 Okay, so we're about to begin an interview with Monica Naysmith. It is September 3rd, 2015. We are in Vancouver, and the interviewer, as usual, will be William McRae. So to begin, could you just please state your full name? Monica Frances Naysmith. And please state your age. I'm 69. And where were you born? I was born in Cornwall, Ontario. And as a child, what did your parents do? My mother was a homemaker, and my father was an engineer, chief engineer at the Courtaulds rayon plant, no longer in operation. What kind of engineer was he? Mechanical. Mechanical, okay. And as a child, what did you do as a hobby, or what were your interests? Oh, I liked making things. My mother taught me to knit at quite a young age, so I knitted, I sewed. I loved active sports. I did gymnastics all on my own without any formal education. Later on, I loved mountain climbing and skiing, of course. Yeah, Sam here. And in school, as a child, were there specific classes you really enjoyed or that you excelled at? Well, if you're talking grade school, primary, I was always a good student. I don't remember any particular class being better than the other. In high school, I tended towards the sciences. I also studied Russian, because by the time I was in high school, my family had moved to the Kootenays, and we lived right close to one of the Dukovar centers, and it still is a center of Dukovar population. And so Russian was taught in my high school, so I took that for a couple of years. Not a bad skill to have. So what did you decide to do after high school? After high school, I went to UBC, my mother and father's alma mater. It just seemed like it was the logical thing to do, and went straight into the sciences. Started off with studying physics and chemistry, being undecided with some biology thrown in, but that wasn't so much my forte. And later on, narrowed that down to chemistry. So I graduated from UBC with a bachelor's in chemistry, and in fact, the last year of that degree was done at McMaster, where I went before graduation to get married. And I had my first child in Hamilton. But the degree was granted by UBC, even though my final year was done at McMaster. After that, I launched directly into a master's degree. I should say that my first child, my daughter, was born just after I graduated with my bachelor's degree. Launched into a master's degree, also in science in chemistry, in organic chemistry. And my second child, a son, was born very shortly after I received my master's degree. Was that at UBC as well? No, no, McMaster. That was McMaster. Yeah, that's right. And that's because your life was kind of there? Yeah, life was there at that time. My husband was working at McMaster. Okay. He was a technician in the geography department. So after your master's, what would you consider your first official job in your career? Well, my first job was a two-year stint with QSO. So my husband at the time, I've remarried now, my husband and our two children, we went off with QSO to the West Indies. It was not our first choice. Peru was our first choice because we wanted to climb mountains. But we loved the West Indies, spent two years teaching there, and came back to Canada. And it was at that point that I started my first, you could say, official job in the mining and metallurgy field. And that was at what is now Kid Creek in Timmins. At that time it was called X-Stall Mining. And very shortly after I started it became Texas Gulf. And finally now it's Kid Creek. So that was my first job in my profession, if you can call it that. Why mining or metallurgy? Because you had taken chemistry. Yes. But why did you ever have in mind to go into mining or metallurgy? No. Or how did you end up? No, I didn't. Well, the way that happened was my husband was a teacher of carpentry and building construction. He got a job after returning from the West Indies as a teacher in, sorry, I have to think of the name of, can't think of the name of the town, but anyway it was a town close to Timmins. So he started teaching and I was looking after the children, but I thought, well, I've got this master's degree, I have to find a job. So I went down on spec to Kid Creek or Texas Gulf and walked in the door and asked if there was anybody I could talk to about a job. Well, I guess they were looking for somebody because they gave me a job. I had more or less the right education. I wasn't an engineer. I hadn't gone to engineering school. I graduated in the sciences, but I had a pretty good grounding in chemistry. And so my first job was pretty interesting. And actually that first job was the one that decided me on sticking with mining and metallurgy. Okay. So what was the actual title of your job and what are examples of things you did? I was a development chemist. Now all of my associates were engineers. And so they were mostly development engineers. In the development group, we worked on various plant problems to modify the process, improve the process, increase production, make things more efficient. So you were kind of in the R&D department? Sort of, in a very applied kind of way. In fact, what I was doing was probably the most R&D oriented. I worked in a little double-wide ACO trailer, which was the development lab. This is not the assay lab, it's the development lab. And I was given a project. It was pointed out to me that there was a mountain of ugly black and kind of green looking material by the train tracks and that my job was to develop a process to treat this. At that time, the zinc plant at Kid Creek was fairly new. And a zinc plant makes zinc, of course, but