I haven't given up on this blog, I've just not taken the time to sit down and write. I've got about half a dozen posts sitting in my head, I just haven't digitised them yet. I was awakened to this fact by a certain cyber-stalker of mine so now I feel guilty enough to start typing, cheers Loz ;P
I'm flying back to the UK in 5 days for a 2week holiday including DOWNLOAD!!! Can't wait! I'll be going home to see my Mum and my WSM friends for two days before heading to Fal for two days before heading to Download and then back to Fal for the remainder of my time at home.
Work is better now as I've started to move around the departments so I've spent a week with the surveyors which included a day on the beach at Wollongong and I'll be moving on to gas drainage and geology when I get back at the end of June.
I've also got a bunch of new housemates, a couple living opposite me, a new girl replacing a now-ex-boyfriend at the back of the house and a soon-to-be-found tenant for the apartment below me. Unfortunately the couple living there who have become my good friends have been evicted for some rather spurious noise complaints. They're leaving tomorrow and so I should have one or two new housemates by the time I get back from the UK.
I've been partying pretty hard with both my housemates and some guys I met through them so my Facebook and Myspace are chocka with new pics... check them out.
31 May 2009
I'm still alive
But barely breathing. Have had the flu and I'm still coughing 3wks later :(
All right, here’s some technical stuff for you. I’ve decided to do a fairly long post covering the technical side of the mine I’m at. I know that most of the people reading this have no interest in mining whatsoever but it should give you a better idea of the conditions I’m working in and hopefully more of what I say will make sense. I’m hoping to get the OK to take the mine’s digital camera underground with me to get some pics so you’ll have a frame of reference. There are some funny bits in here too so don’t write it off too soon (funny being entirely subject to my twisted sense of humour). Technical terms will be kept to a minimum, if you don’t understand one, Google it, you lazy fuck.
All right, first off, the mine that I’m working at shall now be known as TC. It’s a longwall mine about an hour south of Sydney that produces hard coking coal with damn-near-perfect chemical composition putting it in the top 2% of all hard coking coal for desirability. It has its own rail loading facilities and its own washery (for washing the stone and crap out of the coal) which again boosts the mines viability by a large factor. TC is about 2km from the nearest town and approx 9.3km from my front door. This means that the new longwall blocks run under the town of T, the freeway running south from Sydney and the main train line from Sydney to Melbourne. Luckily we’ve only caused enough damage to demolish 3 houses and substantially rebuild another 3 so far… oops. The trains are also speed-limited above the mining area which is costing the mine about $30,000 a week in charges from the various freight/passenger services! There is also a large river only a few km down the road and to cap it off a fault (big crack in the earth) called the Nepean Fault as well as several smaller ones run through the mining area. Faults in coal mining terms mean lots of water, lots of methane/CO gas and potentially a lot of deaths if someone fucks up and mines into one.
TC has had a fair few owners over the last 15yrs or so, mainly because it’s an expensive mine to run and the Union have their claws in deep. Finally it’s been bought by “X” who are the first multi-national company with a lot of experience to own the mine. Unfortunately this has caused a fair bit of angst among the workforce simply because X isn’t stupid enough to bankrupt itself pandering to all the petty demands of the Union unlike several of the previous owners. The constant change of upper management hasn’t helped this either as a decent working relationship between the “feds” and the “staff” can take years to develop. For those not familiar with the lingo (like me 4 weeks ago) the “feds” are the workers and the “staff” is all of the office workers, engineers and management types that stay on the surface. There is an awful lot of resentment between the two groups because the feds are convinced that the staff just wants to make their lives a misery with endless paperwork, not enough overtime and poor decisions while the staff is convinced that the feds are lazy, stupid and can’t be trusted to do the job properly. Unfortunately they are both right to a certain degree so I’ll leave that sleeping dog right there…
