BGC Engineering's employees and scientists provide design services and identify and assess natural hazards for mining projects.

The engineers and scientists who make up BGC Engineering are detectives - not the sort who wear trench coats and walk through crime scenes, but geological detectives, who use their expertise in a number of scientific fields to design infrastructure, manage mine wastes and assess risks for resource companies.

The company's employees are geotechnical, geological, civil, hydro-technical, environmental and mining engineers, geoscientists and geomorphologists, says President and co-founder Iain Bruce. "Our strength is engineering geology, and we are recognized in the industry [for] bringing that forward in all of our engineering studies," he says.

BGC specializes in serving the resource sector, and currently two-thirds of the work it does is for mining clients, in open-pit slope design, and waste management. The remainder of the company's workload involves pipeline and transportation projects.

"We have specialists in natural hazards,who determine how these natural hazards could interact with mining projects, particularly when it involves access roads, plant sites and tailings dams. " Bruce explains.

"Our first big job [in 1990] was route selection and foundation design for the Hides-Porgera powerline, which provided electricity to the Porgera gold mine in Papua New Guinea," Bruce adds. "This year, our firm is providing feasibility level geotechnical design services for Pueblo Viejo Mine in the Dominican Republic; Galore Creek Mine in British Columbia; Donlin Creek Mine in Alaska; and Agua Rica Mine in Argentina, and we just completed the Onca-Puma mine in Brazil." These services include design of tailings containment facilities, waste dumps, infrastructure and plant site foundations and open-pit slope."

BGC has a geo-environmental group that specializes in groundwater and seepage assessment, water supply and pit slope dewatering, Bruce notes. "A lot of what we do falls outside the scope of mining," he adds. "We do a lot of emergency response for rockfalls and landslides for the Canadian National Railways," as well as the city of North Vancouver.

For instance, he says, "we monitor rainfall in real time to assess the likelihood of slope movements, and in the worst case make sure people are moved away from areas of concern." BGC also engages in more proactive measures, such as slope stabilization by designing and supervising the installation of dewatering drains and diversion ditches or debris-flow catch basins.

"We are doing more and more of that type of work for the mining industry," he says, "in particular for the access roads." Bruce adds that in some of the mountainous areas of British Columbia, BGC does avalanche forecasting and assesses avalanche damage. It also forecasts when and where debris slides will occur, as well as predicts major precipitation events "so tailings ponds will be capable of routing or handling the excess precipitation."

‘Understanding the Geology'
BGC engineers use their training and expertise to understand the geology of a site, Bruce says. "We try to develop a geologic model for the facilities we're looking at to explain why soils and rocks are where they are - for example, where you expect faults to be, how you expect them to be oriented" and how they will affect operations of BGC's clients.

BGC looks at recent history through surficial geologic deposits, and by "understanding where those are and how they developed," Bruce says, "it allows us to better understand the geotechnical design requirements for a project. It's really developing the big picture, if you will.

"Once a mine goes into operation," Bruce adds, "many mine owners have their own geotechnical staff on-hand and our role tends toward reviews and safety inspections." But early on, he explains, "a lot of the work is done by consultants [such as BGC] working with the owners," assisting with their feasibility studies, through to final design, and eventually into construction.

BGC Engineering was founded by Bruce and Wayne Savigny in 1991 as Bruce Geotechnical Consultants. Although the two still own part of the company, the company ownership is changing, Bruce notes, as employees buy in. BGC has a subsidiary company, BGC Avot, in South America. The company has offices in Vancouver and Kamloops, British Columbia; Calgary and Edmonton, Alberta; Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, and has offices in South America in Santiago and Punta Arenas, Chile; and Mendoza, Argentina. The company intends to open an office in Nova Scotia in 2006.

‘Common-Sense Engineering'
"We like to think of [what BGC does] as broad-based, geotechnical common-sense engineering," Bruce says. "A lot of what we try to do is make sure things can be built. It's all very well to provide detailed fancy designs, but the designs have to work in the field under adverse conditions.

"Operating tailings dams," he notes, "can be quite complex and you want to make sure you don't over-complicate the issues."

The company's approach is gaining favor in the industry, Bruce says. "There's a lot of impetus now in the industry to improve our methods of waste management," he says. "The Mining Association of Canada has prepared guidelines in how to design and operate tailings ponds, and how to monitor what's going on at these tailings ponds, so we insure they're being run as practically and safely and with as much common sense as possible."

Constant Growth
Bruce sees more work for BGC in all the markets the company now serves, as well as expanding demands for its services in South America. However, he adds, "we've had to control growth in the recent past, because we don't have sufficient resources to complete projects while maintaining our quality. It's all too easy to jump on the bandwagon and expand because everyone's crying for help."

Outside of its mining side, it's doing more and more with early warning and risk management and risk assessments, Bruce says. In the past, BGC's business has been divided evenly between mining, natural resources and transportation. Although the mix is now two-thirds mining and the remainder split between natural resources and transportation, Bruce sees a more equal division of the work in the future, as expansion into other industries allows the company to diversify its client base, in the eventuality that mining work decreases.  E+P