it also makes a couple of residues. And one of those is the purification residue, which was what this mountain was out by the train tracks. It contained zinc, of course, some zinc. It contained cobalt, copper, nickel. It contained arsenic in a reasonable concentration and other unwanted things. Was it affecting anybody nearby or any ecosystems? Well, by today's standards, maybe yes. Today you would have to have a lined pad to store a residue like that on with a liner and you'd have to be capable of recovering and treating any runoff that might come from rainfall. But in fact, this material was reasonably stable, but certainly rainfall combined with oxygen in the air would have been leaching some things out of that. But anyway, this residue was a problem. When Kid Creek first started up, I believe their intent was to sell the residue for its copper content. That would be the most valuable metal in there. But there was a story, and I'm not 100% sure it was official. There was a story that when the first shipments went out to CCR, that would be the Canadian Copper Refiners in Montreal, that the shipment inside the train wagons heated up and was creating fumes. Maybe it didn't catch fire, but it was auto-heating, autogenously heating. And of course that happens when finely divided metals come in contact with oxygen, so they oxidize and produce a lot of heat. So this, like I said, was the unofficial story that I heard. But anyway, the official story was that even if they had been able to sell it, it would have been of very little value, it wouldn't have paid for the freight because it had too much arsenic. That was a penalty metal, you know. Nobody wants arsenic in their smelter. So my job was to find a way to treat this stuff and make it somehow take the value out of it and make it more valuable for the company. So I did that over the space of two years through bench-scale test work and then a little while later plant-scale testing. I created a process that was capable of recovering the, oh, it recovered the zinc, it recovered the cobalt, and more importantly, it recovered the copper and the arsenic in a form that could be recycled in the plant. As those two elements were actually used in the plant as reagents, copper arsenate was able to be a replacement for copper sulfate and arsenic trioxide, which were actually used in the zinc plant as reagents. So this process was patented, had my name on it, and my name at the time was Monica Morris. That was my first married name. Yeah, it was patented and it was, actually after I left, the process was properly installed in the plant with, there was some new equipment that was required for it. And it ran for several years before it was shut down. In fact, the whole zinc plant is shut down now. Yeah. So were there any other plants that started to use your patent? Not that I'm aware of, but other plants certainly knew about it. The Finns at Urukumpu were watching that quite carefully, and so in later years when I met some of them through CIM MetSoc activities, they knew all about it. So where'd you go from there? So from there, that was basically what sparked my passion for metallurgy. From there I went back to school. So I went to UBC, registered out at UBC, as a graduate student under Ernie Peters who was, well at that time anyway, we called him the father of hydro metallurgy. He's a famous hydro metallurgist. He's no longer alive. But he took me on as a graduate student. I was actually on a PhD program, but I didn't finish it. Things intervened, mainly family situation, and I didn't finish that degree. I always intended, I finished all the coursework, did very well in that, and started on the thesis work, but I didn't finish it. Never wrote the thesis. It's the longest part. Yeah. Yeah, so anyway, however, working with Ernie was quite a treat. He was a good lecturer and a good teacher. And so that topped off close to 12 years of education, post-secondary education for me. No, wait a minute now, I can't be right. I did five years on my bachelor's degree because when I moved to Hamilton, I had to do a year of makeup because the two universities didn't agree on the equivalents of courses. Yeah, five years on my bachelor's, close to three on my master's, and another three. So okay, it wasn't quite, no, it wasn't 12 years. Eleven. Eleven years. Yeah, that's right. So there you go. So after your… So yeah, so after my three years at UBC, family matters intervened in another way. My father, this is the mechanical engineer from Courtauld's. By this time, the family had moved to BC. That happened actually quite, when I was quite young. Why BC? For the… That was my mother and father's home. Okay, they were from BC. They're both from Vancouver. Okay. They were both from Vancouver. I guess that's why they went to school there. Yeah. Okay, so we were talking about your parents had moved back here. You'd finished your three years at UBC? Yes, that's right. Yeah, actually I should say about UBC that I was fortunate enough to have some, well, very memorable professors there, one of whom was Ernie Peters. But a couple of others were Professor Samus, who was doing fourth year thermodynamics, and Professor Keith Brimacom, who actually passed away quite young. But both of them were very wonderful lecturers, really memorable. And I can tell you that coming back to school after all those years away and plunging into fourth year classes, actually I had to do, yeah, that's right. Because it was a new field, I'd been in chemistry. I had to do some makeup courses, yeah, that was it. And so I had to take