Customer Profile: International audience, Digital and Print
HED: We’re in it for the Long Haul
Mission Mine, Sahuarita, Arizona, USA
Fifty miles north of the Mexican border in a dust-covered corrugated steel building next to one of the largest copper mines in America, Steve Thompson and his team are performing a sort of geological alchemy.
They have, in effect, learned to transform rock into revenue.
As the Mission Mine’s general maintenance supervisor, it’s all in a day’s work for Thompson. Mine owner ASARCO (Grupo Mexico, Mexico City) unearths about 140 million tons of raw copper here every year, the fruits of the labors of 600+ miners who blast, scrape, shovel and haul the increasingly precious metal from the walls of the 20,000 acre complex. A big part of Thompson’s job, like that of his counterparts at mines all over the world, is figuring out how to wring every available hour of profitable productivity from the mega-mine’s mega-buck motorized equipment…