Alasdair is a geotechnical engineer with over 20 years of international experience in both consultancy and operational roles for open pit mining. He has worked across the full project lifecycle, from geotechnical investigation and design to establishing operational geotechnical departments and implementing industry‑standard practices and procedures.
His operational background provides strong practical expertise in Open Pit slope stability assessment, monitoring, proactive redesign, and remediation of active zones of instability to support safe and continuous mining.
As Technical Lead of the Geotechnical and Hydrogeological Department for SRK Kazakhstan, supporting Central Asia, Alasdair delivers practical, reliable, and tailored geotechnical solutions. His approach combines appropriate levels of geotechnical design with the development of fully integrated, effective operational geotechnical teams.
Resilience based design; benefits, practicalities, and operational realities
Assessing the resilience of an open pit begins with understanding the scale and significance of its geotechnical risks. Resilience reflects the capacity of a geotechnical design to tolerate, withstand, or safely respond to adverse events without compromising overall mine stability or operational continuity.
Building resilience into slope designs is essential for identifying where the greatest geotechnical risks lie and where uncertainty must be reduced through improved investigation, monitoring, or modelling.
A resilience based design approach evaluates potential impacts to slope performance at a scale where slope instability is becomes problematic for a mining operation, disregarding minor instabilities that are easily managed operationally with little disruption, and regardless of whether specific failure geometries can be fully defined through modelling. This perspective recognises that even without explicit failure surface predictions, the consequences of instability can be anticipated and appropriately mitigated.
By identifying high consequence areas and understanding their associated uncertainties, engineers can prioritise data collection, refine design criteria, and strengthen operational controls through integration of the geotechnical and hydrogeological operational teams into the mining cycle.
Overall, resilience based design offers a structured approach for identifying where geotechnical uncertainty has the greatest impact on slope performance. By strengthening the robustness and adaptability of open pit designs, this approach helps ensure that mining operations remain safe, stable, and efficient. It also enables geotechnical and hydrogeological teams to prioritise proactive management of high risk areas, while continually identifying and evaluating newly emerging geotechnical exposures as the pit develops.
