The Life of A Miner.... From Coalface to Power Station

I'm proud to be a coal miner you know when someone says what do you do for a living I say I'm a coal miner and I feel good when I say that because it was something I always wanted to do the motivation basically comes from the fact it's a very dynamic working environment it's always changing and there's always something to do you're never bored here and every day is slightly different you put plans in place yeah but something will change overnight and there's something that keeps you motivated and interested every day we're going to take you to one of our board and pillar operations underground and get an opportunity to talk to our operators down there this is a diesel powered vehicle it's an Australian manufactured vehicle it will take twelve passengers it'll go into what we watch the fires are hazardous zone it'll travel around about 20 kilometers an hour and we'll be traveling this morning around about two two and a half kilometers we're gonna get into the face in two hour five panel where we have two continuous miners at work and we run three shuttle cars in here that load onto a breaker theater and and then send a call out to the surface to our coal handling plant so we're walking down the the main traveling right at the moment towards the face prevented the end of the hazardous zone so all equipment that we operate in this area has to be explosion protected and intrinsically safe all electrical apparatus that is so there's a a fair few procedures and rules and regulations that we have to follow in this area the mechanism of an explosion comes from an accumulation of methane and then the ignition of methane and that will whip the coal dust up into a suspension and then the flame pipe will come along and ignite that dust and that'll cause a secondary explosion so the theory behind the stone dust is to keep that coal dust suppressed so the stone dust is is distributed through a bulb duster we use so one ton bags and we distribute that on night shift where we're required by the regulations to dust every 30 meters or every 24 hours okay so here's a typical profile of our seam you'll see the clay beans specific to the scene and an upper clay beam that we cut approximately half a meter above to get our 2.8 cutting height favorite so here we have the mornings it's out of this cut it just out of this round so just something something at the roof here comes the shuttlecock Benedict I reach into the Bible so the car is just been lighted in the minor it's just heading back now and then on to the fader the people here great to work with and that kids the job interesting it's not a desk job it's not one where I'm sat behind a computer day-in day-out it's very much hands-on this is the end of the feeder where the coal drops onto the conveyor belt you see if you have a look at the back of the feeder now there's a hood and then the coal just comes out along the Floyd's drops onto the belt so this belt runs directly under a two hundred which is a main one of the main trunk belts which feeds onto you see one and goes to the surface and to the crusher house so like my job is also to control the river this is putting extra support while currently this is seeing my weight we're boating on around that we've kind of round out now we're currently putting four seats up to our management rules you know I'm bolting we're doing a full to pattern usually takes about half an hour to cut around out and it takes anywhere from 25 minutes to 45 minutes to bolt up depending on the roof conditions back there we've hit a bit of a small fault that when we hit those sort of features we increase the support we try to work in this miners Boulton and that sides always cutting as soon as I finish cutting will be but ya ready to go the reflective strips that you see is reading traveling it on the road that's all part of our evacuation an emergency management plan this is an example of a lifeline if we're in a smoke-filled atmosphere visions restricted we can actually feel our way out hand slips over the top of the cones you get to this point here I can't go anywhere I'm back onto this line and we get another cone up the exactly the same you've got the green indicating that's the escape route in the opposite direction down here you've got the red indicating that's not the way to go out we've been underground this morning and heard look at how coals cut the face now's time to have a look at the surface and I can explain to you where the coal goes from the underground mine so at the western end of the hard stand portal the coal comes by the underground conveyor travels down and comes over to our coal handling plant the material there is crushed and screened to sighs after the coal handling plan the parts it heads across with our cold product stop are the two is stored in essentially three heats from the stockpile the material is then taken by it accepts conveyor across to the Train loading bin and for miss point trains come via the rail Lu to the Le mine site and are loaded with coal to depart for export never a dull moment there's always you know jump on an item car or jump on the bolt or jump in a shuttle car and it's not you know you're not like a robot there's always something new and something challenging something different in coal mining it's a strong part of our local industry it's good to be a part of that yeah I'd say I'm proud to be a coal miner with ease

Channel: REEDMININGEVENTS TV

Views: 54,473

Rating: 4.8934627 out of 5

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Id: q-QZTbxX6K4

Length: 6min 38sec (398 seconds)

Published: Mon Jul 20 2015