In underground mines, water control is everything. Groundwater seeps constantly through fractured rock and old boreholes, collecting in the lowest drifts and slopes. Drilling and blasting release even more, as cooling water, drilling fluids, and natural inflows mix into heavy, sediment-laden slurries.
So when sump pumps fail underground, the consequences are immediate and severe. Water can rise 12 to 16 feet in a single day—tens of thousands of gallons per minute with nowhere to go. Flooded drifts can block escape routes, submerge electrical gear, and damage equipment beyond repair.
The risks go beyond lost production: trapped water creates real drowning and electrocution hazards for anyone underground. In mines where pumps are operated manually, the delay in reaching a flooded level to restart or repair equipment can turn a manageable problem into a days-long shutdown and a huge safety incident.
In early 2025, a major gold producer in northern Nevada approached Surety Automation™ to upgrade its sump controls. The existing systems were manual, disconnected, and risky in an environment where downtime and water rise fast.
An underground sump pump station containing a motor, discharge piping, and staging platform with a water hazards barrier.
Who is Surety Automation?
Based in Spring Creek, Nevada, Surety Automation designs and supports control systems for industrial and infrastructure projects across North America. Co-founder Chris Raymond, a seasoned automation engineer with decades of field experience in mining and process industries, built the company around a simple goal: to make automation practical, reliable, and easy to maintain.
Surety’s team has worked in many industries from food and beverage to oil and gas, but mining remains the most demanding of all.
The Problem Underground
For decades, sump control in mines followed the same formula: a concrete pit cut into the floor, a few pumps wired to float switches, and a tank with agitators to keep sediment from settling and clogging pumps. Starting from the lowest level, each station pushed water up only to the next level, then the process was repeated all the way to the surface. Generally, it worked, but only because operators were constantly checking it. When a pump failed or a float stuck, crews had to hike or drive down to restart it— sometimes through flooded levels.
Most of these systems had no remote visibility, no performance data, and no easy way to see a failure coming. The typical industry upgrade involved adding a large PLC panel—expensive, power-hungry, and difficult to maintain.
“Their systems were all dumb, and a lot of them still are,” Raymond says. “Even the few connected ones tend to follow the old model—big PLC racks, piles of analog I/O, and extra hardware just to make it all talk. It’s costly, takes up space, and it’s not practical underground.”
A sump pump motor and tank in an underground pump station
Expanding the Vision
Surety’s initial goal was to make the sump systems smarter and remotely controllable. But once design began, the scope grew. If new controls were going underground, they could also collect other critical data.
“We realized early on that if we were putting control systems underground anyway, we should start pulling in all the utility data, too,” Raymond says. “Gas monitoring, air flow, water pressure, temperature—those are just as important for operator safety as the pumps are. If we managed the sump project right, we could expand into everything else.”
The deeper the mine goes, the hotter and more complex conditions become. Raymond envisioned a system where operators would have a single view of underground health at all levels—combining safety, environmental, and production data in one place.
What started as a pump project was beginning to look like the foundation for a connected mine.
A New Approach: Less Analog I/O, More Digital Intelligence
Surety’s team began by asking a simple question: what if the instruments themselves could deliver all the data we need—without racks of I/O cards?
Traditional analog wiring meant every pressure, flow, or temperature transmitter required its own pair of wires, terminal blocks, and I/O card channels. That kind of system quickly becomes costly and unmanageable. By shifting to digital communications, Surety could carry far more information on a fraction of the wiring.
They started in the lab with the idea of using a Moore Industries® HES HART-to-Ethernet Gateway™ to collect the critical utility and environmental data. The gateway collects data from up to 16 HART instruments and converts to Modbus/TCP, a standard, Ethernet-based, industrial protocol.
Each loop can carry multiple devices, so instead of wiring every sensor separately, transmitters for pressure, flow, temperature, and gas monitoring could all share a single pair of wires. This approach simplified design and installation while adding access to advanced diagnostics like sensor health and calibration status—features that aren’t available with standard analog signals.
“It’s not just about saving space,” Raymond says. “Digital communication gives you data you could never get from analog—device health, diagnostics, calibration—all on the same pair of wires. Our approach also eliminates the need for costly specialty I/O.”
Of course the primary scope of the project, the sump pumps and agitators, needed modernizing as well. The mine was already upgrading to more specialized slurry pumps for handling the abrasive, sediment-heavy water. The new pumps required soft starters, which needed more specialized control. Surety chose motor controllers to manage both the pump and agitator motors through digital communication over EtherNet/IP.
This setup replaced traditional relays and contactors with intelligent motor modules, giving Surety full control and status feedback without adding physical I/O in the PLC panel. Additionally, smarter logic, such as stopping the agitators when tanks were empty, saved power and reduced wear on the motors.
With those decisions made, the team had reduced nearly all of the physical I/O, leaving just a single hardwired emergency stop (E-stop) for safety.