AUGUST • 2023
Celebrating 1 Year at Wolfshag
In March, we celebrated one year of Byrnecut officially taking over of the underground operation Wolfshag in Namibia for the client B2Gold. Whilst some expat team members arrived earlier during mobilisation, the one-year milestone has seen many achievements throughout that time.
Wolfshag has grown from a small contingent of expats to a workforce of approximately 125, with around 80 being local Namibians from across the country. Many of the local workforce having limited underground mining experience, adapting their skills to add value to the project. We’ve also been lucky to uncover several team members with a depth of experience to help lead the team as they grow in the mining industry. It has truly been a team effort on site over the past year.
The effort put in by the whole team is an incredible feat as they worked through challenging mining conditions, supply issues off the back of the pandemic and ultimately bringing the whole site up to the Byrnecut standard so we can work safely and productively.
Within the early few months of the contract only development activities took place, however in the last four to five months production has commenced and has successfully ramped up to contract rates; whilst some scheduling related bottlenecks are holding the team back from consistently producing. In that time, Wolfshag hosted the SANO health team for it’s first audit and achieved a great result, whilst still plenty to work on and iron out as the contract matures.
The team look forward to building on the momentum and the successes of the first year as we move into steady state production and development activities; working with B2Gold to optimise the extraction of the Wolfshag orebody.
Congratulations to the team at Wolfshag for a rock-solid first year!
Some fun facts from the first year on site:
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nationalities employed0
bolts installed0m
of safescape ladder tubes established0
olympic sized swimming pools of water pumped out of underground0
pieces of heavy machineryEnough drill metres to travel from Perth to Geraldton
