FROM SUPPLY PACKER TO PRESIDENT

Colin Benner has been immersed in mining all his life. In fact, he was recruited by his prospector father at such an early age that skin tissue assays might yield fairly strong mineralization. Well — not really. But consider this, in 1953 while his uncle Ralph Benner pinpointed the collar north of Elliot Lake for the drill hole that instantly made the penny play called Denison Mines, a superstock, nine-year-old Colin and his father staked claims a few miles away on Canmet ground. “I was a packer for my father,” Benner, now a Curragh president, recalls, adding that everything from cutting line to frying fish for supper fell into the job description.

Earlier, his family pioneered as one of the first four to move into Balmertown for the Red Lake rush in northwestern Ontario. “We lived in tents for the first winter,” Benner, now 47, recalls. His father, beginning his career in the Cobalt silver fields, eventually became chief engineer at the Dickinson mine and worked for Arthur White until his retirement.

Benner himself first descended in the cage at Dickenson as a laborer right after he finished secondary school. That was in 1963. Seven years later, he emerged with a white hardhat (a sure sign of supervisory staff back then) and the title mine engineer. He then studied the theoretical aspects of mining at the Haileybury School of Mines. He moved there with his wife, Irma, and their two children and a dog in tow. Part-time jobs, as many as four at a time, sustained the family. He was later to become a P.Eng.

Benner’s career took a quantum leap in 1974 when he signed on with Denison as a project engineer at Elliot Lake, Ont. This was at about the time that Denison was rising from the uranium market slump.

“It was a tremendous opportunity,” Benner said. The underground operation went from a relatively sedate 5,300 tonnes per day to 21,000 by 1980, a fourfold increase. To an energetic, go-get-’em engineer, expansion on this scale is utopia, heaven, the sun and the moon and the stars. Among many projects, Benner either participated in or directed and supervised the engineering and completion of a 4,500-ft-long ramp to underground, four vent raises (a couple of them breaking through on tiny islands), three shaft rehabs, and the installation of the underground bio-leaching section. One of the biggest challenges was training the green recruits that were to operate all the new machinery (the underground complement tripled during expansion to 310 pieces from 100). “We had to turn young, inexperienced people into heavy-equipment operators working half-million-dollar equipment and we had to do it fast.”

For Benner, projects came one after another in rapid succession. “They (Denison’s top technical brass) threw challenges at you,” Benner remembers. By 1985, with the uranium expansion completed, Benner was appointed to the top spot as general manager of the Elliot Lake works. At the time, Denison itself was a top Canadian enterprise, grossing in the neighborhood of $2 billion dollars.

Benner was dispatched to the Denison-Potacan potash mine in New Brunswick. There, he took over the responsibility of ushering in production. His biggest contributions were to introduce hydraulic backfilling and drill-and-blast methods into a sector of the mining industry that traditionally relied on roadheaders and no backfill. To mine the Potacan deposit, the flexibility of drill-and-blast was needed in certain sections of the mine.

“We went to drill-and-blast because it was a complex orebody…. With cutters (full-face roadheaders), you are productive, but the movements are restricted,” Benner said. Fully 50% of production materialized from drill-and-blast. “The gains came in dilution and ground control.”

His successes at the New Brunswick potash mine and earlier at the uranium operations, which were the result “of the very fine people I worked with at both places,” were rewarded with a promotion to the vice-presidency, uranium, at Denison. A year later he was promoted to the post of executive vice-president, mining. In those heady days, five vice-presidents were reporting to the 43-year-old.

But with the decline of Denison, the potential for a brighter future and bigger challenges faded. So Benner, after a brief stay with Princeton Mining, joined Curragh and Clifford Frame, with whom he had worked earlier at Denison.

At Curragh’s Faro operations, one of the challenges is that each new deposit is farther removed from the concentrator. Where Vangorda is 14 km away, Dy is 18 km and the Swim is beyond that as well. “The logistics of ore delivery to the concentrator becomes increasingly more challenging,” Benner said.

At the time of our interview in mid-March, Benner had a full plate, planning the Dy underground project, overseeing the Faro open pit shutdown and conversion to a tailings pond, introducing a distributed control system in the mill and also converting it to accept Grum ore, and, trying to be as patient as possible, awaiting financing for the Grum development

His biggest concern was getting the development of the Grum orebody moving. With a slumping lead/zinc market, Curragh has had difficulty raising money to strip the overburden and waste. Without Grum, production at Faro would decline significantly. “Fortunately, we always build in a time cushion in our planning so that delays can be absorbed. With Grum, we are starting to cut it pretty fine,” Benner said. (At presstime, Curragh had been promised a $5-million loan.) Stripping Grum will cost about $40 million.

For the Dy underground project, a shaft has been sited and much of the planning done. At roughly $35 million, development will include the sinking of a shaft to 2,300-2,400 ft., lateral excavations and definition drilling. An exploration drift is on the drawing board now.

Introducing distributed control systems (DCS) in the Faro concentrator has been delayed because of slumping zinc prices and its effect on cash flows. However, Curragh is proceeding with $1.5 million in mill alterations to process Grum ore.

As President, Operations and a Director of Curragh, Benner’s responsibilities also include the Westray coal mine and Sa Dena Hes. At Sa Dena Hes, miners are now working the underground of the deposit known as Jewelbox Hill. Jewelbox reserves are still adequate for several more years, but the question soon will be which of the many deposits in the Sa Dena Hes area will next be mined.

Benner said the Burnick will likely be tackled next as an open pit, with a later underground development to extract as much mineralization as possible. This year, a $2-million surface exploration program is planned.