Montana Tech Mine Rescue

Today marks our final practice before the Montana Tech Mine Rescue Team travels to Sudbury, Ontario to compete in the 2026 North American University Mine Rescue Competition.

This season has been built on more than drills and scenarios — it has been built on the generosity, expertise, and mentorship of industry professionals who stepped up to train our students.

A sincere thank you to the individuals and organizations who invested their time in preparing this team:

Jennmar – Tyler Lovato
The Peak Inc. – Rod Alne
Sibanye-Stillwater – Delroy Boese & NikKayla Simon
Butte-Silver Bow Fire Department – Captain Brant Bristol & Captain Chris Mjelde
Turnstone Industrial – Jeff White & Bryon Cerklefskie
Dräger – Darrel Lewis

From breathing apparatus maintenance and troubleshooting to rope systems, ventilation control, fire behavior, and medical responder training, your real-world expertise has strengthened this team’s preparation in ways that simply cannot be replicated in a classroom.

Our students are more confident, technically prepared, and disciplined because of your leadership. We are proud to represent Montana Tech next week — and proud to represent the industry partners who helped prepare us.

For those interested in supporting the team as we continue building this program, sponsorship information can be found here: https://mtechminerescue.givesmart.com

It’s been a busy semester for our Mine Rescue team. In September we held the first ever Montana Tech Mine Rescue Competition in which our team received second place in the field portion of the competition. Other teams that were involved were South Dakota School of Mines and Colorado School of Mines. Later in the year our team helped the World Museum of Mining put on there Haunted Mine Tour. We would like to thank all of our sponsors that helped us put on the competition and hope to get more things rolling in the new year.

Montana Technological University Mine Rescue Help Montana Tech raise $30,000 for the project: Montana Technological University Mine Rescue. Your gift will make a difference!

This weekend we held a initial certification class for our BG-4 self-contained breathing aperatus! With this class our team now has 8 certified BG-4 bench technicians that will allow us to train under oxygen and bench our BG-4 units in preparation for our mine rescue contest we are hosting at Montana Tech in September! Big thanks to Darrell and Harry from Draeger and Cindy with Jennmar for putting on a amazing class!

Our team held training today at our Underground Mine Education Center (UMEC) for some practical mine rescue training! Really excited to watch this team develop as we get ready to host Montana Tech's first mine rescue competition in September 2021!

This weekend the team got together for some introductory rope rescue training with Rod down at The PEAK, Inc. Our team is looking forward to building our own rope rescue kit so we can continue to work on our technical rescue skills!

Since our team was supposed to be in Kellogg,Idaho this week competing at the Central Mine Rescue competition we wanted to share some pictures from last years competition!

Just wanted to say thank you to Dräger for putting on a great tech competition for the collegiate teams present at this years SME conference in Phoenix! Always a great experience dealing with your team! Our team took first in gas, second in first aid and bench with an overall second place finish!

Hello Everyone! Another great year ahead of us and we are starting at an all-out sprint. Our first big event of the year is our first appearance at the Miner's Union Day festival in downtown Philipsburg, MT on September 12th-13th. Come stop by our booth and chat with the team! GO DIGGERS!

Hey everyone! I hope you all had a good summer break. Now that school is again approaching us sadly it's time to get back into the flow of things. Here are some updates.

We are looking to have our first meeting sometime in the first 2 weeks of classes. Well talk about where we stand right now and where we want to be by our next meeting.

Also we are looking for someone who can handle the emails for the mine rescue team. Someone who will be timely and professional on handling all of our emails and trying to gather donations. Talk to Luke or Arthur if you are interested in this job.

Thanks everyone ! Enjoy the last bit of summer!