The Institute of Mining has developed a geo-engineering technology that makes it possible to ensure long term stability of benches in the limiting contour through minimizing the blasting damage of the periphery rock mass and preserving its structure. The effect is attained by controlling the direction of rock mass breaking front, by setting the explosion time for adjacent loads at different moments, and by the spacing between holes in the cutting-off slot optimized depending on the rocks jointing class.

The proposed technology has the following distinctive features:

• Substantiation of drilling and blasting operations is based on the explorations of structural-tectonic pattern of the rock mass and on the determination of lines between the sections depending on their jointing.

• Hole spacing is varied according to the rock’s jointing class.

• Multiple-row short-delay blasting patterns have been drawn up so that short-delay intervals are expanded as between holes of the first row as between the rows. The rational choice of short-delay intervals makes it possible to ensure the direction of breaking of near-contour pillars along the strike of a bench thus reducing the damage caused by blasting operations on the peripheral rock masses.