His career includes 14 years in various mine geotechnical roles in South Africa, 5 years in a mining house corporate role providing geotechnical oversight and assurance to global operations and projects, and 11 years in consulting. Desmond gained discipline management and corporate oversight, assurance and advisory experience at South African mining operations, including Thabazimbi Iron Ore Mine, Palabora Mining Company and Mogalakwena Platinum Mine, after which he provided global geotechnical oversight and assurance for Anglo American corporate office, servicing operations in South Africa, Botswana, Chile, Brazil, Canada and Australia, in Iron Ore, Copper, Platinum and associated base metals, Diamonds, Niobium, Phosphates and Coal, and represented Anglo American on the Large Open Pit (LOP) and Hybrid Stress Blasting Model (HSBM) study groups. He managed the geotechnical discipline at several large open pit operations and was responsible for several pit slope design optimisations, limit blast optimisations, as well as the first radar slope monitoring implementation in Africa. Desmond gained experience in sub-level caving and block caving at mine level, including aspects such as geological and structural modelling, fragmentation analysis, support design, draw modelling, caving induced seismicity, surface and groundwater management, and pit to underground interaction and transition, and at corporate level in international project and operational review work. Since joining SRK in 2014, Desmond has worked in several African countries, including South Africa, Ghana, the DRC, Cameroon, Namibia, Lesotho, Zambia, Zimbabwe, Burkina Faso, Senegal, Côte d'Ivoire and Botswana in the geotechnical aspects of due diligence, technical reviews, concept, pre-feasibility and feasibility studies, general geotechnical site support, data acquisition programmes and geotechnical design. His commodity experience now additionally includes gold, manganese, zinc, lithium and uranium and he has served on international Geotechnical Review Panels for several operations. Desmond has a proven track record providing geotechnical solutions to open pit and underground massive mining operations. This experience includes hardrock, laterite and saprolite environments, working within structurally complex terrains and with deleterious materials in pit slopes, such as reactive clays.