Access underground is by a “dolly car” on train tracks which is raised and lowered on the 2km drift by a winder. The secondary means of egress (escape) is the drift belt, which means lying everyone down on the belt and starting it up, hopefully stopping it before anyone gets launched onto the stockpile. There are two shafts, no.2 and no.3 which are primarily ventilation but no.3 is soon to have a 20 man cage fitted for escape if there is a fire in the drift. I got lucky and got to help out with an exercise where we had to load an injured guy on a stretcher into the existing cage in no.2 shaft. Now I know that I’m only a student but having done a fair amount of hoisting techniques and the minimum standards for man riding cages etc I was shocked. For nearly twenty years the workforce at TC has been relying on no.2 shaft in the event of a fire at pit bottom or in the drift. I can confidently say that they would have had casualties, if not a large number of deaths. The shaft has but a single cage, capable of carrying 5 people OR a stretcher and 1 person. The journey to surface takes 6 minutes and the round-trip is nearly 15 with loading times. It would take over 7hrs to evacuate all workers at that rate! The fact that this system was implemented before it was compulsory to have compressed air breathing units underground makes it even more shocking. Until 12 months ago the trapped workers would have had to survive on whatever fresh air reached down the shaft… completely inadequate to keep 300 blokes alive I can tell you. Now however, thanks to new legislation all coal mines have to have CABA units (air tanks with masks) in each panel, near the working face with refill stations and spares every 1500m. There is also a large “fresh air base” near the shaft which has enough spare units and refill stations to keep everyone underground alive until they can get out. I won’t even start on the lack of guides for the cage and the likelihood of rope entanglement etc etc….
The underground conditions are pretty varied depending on which area of the mine you go to, the older workings are pretty much dry but prone to roof falls and have high gas levels due to all the goaf (mined out) areas which bleed gas through poorly sealed tunnels. The current workings are slightly sloped due to them following the 2m seam as it rises and falls. This means that at one end of the longwall there is a development panel which is very dry and has few gas problems meaning good advance rates and a lot of coal cut. The end I’m working at however is at one of the lowest points in the mine and we constantly have water and gas problems. We wade through about 200m of mud to get to the face and that’s with a dozen pumps running 24/7, you can see water bubbling out of the floor and it can rise several feet in a few hours. This end of the mine is very close to a large fault which wasn’t detected in the original survey so a couple of years ago they were mining right towards it until the roof started falling in on a daily basis and they left a continuous miner overnight to find it underwater in the morning. That means that they have had to abandon a large section of tunnels and cut them all over again to re-route the conveyors and service pipes (water, air etc) at a huge cost and time delay. As of this week there are now 3 panels working in different areas, plus the longwall. This is stretching them right to the limit as there are 5 continuous miners in operation, each needing a whole raft of support such as shuttle-cars, LHD’s, conveyors, boot ends, ventilation etc. plus the manpower to operate them. The two longwall development panels are operated as “super panels” with two CM’s each driving one heading plus cut-through's. The third panel which is replacing the failed panel mentioned above has just one CM but has 4 headings plus cut-through’s to drive. They have the added pressure of knowing that if they are excessively delayed that the old panel might have a major roof fall and so halt all longwall and half the development production until they can finish.
