Alexandra Lopez-Pacheco

Drones, 3D scanners and holographic technology are being used to deliver services while engineers stay in the office or work from home

In February 2020, engineering companies in Canada were paying very close attention to news reports about a mysterious new virus in Wuhan, China, and concerns it could lead to a global pandemic. They began considering how they would keep their people safe and continue to support and service their mining clients if the worst-case scenario became reality.

By the time the World Health Organization declared a global pandemic on March 11, many already had emergency plans in place and had even begun implementing them. They created meticulously thought-out safety protocols and worked with their mining clients and local-area residents where site visits and construction work were still possible. They collaborated as virtual teams dispersed in home offices to continue delivering their services remotely. They adapted or fast-tracked innovative new remote tools to overcome the obstacles of travel bans and lockdowns. And in the process, they just may have been reinventing the way engineers work and deliver their services. When the pandemic is behind us, the new normal might not only be different, it might very well be better.

Ahead of the curve

BGC Engineering began its COVID-19 response for its personnel spread across offices in British Columbia, Alberta, Ontario, New Brunswick, Nova Scotia, Colorado and Santiago, Chile, in the first week of March by creating a pandemic emergency response team (ERT) led by Alex Baumgard, a principal geotechnical and environmental engineer with the company. The ERT quickly gathered as much intelligence as it could and briefed BGC’s senior management team. “Over the following week,” said Baumgard, “we continued to watch the development as the virus was taking hold in Europe and showing up in North America.”

The ERT included BGC people with diverse expertise, including some with extensive experience in search and rescue, law enforcement, health and safety management and emergency management training. Together, they created a strategy to navigate through the pandemic, including a COVID-19 symptom survey database for employees and a dashboard that allowed them to cross-reference staff whereabouts using Transport Canada and airline information.

“If we saw some of our staff having to isolate because of travel, we would know we would be having staffing issues so we would move new staff to replace those in isolation,” said Baumgard. “Fortunately, we haven’t had situations [with people infected], but we wanted to see in near real time how our staff was doing and be able to do contact tracing in the case of illness.

BGC trained junior engineers and scientists to use drones to capture images at mine sites. That data was then sent to senior colleagues for review. Courtesy of BGC

“By the time we got to the second week of March,” he continued, “we had implemented our plan and started shuttering our offices and our staff went to work from home.”

A similar story was unfolding over at Bestech in Sudbury, Ontario. “We started looking at this in February,” said Patrick Fantin, the company’s president. “We were seeing indications that there were going to be problems. Our management team got together and we started looking at what were some of the possible outcomes. We had already started sending people home to work remotely just as the province shut everything down. And we started having some very deliberate and methodical conversations because what we wanted to do was to make sure who we were as an organization didn’t change. All that would change was how we did it.”

Dumas Mining also began preparing in February with plans to send its engineering team to work virtually from home. But as a full-service mining contractor, it also anticipated major issues for its on-site workforce. “Some of the mines had 30 per cent local workforce and two-thirds out-of-towners,” said Richard LaBelle, Dumas’s president and CEO. “So people were travelling from all over Canada to go to these small northern communities.”

Dumas began hiring and training local workers in February as well as stocking up necessary supplies, including personal protective equipment, and developing thorough safety protocols with its clients for the sites. “We were able to convert that 30 per cent to 80 or 90 per cent local if not 100 per cent,” he said. By the time the pandemic was full-blown, many of Dumas’ clients were in better shape than before the arrival of COVID-19. “Because there was less travel and we were able to train people ahead of time, the quality of their work and their productivity increased,” he said.

Hatch had already begun developing new streaming and augmented reality tools to enable remote engineering services prior to 2020, said Blair Climenhaga, a technologies technical specialist for the company. With offices in 150 countries, company employees were also well established in distance collaboration. “But as for adapting to facilitating clients when we don’t have travel, that’s been a learning process,” he said, adding that the company quickly began investing in tools that would facilitate remote service delivery. “After intensive testing and field testing, we began using them to provide services to clients with those tools as a substitute to travel. It’s been pretty explosive how quickly we adopted the tools and how quickly they’ve been picked up by clients.”

