According to preliminary estimates made by ALROSA’s sales service, ALROSA Group will sell about $400 million worth of rough and polished diamonds in September. In the first nine months, ALROSA plans to drive its sales to almost $3.175 billion. The company has disclosed this to Rough&Polished after the meeting held by Fyodor Andreev, President of ALROSA, with the heads of company divisions.
ALROSA says the world diamond market started to recover and the Russian diamond miner forecasts a promising growth in demand in the 4th quarter of 2012.
After the Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Atomic Supervision inspected Mir, ALROSA’s underground diamond mine, the company has developed an updated construction schedule for the mine draining horizon, the first phase of which is to be completed in October this year. In order to ensure operating safety until the commissioning of the first stage of draining horizon ALROSA suspended operations on the two upper levels of the underground mine.
The operations on its other horizons are going in normal mode.
However, the engineering services of ALROSA believe that construction of the draining horizon alone will not solve the problem completely. At the moment, ALROSA is working on an artificial increase of impervious properties of the "solid block" (bridge) between the bottom of the Mir open pit mine and its underground horizons. These works are not covered by the original design, but the current development of the mine proved their necessity, so they were agreed with the Federal Service for Ecological, Technological and Atomic Supervision and received the necessary permit from the point of view of industrial safety.
The meeting also discussed the results of the investigation into the death of workers at the Udachny Mine due to explosion of air and methane mixture. The main conclusion was that this had been a gross violation of labor safety, since the work team was permitted to operate in an unventilated pit.
It was decided to establish a system of triple control over the implementation of technical regulations to ensure the safety of people, which includes portable gas analyzers, a system of forced machinery stoppage in case of excess methane concentration in the air, and a system of continuous transmission of data on air condition in the mine from fixed sensors to the control station on the ground.
Alexander Shaburkin, Rough&Polished, Moscow
