Canadian Mines Upgrade Cap Lamps
Another two mines, Morton Salt’s Mines Seleine Mine and Winsor Salt’s Pugwash Mine, having upgraded their cap lamps and personal PED Receiver units to the latest ICCL version.
Mine Seleine has been using the PED System since 1995 and was one of the first mines in Canada to install BeltPED Receivers on all personnel to use the PED as the primary emergency warning system. Mines Seleine also commenced using the BlastPED System to remotely initiate their blasts underground. This was relatively simple as the PED transmission system in place for personal paging only required a software upgrade to be able to introduce the BlastPED Receiver/Exploders into use. Mines Seleine completed the upgrade earlier this year, justifying the upgrade on ergonomic and economic grounds. The light weight ICCL lamps are one third the weight of the lead-acid batteries formerly in use, plus the sealed housing ensures long term reliability and significantly lower maintenance cost for the internal PED electronics.
For similar reasons Pugwash Mine has just completed it’s change over to the ICCL with PED Receiver. By replacing the older style NiMH cap lamp batteries at Pugwash maintenance costs have been reduced, and personnel now carry a much lighter battery and PED unit. Pugwash also use the PED Transmission for centralized blast initiation, via BlastPED.
With the Integrated Communication Cap Lamps now is use at both mines the option to add RFID Tag electronics into the ICCL’s for implementing a general tracking system is available, if wanted in the future.
MST acknowledge the long term support from these two customers and look forward to supporting their PED, BlastPED and other communication technologies well into the future.