fourth year, along with all these young, hot shot engineers about to get their degrees. Well, that was a challenge, let me tell you, to try and catch up with them and doing fourth year thermodynamics. And they were just at that point of perfection where they'd honed all their techniques in problem solving and writing exams and knew exactly what they had to do to please their professor. Yeah. And I didn't know any of that. They said it's one of the hardest things to just come back in life and get back into school mode, yeah. That was tough, let me tell you. But anyway, these professors were all pretty good to me, and my skills kind of snapped back into place about halfway through that makeup year. So I was able to get through that with fairly good marks and then carried on to graduate level courses after that. But anyway, they were great teachers and they're well-known names in the Canadian metallurgical field. So afterwards, is that when you started working for SNC-11A? No. Oh, no, that came much later. No, after that, I can tell you that my personal life, my relationship with my husband was going downhill. My father at the time had a grocery store business in the Slokan Valley. He owned two grocery stores. So he was no longer doing engineer stuff? No, no, that was in the past. And he had a problem that his store manager in New Denver, in the little village of New Denver, had become sick and wanted to take a year off kind of thing. And so he asked me if I'd like to do it. And the deal was it was a double deal that my husband could go up there and learn to be the meat cutter and I could be the store manager. So we took it. I guess we looked at it as a possible way that we could, you know, keep our marriage on the rails and fill a need for my father as well. So anyway, that took us up to New Denver. So that was good, great experience for me. Running a grocery store is a pretty good experience. It gives you the little bit of that side of life that you don't get in engineering school and certainly not in chemistry. You know, the need to be conscious of money and where it comes from and where it goes to. I'm dealing with a lot more people. Yes, that's right. Yeah, keeping customers happy. Yeah. Yeah, seriously, not always easy. No. Not to mention hiring and firing people. Oh, dear. Yeah. So anyway, so our deal with my father was for one year. And in fact, my husband left after that one year. But by then we had kind of, well, I can't say we had agreed to part ways, but we did. I stayed in New Denver. He came back to Vancouver. And our two children, one stayed with me and the other went with him. And I stayed on at the grocery store because in fact the person that I'd trained up to take over couldn't take the job. And so I once again found myself needed in the grocery store. So I stayed on for another year. And yeah, and then it was after that that I wasn't making much money. You know, these are small little grocery stores. And my father was paying not much more than minimum wage, even for the plant, I mean for the store manager. Even for his daughter. Yeah, that's right. Anyway, so anyway, I realized that I had two children. My husband was working. He wasn't yet my ex, but we were separated, but not making a lot of money. And so I wanted to make use of my education and get a real job, you know. So I did two things. I first of all got a short-term job through a friend at the Ottawa Mill, which is in Silicon City, close to Silicon City, just at the lower end of Silicon Lake. That's a well-known little mill to the small operators of BC mines. It went way back to, I forget, close to the early 1900s, I think, is when the first mill went up. It was tiny by modern standards. Tiny little concentrator, lead zinc, oh, lead zinc silver. 100 tons per day. Yeah, that's pretty small. That's pretty small. That's right. So anyway, I got a job there. My first job was a crusher operator. And so they sent me up into the crusher room. And the crusher was a little jaw crusher. It was about this size, about that wide. And then up behind, and so I had to watch over this crusher. And up behind me was the ore bin. And so the rocks came down out of the, chunks of ore came down out of the ore bin. And a little conveyor into the jaw crusher. My job was, whenever there was a rock that got jammed in the crusher, I had a pole. It was a big, heavy steel pole. It was about, I don't know, eight feet long or so. It was heavy. And so I had to bash at this rock and get it out of there. And then restart the crusher again. Or if, alternatively, if the rocks didn't come down out of the ore bin, I had to take my bar up there and jab away at that ore bin until the rocks came out. Well, let me tell you, there was no safety shrouding around that little crusher, that little jaw crusher. And so anybody that knows how a jaw crusher operates, the rocks spit out of there like you wouldn't believe. They scared me. I hadn't... Had goggles at least. There was no requirement in that little mill for safety equipment. And, no. I didn't. This was a little shoestring operation. And it certainly wouldn't meet today's safety standards. But that's the way it was. I think I had a hard hat, but I'm not sure that I wore it. And anyway, I was probably lucky because those rocks came flying out of there and they hit the sides of the building and clear up to the roof sometimes. Anyway, fortunately I didn't have that job very long. The chief operator, a fellow by the name of Ed, he decided that with my education I should be doing something more than being crusher operator. And so he took me