Mining Engineering Editing and Proofreading Services

Underground ground conditions change slowly and then suddenly. Monitoring picks up the slow part — a few millimetres of convergence a week, a slight increase in seismic events, a crack that lengthens between shifts. What the data cannot supply is the decision. Somebody has to have decided, in advance and in writing, what number means withdraw, because nobody makes that decision well at two in the morning with production behind.

We edit what mining engineers and geotechnical teams produce — ground control management plans and trigger action response plans, monitoring programmes and instrumentation documentation, support design standards and installation specifications, mine design and sequencing documentation, ventilation plans and change management documentation, blast design and exclusion zone documentation, subsidence and pillar stability assessments, tailings and waste dump management documentation, standard operating procedures for underground work, hazard management plans and principal hazard documentation, inspection and reporting standards, and technical reports for regulators and corporate assurance. Our editors work on the document that makes a decision before the moment arrives.

The trigger action response plan is a mine's most important piece of writing, and it fails when the triggers are qualitative or the responses are ambiguous. "Increased deformation" is not a trigger; it is a description of an argument that will happen between a geotechnical engineer and a production supervisor with different incentives. We write these so every trigger is a number against a named instrument with a stated measurement interval, since a threshold that depends on somebody's interpretation is not a threshold; so each level's response is an action with a person and a time attached, and the highest level's action is unambiguous and immediate rather than a requirement to convene; so the authority to stop is stated plainly, naming who can withdraw people and confirming that they need no one's agreement, because ambiguity there is what kills; so the authority to resume is deliberately different and harder, given that the pressure at that moment runs one way; so what happens when an instrument fails or data is missing is defined, as absent data is routinely treated as reassuring; and so the plan is written to be readable by the shift boss who has to apply it, not only by the engineer who wrote it. Plans written this way get acted on rather than reviewed after the event.

Everything you send is treated in confidence, including monitoring data, mine plans and technical documentation. We are editors rather than mining or geotechnical engineers, and we offer no view on triggers, ground conditions or safety decisions. What we can do is remove the ambiguity from a document nobody should be interpreting under pressure.