Exploring an Underground Mine (THE DEEPEST I’VE BEEN)

so don't look like a piece of salt so we're going to reenact what happens this loader say I'm the salt and this loader's driving to me but it's going to be stationary for this presentation I'm going to move towards it so I'm the salt oh my God we are journalists [Music] Hello everybody welcome back to the Vlog today we are in what town is this in half off half off so we're right in the middle of Germany we're at a salt mine video correction I say salt for the entire duration of this video as you know if you're a frequent viewer I am very often wrong and I am even more wrong in foreign countries where I don't speak the native language so the whole time I refer to it as a salt mine because that's what I was told and it is kind of salt but in reality it's a potash mine potash has potassium within it so they extract the potassium to use for fertilizer and the byproduct is the salt material that we saw in the Big Mountain at the end of the video so that is to clarify it's a potash mine not a salt mine stupid me enjoy the video this is where the miners get dressed right here they come in they put their number unlock their little rope and can lower their stuff down to the ground 150 people per shift three shifts seven days a week every day of the year essentially so now now that we're dressed and I still didn't ask why we had to get dressed they just put us in this dressing room and the clothes are in there so here we are we're all matching though so I feel good about it we're gonna go 800 meters underground to go check out the salt mining process so we learned yesterday that glue golf is basically good luck and hope that you come back to the surface when you go underground in Germany foreign we got our headlamp so we'll look like Iron Man and then this is our breathing apparatus an hour of oxygen in case something bad goes happen and something bad happens but something bad won't happen today we learned about that in the safety briefing it's basically you put it in your mouth and you can breathe normally for an hour so we're about to get in the elevator go 800 meters down into the ground and as he explained they don't just take salt out they also bring material in to Old parts of the mine the ash from power plants will go down into the mine and be disposed Underground what's all the salt is it all for Road like road salt it's for um fertilizer fertilizer it's all for fertilizer [Music] so this is how everybody gets down here yep the elevator is four floors and you can get 14 people per floor so you can have 52 people coming down at one time it just takes 90 seconds to get 800 meters underground so we just we were just up on the surface now we're 800 meters Underground I am awake now yeah yeah I don't I don't need any coffee this morning thoughts are in the mind okay and so this is so we're in the entrance of the mine so everybody has a tag and when you come in you put your tag on the board so if something were to happen they can go to this board and know exactly who's in the mine at that time yeah you like it yeah it's really cool we are about 2 000 feet underground right now in a clown car this is wild there's a there's a light that points straight up mounted to the top of the the Jeep and that's safety for the loaders so the loaders can see our vehicle [Music] [Music] to get this down here they had to split this machine into every single individual component including the bucket the bucket that I'm standing in right now it's a 22 cubic meter bucket an enormous enormous bucket that's way bigger than what you typically see on the 992 and Rock he had to split it in three so this was one section the middle part was one section and that was one section these bits right here are additional reinforcement because the bucket is so enormous it needs that reinforcement so that the bucket doesn't Flex when it's picking up material and then you'll notice that the bucket is actually pinned it's not pinned to the back of the bucket Like a Rock bucket it's pinned kind of within the bucket to maintain the center of gravity despite those Bigger Pockets in the back of this this salt bucket don't look like a piece of salt we are journalists or uh what are we we are not pressed uh yeah we're not friends so one I asked what modifications are made to this machine other than the enormous bucket and the fire suppression and he said they replaced typically there's a water spray system for to clean the the windows and these large excavators they've removed that they don't want water down here and they just used compressed air so it'll spray a jet of air onto the window to get the salt off the window while they're running because the the dust is just almost unbearable when this loader is gone putting everything together oh wow so it took it took it took four weeks just to us disassemble it right to all the individual components at the branch truck everything here and then two weeks to get it down here and reassemble it right right damn yeah so this is another classic example of me versus the guy she tells you not to worry about it I'm very salty about it but nothing I can do thank you [Music] [Applause] oh yeah we forgot to mention that they don't have just one they have two so these are not for the main mining operation the main mining operation produces the salt needed in a seven day period but only in five days so the excess salt will be stockpiled in these enormous caverns and then when they're not in production producing material they hand it over to these two 992s that feed the hopper down below to continue feeding the plant because the plant needs to run 24 hours a day seven days a week regardless of what happens what's happening down here 992g [Music] 992k I have never seen anything like this [Music] wow so we're we're in the machine you have your two sticks right here for your bucket control lift and then right here this is what makes it go forward backwards side to side with your joystick so there's no steering wheel in here which is pretty standard for a big loader like this he said they disabled any kind of gear other than first when you have a bucket full to reduce stress and strain on the tires due to the Heat you have your backup camera right here radio your gorgeous cat radio otherwise this is pretty similar to any kind of other mining machine because everything is just caked in salt have these run pretty well up here no no Bubba blades oh no wiper blades oh wow so it's just like a like a foam that they have instead of the wiper blades to scrub the windows so they have within the cabs since the dust gets so extreme in these areas while they're loading they have an additional system outside the cab that keeps positive air pressure within the cap so the dust can't get in because if the air pressure is greater within the cab nothing can get into it just like a science lab but we're talking big loaders and salt underground so despite the the harshness of this they have to clean these machines quite a bit but he said the maintenance is the same as a loader up on the surface the reason why there's no corrosion or rust is because there's no humidity we're Underground uh so they can run in salt all day long as long as they clean the salt off it doesn't affect it doesn't affect the machine because without that moisture salt can't it can't create that that rust that oxes is oxidization moisture at all yeah it can't oxidize after those last one shift the air filters last one shift whoa so that that gives you a pretty good