into the little tiny lab. It was just a small little building beside the main mill and taught me how to do assays. So I got to do the gold and silver assays. There was a little furnace in there where I could make my little beads of gold and silver. And lead, I had to do the lead assays. There was no ventilation as I recall. So there were clouds of lead fume that happened when I was cooking the samples. But anyway, I could open the door so that the breeze blow through. So I learned how to do some assays. So that job lasted about three months before that was a seasonal operation because the water supply was a little creak. And when it got too cold, the creak froze and that was it for the winter. So the mill didn't operate through the winter. And actually I can tell you the other thing that happened once was Ed, Ed broke his leg and so we were short staffed. And so I was asked to come in once on night shift along with another operator who had a sight problem. He didn't see very well. He was okay in the daytime but at night he was pretty well blind. And so the idea was that he knew the operation of the plant and he could direct me. And this is no longer in the crusher area which didn't take much directing anyway. But it was where the mill and the flotation cells were. So anyway, what happened that night was the generator outside tripped. Everything went black and I was sent down to turn a valve to stop something from overflowing. I think it was just to shut off the feed to the flotation cells. Well, I had a flashlight groped around and I didn't really know what I was looking for. And I turned a valve and unbeknown to me it was the wrong valve. And so when I went back a short time later the cells, I think it was the lead cells were overflowing or at least it was the concentrate, the lead concentrate was not going where it was supposed to go. It was all over the floor. It was just all over the floor and it was getting deeper. So anyway, well between the two of us we got the correct valve shut off. And so I spent the next two days shoveling lead concentrate into, forget if it was buckets or wheelbarrow but whatever. I can tell you that lead concentrate is heavy stuff. You would not believe how heavy a small shovel full of lead concentrate is. So anyway, that was my experience at the Ottawa mill. I don't know, I don't think that mill is operating. I don't know if it is even still standing. It's up the Springer Creek Road up outside Thulcan City. So that kind of, well that taught me a thing or two. Yeah, I learned a lot about how real plants, sometimes tiny old ones, how they really operate, you know. Anyway, I went from there to what at the time was Kaminko. So I went, I applied to Kaminko and they invited me in for an interview. And they took me on right away. And at that time they had their electronic materials division up and running. Kaminko of course is now tech, metals, tech resources. They no longer have that electronic materials division. But they did then and they were making semiconductors. And I went to work in that department and once again as a kind of a development engineer, as opposed to a production engineer. I wasn't an engineer at the time, I was still a chemist. Yeah, so I got to do, spent a lot of time in a lab. I had a nice lab there that I could work in on my own. The work you liked best, lab work? No. No, but it was fun. The nice thing about lab work is that it teaches you the fundamentals. A good metallurgist has to understand the fundamentals of reactions. How and why things react, how much they react, how much heat they produce, what kind of noxious gases they produce. How you control the noxious gases, that kind of thing. So to me it's a vital activity. It was fun. But no, I guess I wouldn't call it the most exciting work that I did. Yeah. So I made cadmium sulfide by bubbling H2S through a cadmium solution. Kaminko of course made cadmium, they still do. And so there's two very extremely toxic materials being combined to make cadmium sulfide. And that was kind of a prospect in the hopes of selling it to one of the printer companies that were busy at the time making the first color printers. Yeah. Another thing that I worked on making was zinc sulfide. Zinc sulfide, yeah I had a pretty interesting go with that one. That one's not quite as toxic, but still, still pretty. I'm sorry zinc arsenide, zinc, not zinc sulfide, zinc arsenide. And the way I started on that to figure out how the reaction was going to behave, was to sprinkle a little line of zinc dust in the fume cabinet, just like you would a fuse, you know how they look. Yeah. Yeah, that's right. And I sprinkled some arsenic metal on top of it. And I lit one end of it, just with a burner or a match. And sure enough it went like a fuse, and it made zinc arsenide. I had a nice little trail of kind of semi-metallic, kind of a metallic substance, and sanded the lab for assay, and sure enough it was zinc arsenide. And so I guess that real hands-on, direct hands-on experience, is what's very valuable for a process metallurgist to really understand the chemistry of how things work. And so I went on from there with the help of a technician to put together an apparatus that would do that same thing on a larger scale. But when I say a larger scale, it was still a couple of, it was two or three liters, I guess, inside a furnace that could be... You basically light it up? Heated it to the point that the reaction went on its own. Okay. He didn't just create a massive fuse? No, but that might have been a better way to do it. Because actually when the reaction