That brings me nicely on to the state of the machinery at the mine. It has been in operation for over twenty years and has replaced its machinery several times. However the current batch ranges from 3-12yrs old and is plagued with problems. Thanks to the constant need to be cutting coal and making money, over the year’s maintenance schedules have slipped and once this happens they never recover. This means that machines which really need to be dragged up to surface and completely overhauled are simply kept in service with a series of minor repairs. This is incredibly wasteful and my panel alone spent nearly an entire week sitting on our arses because our CM was out of action thanks to mechanical problems. The more downtime we have, the more targets slip behind and so when we resume production we have to try and make up the lost time which means the machines are pushed too hard and break down again. This cycle is perpetual and the only way it will change is if, God forbid, the mine is forced into care and maintenance and all the machines are pulled out and replaced or fully serviced. A prime example is the state of the transport fleet; there are supposedly 16 underground transports available yet in reality this is never more than 10 due to repairs etc. All it takes is for one or two to breakdown underground and suddenly no one can move around as all the available transport is being used. This happens at least once a week, only a few days ago a group of us including our panel deputy (like a shift boss) were stuck at pit bottom because there weren’t enough serviceable vehicles to get us into the panel. There is a single grader to keep the roads in a fit state; this was recently away for 5wks for a full service and in that time we were losing a vehicle nearly every day due to damage from bad roads…
Ok, confession time, the above 1500 words were written a month ago! I’ve been incredibly slack about typing this stuff up but luckily there’s not much more to say… We’ve now got a 6th miner and shuttle car on surface waiting for the current maingate/tailgate development to finish so it can go into mains development in 900 panel. We seem to have escaped the worst of the economic downturn, the last month has been full of rumours about the pit being shut and mass lay-offs etc but we’ve had a few more small orders to keep the place ticking over. More later…
All right, here’s some technical stuff for you. I’ve decided to do a fairly long post covering the technical side of the mine I’m at. I know that most of the people reading this have no interest in mining whatsoever but it should give you a better idea of the conditions I’m working in and hopefully more of what I say will make sense. I’m hoping to get the OK to take the mine’s digital camera underground with me to get some pics so you’ll have a frame of reference. There are some funny bits in here too so don’t write it off too soon (funny being entirely subject to my twisted sense of humour). Technical terms will be kept to a minimum, if you don’t understand one, Google it, you lazy fuck.
All right, first off, the mine that I’m working at shall now be known as TC. It’s a longwall mine about an hour south of Sydney that produces hard coking coal with damn-near-perfect chemical composition putting it in the top 2% of all hard coking coal for desirability. It has its own rail loading facilities and its own washery (for washing the stone and crap out of the coal) which again boosts the mines viability by a large factor. TC is about 2km from the nearest town and approx 9.3km from my front door. This means that the new longwall blocks run under the town of T, the freeway running south from Sydney and the main train line from Sydney to Melbourne. Luckily we’ve only caused enough damage to demolish 3 houses and substantially rebuild another 3 so far… oops. The trains are also speed-limited above the mining area which is costing the mine about $30,000 a week in charges from the various freight/passenger services! There is also a large river only a few km down the road and to cap it off a fault (big crack in the earth) called the Nepean Fault as well as several smaller ones run through the mining area. Faults in coal mining terms mean lots of water, lots of methane/CO gas and potentially a lot of deaths if someone fucks up and mines into one.
TC has had a fair few owners over the last 15yrs or so, mainly because it’s an expensive mine to run and the Union have their claws in deep. Finally it’s been bought by “X” who are the first multi-national company with a lot of experience to own the mine. Unfortunately this has caused a fair bit of angst among the workforce simply because X isn’t stupid enough to bankrupt itself pandering to all the petty demands of the Union unlike several of the previous owners. The constant change of upper management hasn’t helped this either as a decent working relationship between the “feds” and the “staff” can take years to develop. For those not familiar with the lingo (like me 4 weeks ago) the “feds” are the workers and the “staff” is all of the office workers, engineers and management types that stay on the surface. There is an awful lot of resentment between the two groups because the feds are convinced that the staff just wants to make their lives a misery with endless paperwork, not enough overtime and poor decisions while the staff is convinced that the feds are lazy, stupid and can’t be trusted to do the job properly. Unfortunately they are both right to a certain degree so I’ll leave that sleeping dog right there…
Access underground is by a “dolly car” on train tracks which is raised and lowered on the 2km drift by a winder. The secondary means of egress (escape) is the drift belt, which means lying everyone down on the belt and starting it up, hopefully stopping it before anyone gets launched onto the stockpile. There are two shafts, no.2 and no.3 which are primarily ventilation but no.3 is soon to have a 20 man cage fitted for escape if there is a fire in the drift. I got lucky and got to help out with an exercise where we had to load an injured guy on a stretcher into the existing cage in no.2 shaft. Now I know that I’m only a student but having done a fair amount of hoisting techniques and the minimum standards for man riding cages etc I was shocked. For nearly twenty years the workforce at TC has been relying on no.2 shaft in the event of a fire at pit bottom or in the drift. I can confidently say that they would have had casualties, if not a large number of deaths. The shaft has but a single cage, capable of carrying 5 people OR a stretcher and 1 person. The journey to surface takes 6 minutes and the round-trip is nearly 15 with loading times. It would take over 7hrs to evacuate all workers at that rate! The fact that this system was implemented before it was compulsory to have compressed air breathing units underground makes it even more shocking. Until 12 months ago the trapped workers would have had to survive on whatever fresh air reached down the shaft… completely inadequate to keep 300 blokes alive I can tell you. Now however, thanks to new legislation all coal mines have to have CABA units (air tanks with masks) in each panel, near the working face with refill stations and spares every 1500m. There is also a large “fresh air base” near the shaft which has enough spare units and refill stations to keep everyone underground alive until they can get out. I won’t even start on the lack of guides for the cage and the likelihood of rope entanglement etc etc….
