Safety is our

top priority.

Our project is an extraordinary economic opportunity for northeast Minnesota. But growth will always come second to safety. Every day, we do everything we can to protect our workers and the environment.

Employee wellness is everything.

The health and well-being of our employees, and their families, is a cornerstone of our values. We require compliance with health and safety regulations, policies and programs, and ensure every employee and contractor is thoroughly trained to be responsible for not only their own safety, but the safety of their colleagues.

At Twin Metals Minnesota, we adopted the National Mining Association’s CORESafety® Program, which puts safety at the center of our culture. Specifically, the CORESafety framework incorporates a safety and health management system based on leadership, management and assurance.

CORESafety is based on three organizational competencies.

Lead

Clear communications, accountability, personnel development and culture enhancement are all embodied in leadership. Management is ultimately responsible for the safety system.

Manage

Risk identification, change management, incident reporting and investigation, training, and emergency management ensure that hazards and risks are minimized to the greatest extent possible.

Assure

Assessments, whether internal or provided by third-party verification, tell us whether the system is working and how we can make improvements. 1

In addition, the underground mine will be accessed by trucks driving down a 1.25 mile long tunnel. No lowering of miners via a shaft. Plus, the underground mining area will be well-lit and ventilated for the miners’ safety. 

We’re building a sustainable mine.

Minnesota has some of the highest environmental standards in the world that our project must meet in order to proceed — for air quality, water use, waste management, noise and more. Our goal is to not only meet all environmental safety regulations, but to exceed them when possible. To do this, we’ll: 

  • Minimize the surface footprint of mining activity by using underground mining operations
  • Limit visibility of surface operations by incorporating Dark Sky Initiative guidelines
  • Store half of tailings material as permanent cemented backfill in the underground mine
  • Utilize the environmentally friendly dry stack method to manage the remaining tailings
  • Use existing roads where possible
  • Limit traffic by busing mine employees from the Ely and Babbitt locations
See how we’ll mine responsibly

Safety from the ground up
as well as far beneath it.

We value safety as our number one priority — for the environment as well as for the mine workers.

Protection for the environment:

  • Not every place is Minnesota — we have some of the highest environmental standards in the world that our project must meet. For air quality, water use, waste management, noise and more.
  • Other mines often use ponds to store the leftover rock known as tailings. Not us. We will use the environmentally friendly dry stack method. This means no ponds or dams, so there’s no risk of leakage or dam failure. Half the tailings will also be backfilled into the underground mine for added stability.
  • Our dry stack facility will be concurrently reclaimed with native soil and vegetation planted on top — designed to reflect the surrounding topography.

Protection for workers:

  • Different than an open pit mine, our underground mine will be accessed by trucks driving down a 1.25 mile long tunnel. No lowering of miners via a shaft.
  • The underground mining area will be well-lit and ventilated for the miners’ safety.
  • We do more than follow safety guidelines. We operate under the National Mining Association’s CORESafety® Program, a systematic approach to developing a safety culture.

1 Source : CORESafety