Success Stories at Kumtor: Ruslan Kalykov, Heavy Duty Equipment Maintenance Electrician

published: 10 June 2022

Employees at the Kumtor Mine are now motivated to come up with and implement innovative ideas that significantly reduce the Company’s costs while improving production processes. With the transfer of the Mine under the control of Kyrgyzstan, new management introduced a policy of encouragement and bonuses, which gave workers a boost to creativity.

Ruslan Kalykov, Heavy-Duty Equipment Electrician of the Heavy-Duty Equipment Maintenance Department of the Kumtor Gold Company CJSC, is one of such enterprising employees of Kumtor. He proposed a project, which reduced idle time of heavy-duty equipment due to technical reasons.

As Kalykov said, fire-fighting cylinders with nitrogen were installed on the heavy equipment of the mine. The purpose of permanent installation of such cylinders is that during a fire hazard, a pin breaks out of them under pressure and powder is sprayed, which does not allow fire to spread and extinguishes the source of ignition. Their shelf life is from 5 to 10 years, and when it comes to an end, automatic system is triggered, and the equipment can no longer move until the cylinders are refilled.

Once there was a problem with the delivery of new nitrogen cylinders, and they were not available. Having examined the situation, the Company’s specialists concluded that they could solve the problem in a different way – with the help of available equipment and employees’ outstanding qualifications. Ruslan Kalykov also took an active part in the implementation of the project.

“We had auxiliary equipment, and we decided, with the support of management, to experiment: try to pump nitrogen into cylinders ourselves and see how we can do it. The results came out very good, otherwise the equipment would have been idle from two weeks to a month until the nitrogen cylinders arrived”, said the electrician.

Kalykov added that at the beginning, of course, there was a bit of anxiety, since the pressure is high and the tanks are small. But the experiment turned out better than expected, and now the equipment will not be idle.