idea of how much dust is in there when it's running how do they even see they don't see they don't they just see the bucket nothing else [Music] so he's just he's just looking for that light right that that light is there because the dust is so bad I mean it's it's basically like flour the dust gets so bad in here that the loader operator can only barely just see that light and that light indicates where he needs to dump right behind there is the hopper that he's dumping in but we can see in here because they haven't been working but if they were working the dust would be so bad we couldn't see anything but that that light right there [Music] oh my God [Music] he wasn't kidding about how dusty it gets he's put one bucket in the air [Music] foreign [Music] if you look really closely through this salt Mist you'll notice a 992k that was pretty cool time for the rest of the tour this could be where they faked the moon landing [Music] [Music] [Music] we're in the production area right now and these loaders are working where they just blasted and then hauling the material to this kind of like a Crusher but it's really just like this rotary drum that throws it on a conveyor belt and takes it all the way out it's an enormous bucket the material you can tell it's shiny salt and then the operator and you have one camera facing One Direction One camera facing the other direction and so you're just sitting here sideways but the machine goes this direction this direction there are 25 of these feeding the main plant 25. pretty spooky so what we just saw was the drilling the drilling it's amazingly fast they do it by eye remote control and then we saw there was a essentially what's a powder truck where they're loading the shot so that when this shift is over everybody's up they set the shot off he explained that they take some kind of signal bounce it down the shaft and then use prisms to Bounce It All Around the mine so that they can essentially have what is GPS Underground to know exactly where they need to drill where they need to blast where they need to dig where exactly the mine is designed so they put it into the Rock and it just holds applies pressure when the Earth was here this was pushing on this this was pushing on this now that you take this away there's nothing pushing back on that surface so that's what this is is essentially just applying pressure to that surface to mimic what the Earth was doing when it was all here so 14 to 17 Euros per anchor 1.6 million of these per year and you can see he's going to run it so it just essentially drills the hole puts this within the hole and then this tip here expands and prevents this from ever leaving that hole and they just leave all these here so this is all you see you can see at the very end there this [Music] so this is all the testing area where they're going two kilometers ahead of production to take cores and this is the core storage so all of this is the different cores from within this mine to basically prove that oh yeah the salt's there that's where we're mining next [Music] [Applause] [Music] okay so that concludes our underground portion of the tour now we're gonna go back up to where we should be where humans should be the face of the Earth and we're back here we are [Music] that's crazy [Applause] it this is a simulator for their loaders that we saw down there if you didn't notice the visibility in the loaders is terrible and it requires quite a bit of training to even just get used to running those things in those in in the environment because it can be super dangerous if you don't know what the heck's going on so this is a simulator it has the exact same control layout that the loaders have it has screens all the way around it so it looks like whatever you're looking at outside of the loader from all different angles and it's on a motion platform so it moves around as you're working it's a future futuristic room for a futuristic machine yeah Welcome To The Future okay so this is for all the people when I post the simulators like the cat simulator everybody's like oh you can't feel it in your ass well here you go you can feel this one in your ass feel it in the seat yeah so they've they've recorded the actual mind and when you're driving this it's the exact same layout as the mind that you'll be running this in that's wild [Music] Elijah playing Call of Duty on here yeah [Music] I requested this [Music] the first part of today's video was us beneath the earth now we are clearly on top of the Earth where the salt comes out so we went down one shaft where they bring all the people in and out the second shaft is where all the material comes in and out all the material comes up here to a processing facility which we're not going to get into but one third of the salt that they mine goes to the finished product for fertilizer two-thirds of it is this waste material that they pile up into this gigantic mountain and I'm calling it a mountain because they they call it a mountain and it is approximately Mountain sized so up here they have cat machines of course this enormous conveyor belts piling it up at the top they have d10s d9s and this machine here that machine there big machines to pile up the waste material over here so I don't know what we're going to see beyond this but that's kind of to explain what the heck's going on also there's a black sheep over there okay behind me is a caterpillar d10 T2 delivered and customized for the customer by Zeppelin our host amazing work as you can see this white material is salt which is what it'll be pushing its entire life salts for those of you that don't know is not Metal's best friend it corrodes the hell out of anything metal so to protect this machine some of the features it has it has guarding uh as you can see they've covered up the rock guard there they have flaps over a lot of the exposed cylinders there are there's a wax coating over any wiring harness there's an extra fan within the engine compartment to remove moisture after it works so they've modified this machine to fit the specific application and this is the prettiest it'll ever look this is the first day they'll be able to use it top of the month November 1. so let's go over here and show you a dozer that's been running in salt for a long time ah oh my God okay so in contrast to the brand new d10 T2 we have a d10 T2 that has run for over 10 000 hours in salt if you look really closely you can see the corrosion if you want to look like undercarriage a little bit of corrosion uh rippers yeah corrosion every single body panel imaginable pretty corroded blade hydraulic cylinders wow you can't even take the master key out all right with that we are all squared away here we visited an underground salt mine we saw the 992's underground we saw the production operations we saw I can't do three very well we saw the simulators and then of course we saw where the byproduct ends up really really cool day I've never been even close to that deep underground before I've never seen salt mining before I've never seen a German mine before so today was a lot of Firsts thank you to K plus M for having us out thank you to Zeppelin for having us out and I hope you all enjoyed this one until next time stay salty everybody [Music]

Channel: Aaron Witt

Views: 521,489

Keywords: Aaron Witt, Aaron Witt Vlog, Vlogger, Construction, BuildWitt, Construction Vlog, Cat, Cat Equipment, Dirt Vlog, Heavy Equipment, BuildWitt Vlog, Salt, Mine, Germany

Id: IrjcJwxpmE8

Length: 22min 24sec (1344 seconds)

Published: Thu Dec 22 2022