KCGM | Underground Mining at Mt Charlotte

[Music] [Music] hello my name is nello Luca I work at Mount Charlotte one of the case you were the only case of GM underground mined on the Golden Mile worked for Casey Jim for approximately 24 years all up a normal day starts at about 5:30 most of the workers start arriving at about 5:30 four days shift 6:30 for a night shift make their way into the clean side of the change room get undressed move across to the dirty side get changed into your work clothes the reason we wear gumboots most of us wear gumboots because it's quite wet underground you've got water you've got to go through sometimes above the top of the gumboot the vehicle operators truck drivers loader drivers generally will wear leather boots your self rescuer which is this box I'm wearing on the side here that's your main rescue device if we have a fire underground or an outbreak of gas that will generate oxygen basically you breathe into it it's a exothermic reaction there's a chemical inside called soda-lime and it strips the carbon dioxide out of your breath as you breathe out and as you breathe back in again it's turning it back into oxygen and it'll last for 10-15 minutes at high exertion rate cap lamp which is on the top of the helmet here everybody's got to have one to go underground there's basically no lights underground so you need to work provide your own light and it's a bit similar to working by torchlight there's also a backup lamp in there so if the main lamp fails you've got to back up so that you can get to a place where you can be rescued make your way out of the dirty side into the cap lamp broom where you pick up your self rescuer and your cap lamp going past the breathalyzer of course we breathalyzer at the start of every shift and then into the muster room hi my name is Ron Ellis I'm the underground manager for KC gym and I look after the Mount Charlotte operations and what a lot of people actually don't get to see is actually what's happening beneath the surface we're currently standing in the Cassidy head frame it's the last operating in the Golden Mile it's an iconic operation you literally can't go past without looking at this beautiful redhead frame mouth Charlotte itself is a 1.2 million tons per annum or operation and has approximately 140 people both men and women access to the miners Pro fire this char but also to buy the super pit so there is a decline and a tunnel that connects us to the super pit and the decline is predominately used to track the ore from underground below us through the actual pit which then gets bit into the mill once you arrive at the muster room generally check to see if the tag boards being opened after blasting from the previous shift no blasting can take place underground until that tag board is cleared the only people that will remain on the tag would is actually the blasting crew during the firing run if it is you'll place your tag on the board which is basically an identification card you put on the tag board and that identifies whose underground take a seat in the muster room and just grab a coffee and wait for the start of the shift at 6 o'clock the shift bosses theirs to shift bosses that run the ship will take control of the crew and basically go through the day's activities a legate allocating work to the individuals and also allocating work to the machines whether it's Jumbo's loaders trucks whatever it may be that meeting takes approximately 15 minutes and as part of that we'll also have a safety meeting if there's any concerns from the previous 24 hours they'll be raised any hazards identified in the past 24 hours will be read out and discussed with the crew and once everybody's satisfied and they know what they're doing the shift bosses will basically tell everybody time to go to work have a safe shift and from the master room they'll make their way out if they haven't tagged on yet they will tag on to the tag board make their way to the shaft which is as you can see behind me and wait at the brace until the plat men will take control of the cage plaquemines the man in delicated during the shift to being control of the cage he'll open the gates everybody will enter the cage and be delivered to the level closest to where you're working my name's Rex Esther and I'm one a driver at Casey Jim driving the Cassady wander this shaft is 1,200 meters deep but we're coming down we'll put the camera on to the 28 level and there's the cage they're coming down I just got to line up the handhold in the cage with the top rail on the gate pull the brake on and I'll give him one bail he won't get out of the cage until I'll give him one bail that it's all safe so now he's getting out of the cage now because he knows it's all safe those bells that you just heard they are a code of signals that are the same for all over Australia days before radios and all that what you used to do was communicate the driver through like Morse code in these bells but there's lots of different ways to ring bells you can ring three slow those which means come up slow we could ring three fast bells which means go up fast so I work in levels from the surface down so I'm going down to the 28th level a good bell ringer makes the job very easy it's the best job on the mine I reckon you've got all the good working conditions and yeah you don't have to go down the underground currently we run eight trucks underground 660 Tanner's and 250 ton us jumbo operators will also be picked up by their nippers nipper is offsider to the Jumbo they will deliver them to their machines and that will commence either bolting meshing boring a face or whatever part of the cycle they're into my name is porec Lachlan God with a nickname Irish and I'm a jumbo operator as you can see my day is going to be dealing with this machine next to me which is a jumbo and my job is to firstly put in all this ground support the most important part of my job as far as I'm concerned is getting this right