The underground conditions are pretty varied depending on which area of the mine you go to, the older workings are pretty much dry but prone to roof falls and have high gas levels due to all the goaf (mined out) areas which bleed gas through poorly sealed tunnels. The current workings are slightly sloped due to them following the 2m seam as it rises and falls. This means that at one end of the longwall there is a development panel which is very dry and has few gas problems meaning good advance rates and a lot of coal cut. The end I’m working at however is at one of the lowest points in the mine and we constantly have water and gas problems. We wade through about 200m of mud to get to the face and that’s with a dozen pumps running 24/7, you can see water bubbling out of the floor and it can rise several feet in a few hours. This end of the mine is very close to a large fault which wasn’t detected in the original survey so a couple of years ago they were mining right towards it until the roof started falling in on a daily basis and they left a continuous miner overnight to find it underwater in the morning. That means that they have had to abandon a large section of tunnels and cut them all over again to re-route the conveyors and service pipes (water, air etc) at a huge cost and time delay. As of this week there are now 3 panels working in different areas, plus the longwall. This is stretching them right to the limit as there are 5 continuous miners in operation, each needing a whole raft of support such as shuttle-cars, LHD’s, conveyors, boot ends, ventilation etc. plus the manpower to operate them. The two longwall development panels are operated as “super panels” with two CM’s each driving one heading plus cut-through's. The third panel which is replacing the failed panel mentioned above has just one CM but has 4 headings plus cut-through’s to drive. They have the added pressure of knowing that if they are excessively delayed that the old panel might have a major roof fall and so halt all longwall and half the development production until they can finish.
That brings me nicely on to the state of the machinery at the mine. It has been in operation for over twenty years and has replaced its machinery several times. However the current batch ranges from 3-12yrs old and is plagued with problems. Thanks to the constant need to be cutting coal and making money, over the year’s maintenance schedules have slipped and once this happens they never recover. This means that machines which really need to be dragged up to surface and completely overhauled are simply kept in service with a series of minor repairs. This is incredibly wasteful and my panel alone spent nearly an entire week sitting on our arses because our CM was out of action thanks to mechanical problems. The more downtime we have, the more targets slip behind and so when we resume production we have to try and make up the lost time which means the machines are pushed too hard and break down again. This cycle is perpetual and the only way it will change is if, God forbid, the mine is forced into care and maintenance and all the machines are pulled out and replaced or fully serviced. A prime example is the state of the transport fleet; there are supposedly 16 underground transports available yet in reality this is never more than 10 due to repairs etc. All it takes is for one or two to breakdown underground and suddenly no one can move around as all the available transport is being used. This happens at least once a week, only a few days ago a group of us including our panel deputy (like a shift boss) were stuck at pit bottom because there weren’t enough serviceable vehicles to get us into the panel. There is a single grader to keep the roads in a fit state; this was recently away for 5wks for a full service and in that time we were losing a vehicle nearly every day due to damage from bad roads…
Ok, confession time, the above 1500 words were written a month ago! I’ve been incredibly slack about typing this stuff up but luckily there’s not much more to say… We’ve now got a 6th miner and shuttle car on surface waiting for the current maingate/tailgate development to finish so it can go into mains development in 900 panel. We seem to have escaped the worst of the economic downturn, the last month has been full of rumours about the pit being shut and mass lay-offs etc but we’ve had a few more small orders to keep the place ticking over. More later…
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