Reclaiming Flooded Mine

The email I got with these photos didn't say which mine it was from. Does anyone know if it's Baralaba, or some other mine?

Flooded Drills

I'm not sure if these drills have been flooded in water, or mud / slurry from some sort of highwall failure.

Baralaba Update

When we last saw Baralaba, things weren't looking too good for the mine. Here's some shots showing the progress they've made dewatering the pit. They've still got 40m to go.

Rail Damage at Comet

Continuing on with the flooding news this week. These pictures are from the rail line connecting Comet to Emerald. Incredible amounts of damage.

And a video of Channel Nine News. It shows some additional footage of the Baralaba flood, and some video of the Comet rail line.

Baralaba Flooding

The big news for the last few weeks in mining has been the amazing amount of flooding around Central Queensland. Nearly every mine has been affected in some way. The most prominent of these has been the complete flooding of the Baralaba coal mine, when the Dawson River broke through the levee.

All photos from The Australian newspaper.

Edit: An additional photo showing the pit before the flood:

Flooded Dozer

Ensham Dragline Update

As we saw a few weeks ago, the Ensham dragline got severely flooded in January 2008. A few months later, in April, Ensham had been able to pump a large amount of water out of their pits, and expose their dragline to air.







Not only would there be the direct damage from the water, the fine silt which has made its way into everything would also cause major headaches, not the least of which would be the clean-up.

Flooded dragline at Ensham

I've been waiting to post these photos since I've started this blog, they are some of my favourite photos in my collection.

These are some of the most spectacular photos from the central Queensland floods of 2008.

On the 19th January, 2008 the Fairbairn dam in Emerald reached its spillway height and started to overtop. Shortly afterwards, hundreds of megalitres per minute were pouring over the spillway into the Nogoa river.

A few hours later, the levy banks around the Ensham mine broke and water started pouring into several of the pits.






Before the levees broke, Ensham tried moving the dragline out of danger onto safe ground. However, they didn't make it in time and the floodwaters started to surround the dragline.


Eventually, the pits were filled with water and the No. 1 dragline (and a couple of cranes) was completely flooded, with only the boom and the top of the house above the water line.








The Ensham pits, completely underwater:



To completely replace this dragline would be in the order of US$100 million. However, the repairs are estimated to only cost about Aus$50 million.

On the upside, I've been told that this dragline always had electrical issues. I guess a total strip-out and rebuild of the electrical system will help. :)

Stay tuned, in a few weeks I'll post some photos of the inside of the dragline, once the water has receded.

Another flooded pit

Continuing on with our flooded theme, here's another mine which has been flooded. While not as bad as Middlemount, it's still quite bad.



[Edit May 2010] Here's some extra pictures of the recovery process, sent in by a reader.