- Open pit mines utilise staged construction, or phased development, involving an engineering sequence of mining “pushbacks” to reach the final pit limit.
- Each pushback would include the extraction of some number of benches simultaneously with operations including drilling, blasting, loading, and hauling.
- The constraints of simultaneous operations of access and amount of mining equipment would government the staged pit construction details and schedules.
- Planning is critical with a finite ore body and the uncertainty of ore body characteristics as the excavation proceeds whilst under changing economic prices and costs.
