Emptying his inbox: Todd Hubbard retires after 35 years

The former Homestake Mine had an intensive, hands-on training program for young engineers. In 1991, fresh out of college from South Dakota Mines, Todd Hubbard got the full experience.

“The training program for civil, mechanical, or electrical engineers was a one-year basic internship across the entire property. So basically, we started inside the mine mucking the drainage ditch—spending roughly six months with the mine department, then about four months with the mechanical department, and then a couple months with the metallurgy department. So, I did everything from mucking, to mining the rock, to processing the rock, to pouring the gold in the refinery,” Hubbard said.

At the time, Homestake employed more than 1100 people. For Hubbard, getting to know many of them in the first year, and understanding the challenges, pain points and problems his colleagues encountered across the operation was an invaluable learning experience that he carried throughout his career.

“I knew how valuable that would be to be able to get my feet on the ground, get to know the entire operation and the people you’re working with. Of course, they’re going to tell you their problems with their job, so there was that basis for forming that relationship with employees throughout the company. Having the knowledge of when they talked about a level, or part of the processing plant, or anywhere on the property, this first-hand experience gave you a big head start on things,” Hubbard said.

Those he met while working at Homestake included physicists such as Ken Lande with the University of Pennsylvania, who worked alongside Ray Davis on the 4850 Level solar neutrino experiment.

“It was great to get to see what these scientists are striving to learn about,” Hubbard said. “Dr. Lande explained the Davis Experiment to me. Given my limited knowledge of just two semesters of physics from the university, he walked me through the research from what a neutrino is, to the big tank of dry-cleaning fluid on the 4850 Level, and how the solar neutrinos would come from the sun and how they were detecting them.”

Davis would go on to win a Nobel Prize for that experiment a handful of years later, shortly after the closure of the Homestake Mine. Hubbard stayed on as an engineer for Barrick Gold, owner of Homestake, through the closure. He helped maintain the water treatment plant and designed a large heating plant to enable the treatment of Grizzly Gulch tailings water.

“After the mine closed, one of the big challenges we had was continuing to operate the water treatment plant without warm underground water,” Hubbard said. “We were going to bring roughly 1,000 gallons a minute in from the Grizzly Gulch tailings facility, but in the winter, after it freezes over, pulling the water from the bottom side of the ice was a challenge. So, I put in a boiler plant, an instantaneous heater that could heat 1,000 gallons a minute from 32 degrees to 60 degrees instantly.”

This large heating plant is just one of many projects Hubbard completed on site during his career. His work continued with Barrick after the closure of Homestake until about 2016, when he did a stint at a large copper mine in Indonesia.

“Homestake was a huge operation in the mining industry. That operation, the Grasberg Mine in Indonesia, was 10 times bigger. I went from big to biggest,” Hubbard said.

Hubbard returned to the Sanford Underground Research Facility (SURF) in 2018. His career has spanned the arc from the full operation of the former mine to the creation and expansion of America’s deepest underground laboratory. In his final years at SURF, Hubbard led the massive overhaul of the facility’s water treatment plant—ensuring clean water downstream in Gold Run Creek and Whitewood Creek.

“Water treatment is very critical and crucial to protect these waterways,” Hubbard said. “Anybody that goes down to the creek and decides to drop a line and do a little fly fishing, those trout will be there for them in the decades to come.”

One bit of advice Hubbard has for younger engineers starting out in the field: Pace yourself. It’s a lesson he learned as a college intern at John Deere, when he spoke with a seasoned engineer who had an inbox full of projects in the works.

“I learned you’ll never empty that inbox. There’s always something going on and there is always more that needs to be done. Learn to prioritize, and don’t break your neck trying to do it all at once, or you’ll just burn out,” Hubbard said.

Today, Hubbard’s inbox is empty for the first time in 35 years. But it won’t stay that way. In retirement, he is not slowing down. He’s looking forward to spending more time on projects, including building racing snowmobiles in a new shop he has just completed. He’s also continuing his own consulting business, Sundance Engineering, putting his decades of experience to work on engineering projects still to come.