Stacker Fire

Location – BHPBilliton Nelson Point – Port Hedland. Plant – Stacker number 8. ‘A’ Area stockpile. This fire happened on March 6th. Initial assessment was that the fire was caused by hot work in the head chute, but the fire was caused by iron ore build up under the return side of the belt in launder catchment trays designed to direct the carry-back away from falling straight down.

Launder tray sprays can be ineffective if too much material hits the tray at once and as the clearance is not much, the catchment tray blocks up until material comes into contact with the moving belt.

992G Boom Failure

From Oxford Mining, Kentucky, USA. A Caterpillar 992G with a seriously broken boom 68,000 hours on the machine.

Big Update Week

I've been getting a lot submissions lately, more than I can deal with on a Sunday-only update schedule.

So for the next couple of weeks, I'm going to update Sunday-Tuesday-Thursday. Come back and enjoy the extra mayhem!

Truck names

The blog had a comment this week:

Anonymous said...

their called haul trucks or (tonka trucks is a nickname we use).

A few people have commented on what I call the trucks. I call them rear dumpers to separate out what kind of haul trucks they are. Rear dumpers, belly dumpers, side tippers and moxys are all 'haul trucks', but are just individual types of haul trucks.

South Walker Creek Bench Failure

This was sent it by a reader, of a bench failure which occurred on the 29th. Looks fairly lucky. The boom looks like it got pretty close to the spoil.

Burning Money

According to the email, this 282 only had a few hours on the clock. Judging by the fact that the fire seems more intense at the back than the front, I'm guessing a wheel motor fire.

Rolled Rear Dumper

Collapsed BWE

These spectacular pictures come from the CSN Itagui mine in Brazil. This bucket-wheel reclaimer failed during commissioning in 2007.

Imitation is the Sincerest Form of ...

Someone let me know today about the 'Mining Mayhem' page on Facebook. While it's a good page, it's not mine.

I don't pretend to have the monopoly on mining accident photos, but why not come up with an original name?

Copying someone else's idea, and passing it off as your own - very lame. Poor form, mate, poor form.

Yallourn Wall Collapse

I don't know much about this incident, other than that it happened at the Yallourn coal mine about four years ago. Looking at the photos, it looks like water from the creek piped through behind the wall, causing it to fail.