In spring 1980, as Véronique Falmagne was graduating with a mining and mineral engineering degree from McGill University, a catastrophic crown pillar failure at the Belmoral gold mine in Val-d’Or, Quebec, killed eight miners. Four years later, Falmagne was breaking ground as Quebec’s only practising female underground mining engineer when a seismic event triggered a deadly rockburst at Falconbridge’s operation in Sudbury, Ontario, killing four miners.
These disasters led to new mining regulations, increased the presence of engineers underground, enabled the establishment of groundbreaking research at Canadian universities and forced the Canadian mining industry to confront the realities of rock mass behaviour and crown pillar stability risks—and focus on preventing rather than reacting to failures.
“It fundamentally changed the way we mine,” said Falmagne, who joined Agnico Eagle in 2012 and has been corporate director, rock engineering and ground control since 2024. “It marked the birth of ground control as we know it today, both in our understanding of what we’re doing and how we manage rock mass failure risk to keep people safe.”
Falmagne went on to become not only a trailblazer for women in Canadian mining engineering but also a significant contributor to shaping modern ground control.
In 1998, while pursuing a PhD in mining geomechanics and mine design at Queen’s University, Falmagne was hired as team leader for mining technology at the Noranda Technology Centre (NTC) in Quebec, then one of the world’s premier corporate mining, metallurgy and industrial research laboratories.
There, she advanced rock mechanics and ground control practices by leading a multidisciplinary team that integrated geomechanics, mine seismology, pastefill research, instrumentation and mine design into day-to-day mining operations. She also ran a leading-edge dynamic testing program for rock bolts and helped to modernize the industry through worker training, automation and the pioneering use of 3D GIS modelling for geomechanical data integration, hazard analysis and mine planning.
When the NTC closed in 2003, she spearheaded the transfer of the dynamic rock bolt testing program to Natural Resources Canada’s CanmetMINING laboratories.
“I am incredibly proud to have pioneered this initiative that ensured Canada retained its global leadership in the dynamic testing of rock bolts,” said Falmagne, who received CIM’s 2024 Rock Mechanics Award.
Over the decades, Falmagne has engineered solutions for several technically complex mining projects, including the design of an artificial crown pillar to enable secure in-pit tailings storage at Agnico Eagle’s Pinos Altos mine in Mexico and ground support applications for mining within and below permafrost at its Meliadine mine in Nunavut. She was also part of the team that redesigned and reopened the Goldex mine in Quebec in 2013 after it was shut down in 2011 due to ground stability issues.
Today, she leads and inspires teams that manage seismic risk at several underground operations, including the LaRonde mine in Quebec—the deepest in Canada at over 3,200 metres—with advances in dynamic ground support systems within some of the most demanding underground environments in the world. She also remains at the forefront of rock mass characterization and the development of geotechnical models for mine design, and drives the testing of advanced digital tools—from core scanning and drone-based imaging to LiDAR and AI-assisted data analysis.
“We need to be aware of what technologies are out there, but also that they’re not going to solve all [our] problems,” said Falmagne. “We have to know how to use them to our advantage. It’s also [about] hiring people who have the intellectual curiosity and knowledge to test and adapt them for our industry’s needs.”
Thanks to Falmagne and other female trailblazers, many of those people will be women.