did go, there was a great puff of fume that came out the top of arsenic and zinc dust, and you name it. Which is not great to breathe in. Yeah, the technician wasn't super happy about it, but he was a senior technician. He'd seen some fairly unusual chemistry himself. I would say that that kind of thing is harder to do now. In those days, those inventive things, and especially at a place like Kaminko, which through the years had been self-sufficient, Kaminko always did its own research, did its own development. They basically designed their entire zinc cell house on their own, without an outside technology supplier. So that sort of thing went on at Kaminko at the time. Yeah, anyway. Throughout your career, did you... Well, first of all, I'll ask you more of an observation question, but throughout your career, how present or absent were women? Oh, they were absent. And you being one of them, were you often the only woman? Yeah, I was. At Kid Creek, I was the only woman. There were one or two that were in the assay lab doing the routine assays for the plants. There was a concentrator and a zinc plant there at the time. This was prior to when the copper smelter was built. Yeah, so there were a couple of women there. There were clerks and women in the main office, the administrative offices. But no, I was the only one all the time I was there. And did you, throughout your career, did you ever meet some, I guess, resistance because you were a woman? Yes, I did. Yeah. I can tell you that this wasn't direct resistance, but in many of the labs and little operators' booths and, I don't know, sample prep shacks and so on, there were many pin-up pictures from Playboy and other such things. That was commonplace. And sometimes there was an attitude to go with it, too. I remember clearly at Kid Creek there was one fellow who was kind of bummed and he didn't like me being there. And he said to me, what are you doing here? Why are you working? You don't need to work. Your husband's got a job, hasn't he? I said yes. But I said, well, I like to work. But anyway, that was the attitude. Why should a woman be taking a man's job? Yeah. Has that, have you seen that change throughout your career? Yes. Yes, I have. I think there's still some of that. Yeah, especially in hard times, like now. Well, I don't get any resentment now. I'm not working anymore. But yeah, that's pretty deep-seated, that one. And I don't know the answer to it. Certainly, I like to work. I like to work. But it's true that I'm taking a job that could be done by a man. And maybe by a man who would be the only breadwinner for his family. But at this point, I mean, it could be only a woman who's the only breadwinner. Well, now for me it was. After those years of separation, I was a single parent. Yeah. Yeah. So I know what that feels like too. Anyway. And then another indication of this, you know, kind of barrier to women was when all the development engineers that I was working for got invited to go underground at the Kid Creek Mine, which is down the road from the concentrator, kind of up north of the city of Timmins. And I just assumed that I'd be able to go too, but I couldn't. And it was explained to me that, well, we don't take women underground. They're not allowed. Was it because of that bad luck thing? Yeah. In those days, that's what it was. So they said, yeah. Yeah, that's what it was. Yeah. So that was 1973 to 75 that I was at Kid Creek. Yeah. That fortunately has changed. Yes. Women can work underground. That's right. They're still less than men. Yeah. But yeah. That's right. Yeah. Another social question. You working, I guess, well, you work really kind of in both worlds, mining and metallurgy. Mm-hmm. Back in the day, and still to this day, or you can divide it in how many periods you want, but do you believe there's a disconnect between the natural resource industry, mining and metallurgy, for example, and the general public? Yes. There's a huge disconnect. This is something that I've regretted and railed about all my working life, is that the education system, at least here in Canada and the U.S., doesn't teach students how their society really works. They have no idea. Yeah, they just have no idea where these metals that they rely on in very fundamental ways, where they come from. Yeah. And what it's like in those processing facilities. Yeah, so I try and... My children know, of course, because I talk about it, and my grandchildren know a bit about it, but not as much as they should. Yeah. Do you think there should also be not only in the education system, for example, for young kids to just find out what are things made of and where do those things come from, but do you think there should be more of an effort made by the natural resource companies to educate the public? Well, I'd like to say yes, but the natural resource companies have to... they've got to, you know, make their financial plan and make enough money to be profitable. No. Yeah, I don't know if... to saddle them with that is kind of a... it doesn't seem quite fair. I would say that government money would probably have to play some part. Mm-hmm. Yeah. And so today you're retired. Hmm. Actually, not fully, I still have it. Not fully. That was my question. I have a tenuous relationship with the SNC level. Okay. So you still consult or...? No, but I could if something came up. Okay. Yeah. So you're kind of on call. That's... Yeah, sort of. Yeah. Because that's... it's a recurring theme with these... the people I interviewed for this project is that many... most of them are retired, but they're