because if this isn't right advancing forward isn't going to help much if this tends to fail the offset and work out what sort of I want in general in the direction I need to advance destroyed and there's a certain way to mark it up using certain spacings on your black stones and after so many folds forward into a face charge of rock off grab the plan off me and I pull back and then they come in and charge it with explosives Rock dagger nut shot Farah today we've just been bagging and charging after part of the scope which entail was bagging the holes making the debts up dropping the debts and prom is down the hole and then topping them up with Aunt Flo now the charge up bro is not a bad roll because you get a bit of a variety but if this is a fairly physical job [Music] hi my name's Steve Davis I am an underground shift supervisor at the Mount Charlotte operations I Drive around making sure that all the operators across the whole crew are working safely and working as per the procedure and one thing I will say after 24 years in mining is the only certainty in mining is uncertainty and we are problem-solving constantly obviously we've got to get a lot of our or up out of the mine the bother comes along it's basically a front-end loader it's easy to use good vision with the cameras you got three cameras on the bhagat Korea front camera and a slow camera and just makes it a lot easier to say hello excitement and well box and then transfer it back to the stop-off filled with stuff Paula and Dexter hello I'm David segui and I'm the underground exploration project geologists at Mount Charlotte a day in the life for me involves managing our to underground diamond drill rigs they're basically collecting the sample core that you see behind us that we analyze and then get the god results for to determine where we're going to my next the geological information that we can get from the rocks we basically put into a database so we record the stratigraphy the ethology that's basically just the different rock types and from that we can determine if the guy if the rock is going to be gold-bearing or not it's a lot easier to see the rock fabrics as well as the minerals inside the rock when it's wet as opposed to being dry it starts with us we have to find the gold deposit so you need to do your drilling and get the essays back and basically work out whether it's going to be economic at various different stages throughout the mining project because without the gold and there's obviously no point in having the mind so you can you really get to add value through the drilling that we do by finding more gold yeah it's really rewarding hi my name's chelator pastor I'm a journalist came to me from a Charlotte at the moment we are sitting in a resting tremor various chambers and used in case of emergency and they effectively remove all staff from dangerous situations in the event of an emergency is people to come to recognize changes they should stay in here from anywhere two hours or up to her a couple days if needed and effectively once you come in close the door behind you it's completely sufficient there is water toilet facility and we use a range of chemicals to help keep the office women depending on the amount given that we that system behind us here as their heap of crows and that's typical reaction and their instructions as soon as you come to know what to do my name's Brody Lance on the underground engineering superintendent in my role in particular I coordinate a multitude of activities between the survey Department the geotechnical Department and the engineering in my opinion to have a successful operation you need everyone to work together and that's absolutely what happens here in mount Charlotte and that starts from anyone from the cleaners to the admin to the technical team that that I guess lead and instruct the operations so we're talking about surveyors geo textures mining engineers across drawn blasts and planning and that you know then leads into the operational guys we're looking at till that baba's bug operators sniffers truck driver service crew charge jump operators long aisle drillers you know and the guys that run our plots and they maintain the pumps and the shaft guys the wander operators and you know that all would be nothing without the maintenance team so if you've grown up your fitters in your sparkies and your auto sparkies you know and the management I guess coordinating their activity you don't have the mix you need for a successful operation and there's a credit to the team here that everyone that's involved you know there's everyone is a really important cog in this in the big wheel that is me I Charlotte and it's its credit that they can that we keep this mind running and it has been running successfully for 50 odd years at the end of the shift the mine needs to be cleared before firing time we have a 15-minute window for firing or blasting of the headings so all personnel will make their way back to the the Platts or platforms the cage will arrive pick them up and bring them back to the surface once on the surface they'll make their way back to the muster room handing in their pre starts their timesheets and also more importantly taking their tags off the tag board if there's any information that needs to be passed to the supervisor they will stop and speak to the supervisor and pass that information on such as any hazards any problems with machinery or any problems in the headings that needs to be passed on to the following shift once they're hand the time shooting they'll make their way into the lamp room hand back their self rescuer and they're kept lamp back into the dirty side take your dirty clothes off and then into the clean side dry get changed india street clothes and at the gate [Music]

Channel: KCGM

Views: 37,366

Keywords: Mt Charlotte, Underground, Mining, Kalgoorlie-Boulder, KCGM, Super Pit

Id: zCYBnXM9uhg

Length: 13min 49sec (829 seconds)

Published: Tue Mar 24 2020