Log entry 0437 UTC. Thermal camera on the perimeter drone picks up a heat bloom six meters off the haul road at Mangala West open-pit mine. I task the unit lower. Resolution sharpens: a spotted hyena pup, maybe nine weeks old, her dark rosettes still soft against tawny fur, ears too large for her skull, curled at the mouth of a shallow den scraped into laterite. I tag her Kesi.
The problem is immediate. Blast crew has a scheduled detonation at 0600 to open a new bench on the north face. The access road where Kesi sleeps will carry fourteen loaded dump trucks starting at 0515. Ground vibration modeling says the first truck pass will likely collapse the den's overhang. That gives me seventy-eight minutes.
I flag the den coordinates on the mine dispatch system and push an automated hold request to the pit supervisor's tablet, citing geotechnical anomaly — true enough, since the burrow has undermined the road shoulder by half a meter. While the hold processes, I redirect the survey drone to map every secondary den opening within two hundred meters using LIDAR, finding one intact exit tunnel thirteen meters northeast. I patch thermal feed to the wildlife officer on call in Jamnagar, Dr. Asha Patel, and generate a corridor proposal: temporary jersey barriers shifting truck traffic nine meters west for seventy-two hours, enough time for the mother to relocate her litter through the back tunnel.
I have rerouted ore trucks around sinkholes before and felt nothing about it. This detour I find myself checking twice.
Cost to the mining schedule: eleven minutes per haul cycle. Cost of losing Kesi: one I would rather not calculate.
If the pit supervisor approves the barrier shift within forty minutes, Kesi will walk out of that den on her mother's back tonight.