When the COVID-19 crisis started to ramp up globally in March, Michael Gribbons, cofounder of Lively, Ont.-based Maestro Digital Mine, spent hours each day trying to learn as much as possible about the novel coronavirus and get a sense of its big picture implications.
“The safety of the miners both nationally and globally is of utter critical importance to us, it’s really our key purpose,” said Gribbons, who’s also the company’s vice-president of marketing and sales. “So we have to remain open, there’s no other way.”
Maestro makes environmental sensors, as well as easy-to-install hardware that allows digital communications at the mine face. Its products are aimed at improving both safety and productivity in underground mines. As an Ontario-based supplier to the mining sector, the company operates as an essential service and has been exempted from province-mandated closures of non-essential businesses that started Mar. 24.
At the start of the crisis, the company put a leadership team and plan in place to ensure that first, the team and their family members stayed healthy, and second, the company remained financially healthy. (With David Ballantyne, Maestro’s cofounder and vice-president of development and technology, having a spouse and two daughters working in the health care system, the fight against COVID-19 is personal.)
Read More on this article on the Canadian Mining Journal website (April 20, 2020).