One year old

Tomorrow marks the one-year anniversary of the first posting to Mining Mayhem. It's been a much bigger success than I could have anticipated a year ago, with the site now averaging over 100 visits a week.

I hope you've all enjoyed the site and I'd like to thank everyone who's told their friends about this site. Keep coming back. At my one-a-week posting rate, I've still got over two years left of mayhem to come.

As a special treat for our one-year anniversary, I've got a video to show you of some fancy loader driving. Not much mayhem to speak of here, but there would be large amounts of mayhem if someone tried to do this on site.

Total Highwall Collapse

This highwall failure looks like the biggest I've ever seen.

Shaking hands

Another one that doesn't seem to make much sense. Looks like the truck has backed off the edge of a small hole, which it has then filled with its load.

Broken front cleats

Received this one from a reader a couple of weeks ago. It's from a Pilbara iron ore mine. The cleats holding on the front wheel have broken.

Speed Hump

Another example of why you don't get in the way of a mining truck.

Dragline Bench Failure

Here's another one in my collection of old dragline bench failures.

light vehicle vs belly dumper

Major Highwall Failure

This is a strange one, with excavators, trucks, coal and a dragline. I can't really tell what happened, but it looks like the highwall has collapsed in a big way, going right across the pit.

Edit 7/12/10 - Additional photo. This makes the incident looks much worse.

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.

Dragline Bench Failure

I recently received a bunch of old dragline bench failures. This is the first of them to come through. This dragline is fairly lucky, only falling a little bit off balance. It would still be a major recovery effort.

Judging by the old Ford Falcon in the first photo, these photos must have been from the early 80's.