Hatch sent its clients cameras to mount on hardhats. The captured video can then be streamed back to the engineering company. Courtesy of Hatch

For BBA in Ontario, where many mines remained open as essential services, having a local presence proved to be critical. Although most of its staff opted to work from home, BBA offices remained open and the team continued being able to do site visits while adhering to the constantly evolving safety rules, said Lou Bruno, executive director of central Canada operations at BBA. That required the management to be both flexible and agile in keeping up with the changes to ensure the safety of its people. “Our executive team had meetings twice a week or sometimes three times a week,” he said. “And we talked about what was going on and tweaked our response according to what was changing.”

Lockdown day

“The immediate impact when the pandemic happened was the greatest challenge,” said Stantec’s mining sector leader Mike Garbutt. “Our goal was to be stable and dependable and provide the same level of service to clients,” he said. “But we all had to get out of the office. As a group we needed to reinvent ourselves internally and to adapt our processes to make sure we remained dependable. A lot of times that involved getting better at collaborating internally using whatever tools are available.”

Fortunately, most engineering teams and companies in Canada were already experienced in collaborating remotely and using virtual and desktop collaboration tools.

In fact, said Baumgard, even before the pandemic, BGC’s project teams were not selected based on geography but on the needed expertise. “If we have an expert who is based in Halifax, Nova Scotia, but has expertise that can help with a project in B.C., we want to be able to make that work. It’s already in our culture.”

What the engineering teams were not accustomed to, however, was the distress of a global pandemic and all of its unknowns. At the end of the day, remote engineering isn’t just about technology. “It starts with taking care of the people who use that technology,” said Fantin. Like other engineering companies, Bestech put considerable effort into communication and ensuring their people had the tools and support they needed, including access to mental health support.

When Redpath Canada’s engineering and technical services team first closed its offices, for example, “there was a lot of uncertainty and quite a bit of anxiety with people not being quite sure what was happening and what it would be like,” said engineering and technical services manager Jeremy Berg.

Redpath addressed this by communicating with its team as openly and transparently as possible. “And we kept people informed about what kind of work we had on the table, what was happening with our projects, how our clients were responding,” he said. “The more information people had the better.”

Remote tooling up

Going into the pandemic, there were already many tools available to enable remote engineering, said Berg. “We’ve always had a facility to offer remote support and control systems programming changes so we’ve been providing that solution,” he said. “What the pandemic has done is that certain people before were comfortable with using the tools and others tended to avoid them. But this has pushed everybody to embrace them.”

Fantin concurs. “We’re using a lot of video. We use a virtual whiteboard. You can do those virtually now. We’ve already had 3D scanning technologies for a long time, so we can do a 3D scan of an area,” he said. “Although, there still have to be site visits to meet legal requirements where they have to be physically on-site.”

Still, there were gaps when it came to site visits blocked by travel bans. To overcome this obstacle, some of the engineering companies turned the local boots on the ground into the eyes on the ground. Hatch, for example, developed a tool to stream back the site environment to its team from the hardhat of a worker on the site. The company shipped the cameras equipped with its proprietary software to the clients.

“So workers on-site essentially duct taped a camera to their hardhats and they streamed back using similar callback features to Microsoft Teams,” said Climenhaga. “That allows us to direct someone in the field. For example, I recently worked on a rail project and because of the nature of this project, we weren’t able to send subcontractors or the people who need to go there to do the environmental testing. By having this system, we were able to utilize local staff to complete the data collection and the sample process for environmental testing and then send those samples back.”

Hatch did a lot of homework to ensure the new tool was easy to use, said Atishay Godre, service manager and system integration lead at Hatch’s digital operations. “Explaining these tools to people who don’t work with new technologies can be a challenge but our tools are very user friendly.”

BGC faced restrictions on some of its senior people being able to travel to sites. “And that’s a really important part of the tailings dams design and construction we do in terms of getting reviews,” said Matthew Lato, research and development lead at BGC.

In anticipation of this challenge, BGC trained field engineers and scientists to fly drones on sites and send back photographs to their senior colleagues for review.

The company is also developing 3D models of sites using the drone photography for its office-based engineers to use when they are unable to travel to sites. Other innovations at BGC built on the company’s Ada holographic visualization software platform, which it transferred to a new spin-off company, Clirio Inc., at the beginning of June 2020. Microsoft’s HoloLens technology is used to interface with Ada. HoloLens goggles allow users to see both what’s in front of them and a virtual reality interface, a perspective Microsoft describes as “mixed reality.”

