that has required someone to take time off work," Bekhuys. "Lost-time incidents is a main measurement in our industry, and in the 500,000 hours of work on-site in the past three years, we haven't had one lost-time incident."

The exploration site was also home base to a contingent of forest firefighters, including helicopters, during the fighting of the Cheslatta fire, furthering the company's reputation for putting safety first.

To celebrate this life-and-death statistic, and to say thank you to the community employees (70 per cent of the employees at Blackwater come from the immediate region, and 20 per cent are First Nations employees) who worked safely at Blackwater for that three-year period, New Gold is throwing a party.

From noon to 3 p.m. on Tuesday, a barbecue will be underway at the Nechako Seniors Friendship Centre (219 Victoria Street East) in Vanderhoof. The public will get an update as to the progress of the Blackwater project (exploration continues in the larger area around the main mine site, with the main site midway through the environmental assessment process, aiming at 2018 for the start of construction) and to make a donation.

As an extra way of celebrating the safety record so far, New Gold will make a donation to the Vanderhoof area's search-and-rescue team so community safety can be part of the legacy of their mine safety.