There is a common perception that mining jobs are for men. However in Oyu Tolgoi, Mongolia’s world-class mining company, women and men work side by side operating machinery including some of the heaviest mining trucks in the world. I recently went to the Oyu Tolgoi site to meet with one of these female pioneers.
Giant trucks carrying earth and ore carefully drive on gradually ascending roadways. You can see this continuous caravan of heavy machinery from far away. The cabins of the trucks are situated high up on the machinery meaning the operators can’t see nearby things, people or animals. Therefore, for safety reasons, you can only communicate with the trucks by radio. We contacted a female operator and arranged a time to meet. According to Oyu Tolgoi’s strict safety rules, operators who are breaking for lunch have to park their trucks by placing the rear tires in shallow pits. This prevents the trucks accidently moving. After parking her truck safely, G.Solongo came down to meet me.
There are less than a dozen women who work as operators of the heavy mining trucks at Oyu Tolgoi. G.Solongo is from western region of Altai and works as a truck operator in the open pit mine.
The story of how Solongo became a truck operator is fasicnating. She was working as a cook in a mine operating in the Gobi-Altai aimag but was more interested in the large mining trucks and heavy equipment that she saw every day. She heard the miners talking about the operator course run by the company Wagner Asia and signed up as a trainee straight away. Solongo was the only female on the course and at first, the trainers were reluctant to accept her. They asked her if she really wanted to learn to operate the trucks and whether she had any experience running and operating equipment and machinery.
She insisted that she was committed to learning and becoming a heavy truck driver. Once the theory side of the course was complete, practical training began at the Baganuur coal mine, where her desire to be a truck driver also caused surprise. She even doubted her ability when she saw the size and scale of a heavy mining truck for the first time. She remembers thinking: “Wow, it’s so big. Will I be able to drive and operate this?” After completing the course, she heard that Oyu Tolgoi was recruiting for a heavy truck operator, applied for the position and soon began to work for the company.
It’s now over three years since Solongo began to work as an open pit truck operator for Oyu Tolgoi. “Of the 150 truck operators at the open pit mine, only three are women. Although, there are such a small number of us, we are completely equal to our male colleagues,” she says. Operating heavy mining trucks is a very interesting job. From the outside, it may seem like all we have to do is turn the steering wheel, but it requires so much concentration and ability. It is a lot of responsibility, especially during difficult weather such as rain or snow.”
It is noisy in the cabin and working the long shifts through the day or night can be difficult. However, Solongo has never felt discouraged because she enjoys her job so much.
People who are unfamiliar with mining often don’t believe Solongo when she tells them what she does for her job. Her family knows about the giant size of the truck that she drives from the pictures she has taken of them, standing by the giant wheels. “I think that soon, many more women will become operators,” says Solongo. “The main thing is that you have to be passionate about the job and enjoy it. Then you are bound to be successful.”
The truck she operates is a 2,700-3,500 horsepower, Komatsu 930E-4SE dump truck. The latest models of Toyota Land Cruisers which we see on the roads of Ulaanbaatar are 381 horsepower, making Solongo’s truck almost ten times more powerful. In each trip, it carries 290 tonnes. The Soviet made Zil-130s that have dominated Mongolian mining for many years would have to make 58 trips to carry the same load. The Komatsu is 15 metres wide and 18 metres long. The height of each tire is almost 3 metres and fuel tank capacity is 4.5 tonnes. Of the 1,000 trucks of this type around the world, 28 are working in the open pit mine at Oyu Tolgoi.
G.Solongo is happy to admit that despite the fact that her truck is the largest available, if ever an even more powerful truck came to Oyu Tolgoi, she would be first in line to operate it. In the poem, Where I was born by the famous Mongolian poet, B.Yavuukhulan, there is a line which says, “I was born in the stirrups of a mighty horse.” Now, instead of the horse, in the Southern Gobi, Mongolian women have become masters of the most modern, mighty mining trucks in the world. At Oyu Tolgoi, thousands of young people are training and working in jobs they are passionate about. Each day, they are creating a bright future for Mongolia.
Ch.Batpurev
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