Exploring the Idled Pathfork Prep Plant & RB #11 Mine

heyo this is 40 1119 with headframe hunters we're here in Harlan County Kentucky at the path fork complex you might be wondering well that fork Harlan County that don't sound like hardrock it's not hard rock it's coal this right here is a continuous miner a fairly new one and once set up for low seem so this does it mechanically eggs coal with the cutter head on the front of it and has a conveyor up here that'll transfer coal onto what are called shuttle cars which are electrically powered trucks more or less with conveyor brown on them that'll transfer coal into a feeder breaker it all works in real low height or he wouldn't be able to fit a conventional dump truck in other thing you might be noticing there's no cab there's no operator station it actually runs off of remote control if you've ever seen a remote control LHD it's a pretty similar arrangement where the operator can stand behind it stay under supported ground so he's not a in any unsupported area that has not yet been bolted or meshed this right here is the engineering offices tipples that way that miner and back that way is all the mobile equipments being used for the reclamation and salvage process they're processing old coal or yard waste around the prep plant and pulling a good coal out of it we're gonna kind of make our way up the holler here this is the tipple fat fork or rail loadout and I'm what you want to call it where you know trains carrying coal we've been loaded I believe this was a thermal coal mine and I was told it was last really active in the late nineties to early 2000s we've also been warned that most of the metal was in real bad shape and shouldn't be climbed on so pretty well shoot this from ground level up there those hoes big towers would have had a coal stockpile that could be drawn down without meeting a dozer or a loader to push in from there it'd be conveyed across this conveyor into this bin at which point the tipple operator would and load load unit trains walks assist there may have been two bins side by side so we're looking back at the tip path fork now these here gonna be settling ponds to allow sediment to settle out of water before it's discharged back into a stream easier the conveyors running from the prep plant to the tipple and there is the prep plant itself with a nice big door thickener or clarifier protocol to either that's going to be water material probably be water slurry which would then be pumped up to a slurry and slurry pond really the prep plant or coal preparation process involves basic sizing and then a screening and washing process or by the coal separated into different grades via screens possibly wash screens clean it off remove excess dust or particulate separated from any gang or toprock which I think around here would be sandstone and then dried there's a another very special something here that I'm not gonna mention it because that would spoil surprise [Applause] believe this hopper here would have been used to load trucks as would that belt line right there the weight limit on the bridge coming out a path fork is only 22 tons cuz they'd be significantly limited and the ability to ship coal vieira via truck say it's a not in very good shape in there so we're going to that's a orange and red and cold color that perhaps ahead of us is a portable screening plant it's a self-propelled runs on tracks the Grizzlies on the web side of the machine are where rock is fed in let's see the conveyor belt runs material up to up to the top this whole apparatus was going shake up and down or there's a somewhat circular throw motion maybe about an inch to 3/4 of an inch of stroke I think that's what we use and the gridded media in their screen clods will classify material by size and then that conveyor and that conveyor will discharge product what it appears they've been doing here is rescreening stock piles to separate out waste material that would be potentially saleable coal and this is junk a really really cool thing you'll get in coal it's wood tree trunks just remember coal is formed by a prehistoric swamp there's a lot of organic material embedded in coal now this up here this this damn behind there will be the slurry pond where all the fines and waste material produced during the preparation process are pumped up to for storage this is filled up a whole holler with slurry that's the pump house and then that girder there is the rotating arm for the thickener classifier that would be water a lot a lot of the slurry belt with the tipple it's up that way leave that right there we're being a tank cage or oxygen and acetylene tanks I believe I may be wrong so this area up here which has been so conveniently signed to danger is the dump hopper for trucks carrying coal why the mines it would then be a gravity assisted fed through the wash plant or the rep plant which we'll be looking at a little more in a minute and convey it out that way it's the typical I'm not actually sure if they use the crusher here or just counter it on the coal being sized down by the continuous miner it's not gonna be like a hard rock we're particulars of your your drill pattern and your powder factor will affect the the rock size continuous minor should give you fairly uniformly sized coal product so this is looking up at that dump hopper then coming down looks like there was a secondary hopper with a belt that dumps on to the primary feed belt for the prep plant so caution magnet what that's about is that fake orange block right there so any kind of mind especially underground mines don't get what you call metal it'll be roof bolts drill Steel's scale or minor bits spray paint cans PB Blaster cans scrap metal half a loader stuff like that you don't want that going through your your plant jamming equipment or getting your final product can cause it to break quality specs so that magnet right there it'll pull it right off get dadier now your your material flow so well but this looks to a band I was a screening circuit yeah this is most definitely a screen just like the portable one but a bit bigger but it'll do its classify material by size that's what we call pegboards up on top I'll pull your real big nasty stuff off and then looks like they were they loaded some greats a coal directly from here there's a double track sound of gauge railroad in there from there it runs into the washing and drying portion of the prep plant all this in here's what I'm talking about with rail loading at the prep plant there's a hopper right there I think this would have been larger grades of coal I'm not too familiar with with coal grades and specifications yes it is remember we talking about a surprise here it is I don't know this mines name it might be P 11 I'm not rightly sure either way this is your archetypical Eastern Kentucky coal mine watered quartz water anyways so what this is it's a box cut they put down on the hillside to expose the seam which is gonna be down there I don't know I don't think that's more than six feet deep and uh your your far left portal will be your conveyor portal that run rock off the shuttle card with feeder breaker to the belt line all the way out to there then your Center portal would probably be your main portal and you're right portal would be your fan portal so actually if you look close all the portals are still there they should kind of heat some dirt up in front of them to sail them and spoiler alert even if we find any we will not be doing any underground video and abandoned coal mines the the gas under there whether it's black damp or firedamp is too hazardous to it's too hazardous to enter without a gas detector and a cba which we don't have the budget for SCBA IBG for is thousands of dollars and it's not cheap for the scrubber compound for even a single use either so we will not be doing that about the best I can offer you is a maybe a shot down a portal anyways just thought uh this would be a nice little addition to our to this video the water level is lower than it was on Google Earth

Channel: Headframe Hunters

Views: 5,860

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: Pathfork, Path, Fork, prep, plant, mine, coal, continuous, miner, Harlan, County, KY, Kentucky, Appalachia, mining, abandoned, mill, bankruptcy, Blackjewel, Black, Jewel

Id: EvUHe2W8Egw

Length: 15min 43sec (943 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 18 2019