not technically retired. That's right. Yeah. They... most of them work till... work till they die. Or... Or at least a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. In your opinion, and this could be a tough broad question, but give me the... the examples that you want. But in your opinion, are there any events, people, inventions, contributions, disasters, anything really, that you believe must be mentioned when discussing the modern history of the natural resources in Canada? Heavy question. It's a heavy question. Yeah. And well, what immediately comes to mind is the Mount Pauli tailings dam breach. Yeah. Earlier than that, well, there's the coal mine disaster out in... Nova Scotia, but that's going a long ways back. There are smaller things, but most people have never heard of them. I think the tailings breach is a big one. And that's a... that's a major... that's a major threat now. And to me, having followed the story somewhat, not really closely, but I believe that Mount Pauli, that the... it was imperial medals, did what they could under the circumstances and certainly showed a lot of commitment to cleaning up the... doing as much cleanup as they could, fixing the faults with the dam and getting on with their business. I see a gap in the legislative side of things and in the provincial government's part in it. I... I feel as though the BC... BC in particular, because I know that it's... because I know that it's stronger in Ontario and Quebec. The BC in particular has not... I don't believe that they've taken their legislative and monitoring responsibilities seriously enough. I think the people that create the environmental framework and the checks and balances, the inspections that have to be done, the monitoring, the standards for... in this case, for building an earth dam, I don't think they've done enough by world standards. Having been recently in Peru and just a year ago in... in Brussels and having had some dealings with the... European, the EC, all of the standards and the monitoring that they do, we're not doing enough not to meet those standards. Not in... not in BC. Like I said, I think Quebec and Ontario do a better job. Yeah. It's the same kind of thing as with the SO2 abatement. You know, I worked in the Sudbury smelter for close to eight years, the Falconbridge smelter, which has now became... Extrada is now at Glencore. And I was there at the time when SO2 abatement was the big push. Well, it wasn't Falconbridge that was bringing that on out of their own goodwill and munificence. It was the Ontario... government. Sure. They were laying down the ground rules. They were the ones that were giving INCO and Falconbridge a certain amount of time to get their plans in place and then, you know, implementing these annual reports. It was more than annual reports, but regular reporting on their performance. And so that kind of thing has to come to BC, too. Yeah. Yeah. With dams, tailings dams. Thank you. Another... could be considered a tough question, but we can divide it in two. What are you proudest of in life? And we could go in life in general and also professionally, if you'd like. Okay. Well, I have to tell you, I'm very proud of my grandchildren. I have five grandchildren. And so that gives me a great deal to look forward to now that my professional career is mostly over. But, no, I did take pride in some of my accomplishments. There was...there were... My years at Falconbridge, I started off as in the development group once again. It's a standard entry position for somebody like me. By the time I got there, I actually was an engineer. I took a couple of courses while and became a professional engineer. So anyway, after a couple of years as a development engineer, I went to the smelter and I became the smelter metallurgist. Once again, that was what you did when you started in the smelter as an engineer. And so that Falconbridge has a copper-nickel... or nickel-copper smelter, and they try and stuff in the cobalt as they can because it makes money. But anyway, there was an accomplishment there that I was pretty proud of. There was... Falconbridge had two old roasters. Or was it one? I don't want to... Well anyway, sorry, it was one. I'm thinking of somewhere else. Anyway, this roaster at Falconbridge, it was an old one. It didn't have the modern automated controls. And it didn't have oil burners that were easy to operate. It didn't have diesel burners. It did have old oil burners, but they didn't work properly. They were very awkward to get started. You have to heat the oil and circulate it and all that stuff. And so the operators over the years had developed this procedure for starting or restarting the roaster. It was called roaster bumping. What this involved was dumping in through the top of the roaster, high-volatile content coal in pieces, kind of one-inch pieces, I guess. Dumping it in there. If the roaster was still hot, which it usually was, this would be a restart. If the roaster had been down and it hadn't been able to be restarted until it cooled off too much, then they used this roaster bumping procedure. So the roaster bed is all settled down. It's not fluidized, but it's still hot. So you dump in this coal, about a ton of it or so. I forget how much it was. It might have been one or two tons. Wait some vague length of time that was estimated to give the coal enough time to heat up and the volatiles to begin to be coming off the coal. And then crank on the fluidizing blower and fluidize everything. And the coal would go hump. There'd be basically a kind of a lazy explosion