Newmont Team Wins National Mine Rescue Competition

ELKO, NV - Newmont Mining Corporations (NMC) Carlin Mine Rescue Team (MRT) has become the first team from Nevada to win the top award at the National Mine Rescue Competition. The Carlin MRT, along with Newmont’s Midas MRT, competed against 29 other teams from across the U.S. to take the top spot at this year’s event, held in Reno, Nevada, in early August.

We congratulate our Carlin and Midas mine rescue teams on their successes at this and other competitions this year, said Tom Kerr, senior vice president, Newmont North America. We also thank our mining industry partners, including the Nevada Mining Association (NvMA), the Mine Safety and Health Administration (MSHA) and other mining companies, who provide the resources namely, talented, experienced people making it possible to continue holding this important event.

The first two days of competition consisted of qualifying rounds in various skills exercises. Teams completed mock first-aid scenarios featuring live volunteers posing as injured patients. Individual team members took on a team technical challenge that tested their ability to check and set up safety apparatus. There was also a field problem in which each team had to carefully search for missing miners in a mock mine represented by a course of piping, barriers and written descriptions of ventilation issues and other hazards. By the end of the qualification rounds, both the Carlin and Midas teams had secured top-10 positions, earning the opportunity to compete in the final field problem on the last day of the event.

In that final field scenario, the top-10 teams each went through a simulation involving multiple miners trapped in an underground shaft where smoke was reported. Carlin and Midas finished the scenario with only minimal deductions. In the end, the Carlin team was declared the National Champions; giving them the distinction of being the first mine rescue team from Nevada to win that title.