Even as the demand for the Ada was growing, COVID-19 was throwing a wrench into one of the ongoing projects using it: the Crown-Indigenous Relations and Northern Affairs Canada (CIRNAC) Giant Mine Remediation Project in Yellowknife. Due to social distancing restrictions, CIRNAC could no longer host large in-person community consultation meetings where people could view the plans through the Ada HoloLens, but BGC found a solution. “We’re working on turning the HoloLens mixed reality model into an iPhone model for augmented reality,” said Lato. “So anyone with an iPhone 7 or newer will be able to load the overlay, and view the city of Yellowknife and Giant mine and the underground mine and closure plans on their phone. It will be released in the fall.”

As of September 2020, the company has been asked to create an Android version as well. The targetted release date for that is January 2021.

BGC also developed another HoloLens-related technology to facilitate virtual meetings for a client. “They had a virtual board meeting set up with 10 individuals in Canada and the U.S. and there were technical aspects we wanted them to see in 3D,” said Lato. So BGC shipped HoloLenses to all attendees and adapted the software to enable everyone in the virtual meeting to view the same model. “If I have the HoloLens in my office, I can see it in front of me and I see floating avatars of the others where they are in relation to the model,” he said. “They can see what the others are looking at in the model and have a discussion and point to specific things and talk about them as if they were in the same room and looking at it together.”

SRK’s EasyMine maps the rock face, captures data about it and displays the information holographically, allowing miners to see both the real and the virtual worlds at the same time. Courtesy of SRK

BGC was not the only engineering company adapting HoloLens technology to meet COVID-19 challenges. SRK also adapted its HoloLens-based EasyMine XR collaborative mapping software to facilitate virtual site tours when on-site visits are not an option. EasyMine is equipped with a 3D scanner that enables the capture of detailed metadata and mapping of rock faces using holographic painting tools while also making it possible for the wearer to view the rock in front of them and existing data and information displayed holographically. “It just so happens some of the software can be used on interactive sessions on a desktop,” said James Siddorn, principal structural geologist and managing practice leader at SRK. EasyMine is now being used by the SRK team to conduct site tours interactively with client teams on-site.

Silver linings

Many of the engineering teams found working remotely with the new tools came with significant advantages. “You can have a person on site and have five or six other people reviewing the footage that comes in,” said Climenhaga. “It means that conventionally, where we would have sent out a single person or a couple depending on what’s feasible for the project, now we are able to bring in virtually all the professionals we need. So when you have the digital visit, you are getting as many experts as you need and those who are on-site. Or if you find there’s a problem you didn’t know about, you can bring another expert into the call. The value of these visits has skyrocketed and it’s reducing costs.”

Remote engineering can also speed up projects. “You can send an invite and within an hour, you can have a virtual meeting with a large contingent for a problem,” said Baumgard. “That’s something that in the past could have taken days or weeks to organize because people wanted to be there in person.”

It also increases safety. “A large portion of travel can be eliminated. Even outside the pandemic, sending specialists to mine sites carries inherent risks that have to be managed by proper training and other measures,” said Climenhaga. “A benefit of remote services is that they totally eliminate the safety risk by never having to step foot out of the office.”

The necessity of remote engineering through the pandemic has reduced the fear of the risk of trying out the new technologies. “I think what happens is when you get forced to do something like this, the fear goes away,” said Fantin. “People are incredibly resilient and innovative when they believe they don’t have a choice. And the other big thing is, when you are in this type of world, people are a lot less fearful of failure. Everyone believes we have to do this. If it fails, we just change it and we will make it work.”

The pandemic, said Lato, has increased the willingness of mining companies to embrace the new tools moving forward. “Some of the feedback we’ve had with successful trials is the clients aren’t seeing them as temporary replacements; they’re seeing them as a new way to engage with each other and with their projects,” he said.

Despite this, no one believes the virtual will completely replace site visits and face-to-face interaction for delivering engineering services anytime soon. If anything, the dramatic reduction in face-to-face human interaction has highlighted its importance and value. “If I’m coaching someone, for example, it’s way more effective in person,” said Bruno. “Technology isn’t there yet for that effectiveness to be achieved remotely, but it probably will be eventually.”

For engineers, “there are very strong benefits to going on site to get an impression of what’s going on in a mine,” said Siddorn. This might never change.

But, he added, “the relative balance has changed between site and desktop work and I hope we will see technologies be born out of this – new ways of working out of necessity,” he said. “There already was a strong interest in the digitalization of mining. So I’m hoping that enhances [it] and maybe [enhances] the movement to more remotely operated mining.”