as those volatiles caught fire and then the coal would burn in the fluidized bed. Heat everything back up to temperature and they'd be off and running again. Well, as you can guess, this was not a properly controlled procedure. The union did not like it, but the union always had recourse. They could just simply clear their people out. They could say, don't go near that thing. And so it would be the staff that would, young engineers that would actually do it. I'm saying that. I don't recall if that was exactly the case. But the truth of the matter is that nobody liked it. People were afraid of it. And one day while I was there, while I was in the job in the smelter, I wasn't physically present, they did this and it lifted the roof off the roaster. It didn't lift it far off. It kind of raised it and it settled back down not quite in the right place. So they had to shut the roaster down for a longer period and it really did cool down that time. And then they had to, you know, they had to shut the roaster, the acid plant and get the roof back on in the right place and do a controlled start-up with a proper heat-up. Well, after that, my superiors decided that we needed a safe roaster start-up procedure. So that fell to me. So I put together a little team, including a couple of other engineers and operators and technician, I guess, process control type person. And we didn't do anything very earth-shaking. All we did tossed around a lot of ideas. All we did was to use the same coal, but feed it in with a conveyor, a small little portable conveyor that we could take up there to the top floor, the top of the roaster. And feed it through the roof of the roaster. There's a port there. And so that any, you know, any explosion that happened as it hit the hot bed, the hot roaster bed, would just create a more controlled kind of a burn. And so you basically get something. Yeah, watch safer. That's right. So it wasn't earth-shaking, but you know, that was, and that was very successful. It just worked like a charm. Yeah, I was in the control room at the time watching the, when we did the first test, watching the roaster temperatures come up and they just climbed nice and steadily as that coal went in on the conveyor and burned. Nice. Yeah. So that's the kind of thing that the development engineers in plants have to do. Well, when you can also say, look back and say you made something safer, it's also pretty significant. Well, yeah, you know what? There's another one. This actually didn't happen in Canada, but my final job at Falcon Bridge and now Glencore was in the acid plant. I was the acid plant superintendent. And so I learned a lot about acid, how it's made and you know, how an acid plant works. But later, after I went to work in the engineering business with SNC Lavalin, I found myself down in Namibia on the Scorpion project. This is fairly well known to people in the zinc business. And on that, for the start-up of that plant in Namibia, there's a brand new zinc plant, Greenfield zinc plant out in the, out in the desert in Namibia. So I was responsible on the engineering contractor's side, SNC Lavalin's side, for the acid plant area. The supply contractor was a South African company with license with the Monsanto technology. And so they had built the acid plant and it was all put together and all the pumps and motors were put through their paces and so on. And I was there for the start-up. And anyway, before the, before the construction was finished, I basically insisted that, look, we've got to have a plunge bath. Now, we didn't have a plunge bath at the Falconbridge acid plant. In fact, plunge baths I don't think would be very common in Canada because it's too cold and it would freeze in the winter. But as I knew from visiting another acid plant in South Africa, they're pretty common there. Acid plants, I should step back, acid plants all have to have safety showers. In fact, that's common in any plant. Any plant where there's, you know, risk of a chemical burn or a real burn, you know, have to have safety showers. But in South Africa, they've got, they have safety showers and, at least this one other plant that I saw, I had a plunge bath where you could, if you were splashed with acid, you could climb right into that bath, a nice big concrete tub. Ideally with the water running through it continuously. Well, so during the construction, I had recommended strongly that we put a plunge bath in. Out in Namibia we had a lot of inexperienced operators. The schedule for the acid plant was such that we weren't sure if, you know, if we might have acid on site before the safety showers were all connected and serviceable. So it was a nice, nice piece of insurance to have that plunge bath was there. So they put it in. It didn't cost much, you know, the grand scheme of things. So it was there. Well, you know what? That got used. And that was an amazing incident. The site manager for the acid plant construction package, he was the construction manager, it was just during the first pumping of strong acid over the absorption towers and through the cooler. The strong acid cooler is a vital part of any acid plant. It's the thing that takes away the heat that's formed when the SO3 gas contacts water, a huge amount of heat. So that heat exchanger has to work properly. Well, it wasn't working properly. This was during the first run-through of, well, basically of gas through the sulfur burner. Gas from the sulfur burner contacting the strong acid to make more strong acid. Yeah, so the construction manager, he came out and he thought, I think the