Introduction:
Coal Mining 150 Years Ago

A Day in the Life of a Miner

• Morning
• Arrival
• Descent
• Bottom

As Fireboss

Jobs

Underground Stables

Introduction:
Open-Pit Mining Today

Mining

• Drilling and Blasting
• Removing the Waste Rock
• Loading Coal
• Processing Coal
  • Breaker
  • Coal-fired Dryer

Transporting Coal to the Market

Mining:

Extracting or taking the coal out of the ground

Drilling and Blasting:

The next step in mining is to get the coal out of the ground. To do this the miners need to blast the rock on top of the coal so that they can move it out of the way. They drill holes into the surface rock with a large electric drill. The holes are then filled with explosives and blasted. Just to be safe I put my earplugs in because the explosives above me were really loud. I could feel the ground all around me shaking, this was one of the scariest moments of my life.

"Controlled Explosion at the Mine"

Removing the Waste Rock:

After the overburdern, the layer of rock that was covering me, was loosened with explosives, it was taken away as waste. The rock is removed in order to get to the coal seam. I could hear the miners getting closer and closer to me as they started to remove the overburden and rock covering my cozy bed of coal.

Large electric shovels or draglines are usually the major pieces of equipment used for removing this waste. These shovels have buckets that can hold up to 44m₃ of rock. Here are some interesting things to know:²

• One bucket from a shovel this big can hold 50 grown men.
• It only takes a large shovel 3 scoops to fill one truck.
• A shovel this size weighs 2,450,000 lbs and uses 13800 volts of electricity.

"Loading the trucks with waste rock"

The shovels load the waste rock into large trucks that can hold up to 240 tonnes. These trucks are HUGE:

• When a 240 tonne truck is loaded it weighs or 387, 000 Kg (853 000 lb.)
• The trucks use 150 litres of fuel in one hour, the gas tank in a car only holds around 50 litres of fuel.
• The trucks are so big and weigh so much that they can only drive up to 48 km/hr.
• Loading one 240 tonne truck would be the same as loading a regular pick-up truck over 300 times or loading it with 48 full grown elephants.
• The wheels are 10 ft tall which is equal to the height of a full grown elephant.

Loading coal:

Bulldozers and backhoes are sent to clean off the coal seams. They push the exposed coal down to the bottom of the bench so that front end loaders can scoop it up. This was when my life changed forever. I was lying there peacefully when suddenly I was pushed out of bed and sent tumbling down the bank. Before I knew what was happening, I was scooped up into the bucket of a loader and dumped into a huge truck. Like the rest of the coal being removed, I was dumped into coal hauling trucks that have boxes that are made especially for coal. These coal-hauling trucks are usually smaller than the trucks that carry waste rock and can hold up to 170 tonnes.

The coal mines today use a lot of state of the art technology. It allows them to stay at the top of competitive international markets. One type of technology that is used is the Automated Dispatch System.

Computers at the mine work together with satellites to monitor all the equipment. The satellite sends the computer images of where each truck is in the minesite. This allows people in the mine office to know what each piece of equipment is doing at all times so that trucks can be sent when and where they are needed.

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