thinking was that there must be an airlock in that heat exchanger. The flow wasn't getting through it properly. Not enough cooling water was getting through it. And so they figured that all they needed to do was, you know, crank open a little nipple that was basically an air bleed. Well, this guy went up to the end of the heat exchanger. This is a big horizontal shell and tube heat exchanger. And he was pulling on, he didn't have safety gear on. He was pulling on what appeared to be just a little nipple up on kind of the top part of that end of the heat exchanger. He was pulling on it and it let go. And he was, the thing was full of acid. And so he had misjudged, he didn't understand what he was pulling. As soon as the acid came gushing out, he knew. And so this chap, I believe he had glasses on, although I'm not sure about that, he would have had a hard hat on. So that was just standard PPE for the site, you know, hard hat safety glasses and boots and so on. But he was just in his street clothes and Namibia was a very hot place. This was Christmas time in Namibia. It was really hot. And so I think he had short sleeves on too. And anyway, this acid wasn't under a lot of pressure but it was under some pressure enough that it came straight out right at his face. He was, no, what happened? The showers were serviceable, I believe. Yeah, I'm pretty sure they were serviceable. What happened was his reflexes were quick enough that his eyes closed. So he didn't immediately get acid into his eyes. He got it all over his face and neck. I think the hard hat shielded a little bit. Face, neck, chest and so on. He was, you know, anybody that deals with acid they kind of know what to do. So he didn't open his eyes. He knew that he couldn't open his eyes. He was shouting for help. Part of this is the story that was pieced together through this chap's story and others who ran to help. So there was one fellow that was passing by just at the time and he ran to help him. The thing that was closest at hand was the plunge bath and there was water in it. So in he went. By this time, I got down there because I'd received word up in the engineering, in the offices, there were trailers, you know, where we had our offices. The word went around like wildfire. So I tore down there. By the time I got there, he was in that bath and people were manually splashing water on him. So there was water in the plunge bath but we didn't have the hose in there with the fresh water supply. But at least there was water. Well, you know, I'm happy to say I still think it's kind of a miracle that he survived and survived well. He, you know, they quickly got a hose pipe fixed up so they could do better than just using hands to splash water over him. Must have still ended up pretty scarred. Well, it wasn't as bad as you might think. I believe he had skin crafts. He was, first aid took over as soon as they got down there. It was all handled pretty fast. He was in 2003. So, you know, everything was well set up on that construction site. They were well ready to respond, you know. He was flown out to, I guess, back to Johannesburg. I'm not exactly sure where he went and kept in hospital for quite some time. And I believe he had some skin grafts but at the end of the day his sight was good and whatever skin grafting had to be done was turned out fine. So, he lived to tell the tale. He wasn't severely scarred. He was burned. But anyway, there you have it. A plunge bath saved the day. Yeah. Yeah, and I guess in that, see, in that particular case even if the safety showers, he could have got to them but they were a bit further away. And the acid can do the damage. There was one that was up on the platform, right kind of at the level of the top of that big cooler. And the other one that was on the ground wasn't immediately right there. It's just not one of the places kind of at the end of the cooler where you'd expect to get splashed. But the plunge bath was right close by and it was easy to get into. Right, huh? Last question. If you were to speak to someone much younger like a student, for example, what would be the one life lesson or a piece of advice you would give them for their future? A student in mining and metallurgy? Sure. Or mining metallurgy? Or in general, it's up to you? Or both? My advice is go out and work in an operating plant. And that's going to do way more for your career than staying in the city and sort of very slowly climbing the design engineering ladder if that's your choice. Find out how it really works. Find out how it really works. Then you'll be able to do a better job on your design work. All right. Well, thank you. Anything else you'd like to add? One thing I'd like to add. Sure. Some of my best teachers that I had through the years, this is, of course, in addition to the university ones, were plant operators and technicians and technologists. They were great because they did know how things work. Yeah, they had done it. Yeah, they were great. Some of them anyway would kind of watch over me and take trouble to teach me things that weren't immediately apparent to me. Yeah, I think sometimes they're the unsung heroes. Teachers? Yeah, they're teachers. You know, they're union members. They all were in the Canadian plants I worked in, except for the Ottawa mill. Yeah, they're union members and they're not called on to do those things. But sometimes they're the unsung heroes that they'll take you aside and they like telling you about the plant because it's basically their baby, you know? They know how to operate it. Well, thank you. You're welcome.