Bogging

38 miles east of Tennant Creak, Northern Territory, Australia.

JB is twenty-three years old, built solid, at just under six feet. He
weighs just about two hundred pounds, he is tanned and muscular. His hair is brown, shoulder length, tied back with a blue bandanna. He
sports a long beard, confined mostly to the point of his chin. He is dressed blue jeans, and a T shirt that advertises a hotel in the Philippines and a pair of red sneakers.
It's a Saturday Morning, just before 5 a.m., the air is clear and warm, it will be another hot day on the surface, good thing he will be working underground today. Today is an overtime shift. He has worked through the week, 10 hours each day. Today will be something different, no mucking and bogging, today will be maintenance and resetting of equipment for the coming week. JB is thinking about what he might be asked to do in the mines today. Each Saturday is different. Last week he ran the clam and mucked out the sump where all the water runs into the very bottom of the mine. The water carries mineral-rich silt into the sump, and there is a clam there. Every once in a while someone uses the clam to muck out the sump and send the mineral-rich silt and muck to the surface. That had been interesting and somewhat challenging. Sending the clam into the water, closing
it on a mouthful of muck. then pulling it up to the waiting cage. All this by operating four levers and a peddle on the floor. The ore car, that hangs beneath the man cage, had been brought all the way to the bottom, 100 feet below the lowest working level. The muck was released into the waiting ore car on the lift.
Sometimes on a Saturday, there will be work on the surface, in the shop or running the crusher. The crusher job is one of the few surface jobs that are not taken by the union miners. The job entails watching over the crusher and examining the material being crushed. Making sure no steel or explosives go through the jaws. Some of the rocks need a helping hand with a bar to go through the jaws. The weather is the biggest factor of working on the surface. It gets to be 110F often in the heat of the day. The weather underground is always about the same. It will be about 70F, there will be a drafty wind going steady all the time. In places it will be raining all the time.
Saturday breakfast at the mess hall is a good one. They are all good meals at the mess hall. The cook had baked bread and the place smelled of the freshly baked bread coming out of the oven, mixed with the smell of the wood fire steak cooker, grilling steaks and chops. This morning for breakfast JB selects a good sized steak, a couple a chops, four eggs cooked to order, over easy, one slice of bacon, a sausage, and a bowl of the cooks’ baked beans (the beans will give you power when the rest is gone). He takes his tray to the table where Liffy is
sitting, and goes back for a big cup of strong tea. On the way back to the table JB grabs a small loaf of the fresh bread and sets it on the table between him and Liffy.
Liffy is 22, has short red hair, so curly it is almost kinky. He's all muscle from the work in the mines, and he is wearing a dirty Irish football shirt with the arms cut off. Where the arm holes are on the T shirt, you can see the edge of a tattoo, chest size, of a clipper ship, a four masted clipper in full sail, and over the tattoo there is a cloud. The cloud was caused by an accident in the mines. Liffy had been training a new man, and an air hose had been run over and cut in two by the ore train. The 1-3/4 inch hose has 200 pounds per square inch of compressed air in it, used to run a Bogger and drills. When the train ran it over the hose began to fly around, Liffy was near, and jumped on the flailing hose and yelled for the trainee to turn the line off. The air from the hose got him across Liffy's tattooed chest, taking the skin off. In the months following the mishap, Liffy continued to work underground, getting dirt in the injury each day as it healed. As the wound healed, a cloud was formed over the clipper ship.
"What you figure we gonna do today?” JB greets Liffy as he sits down.
"Aye, you got me there Yank, I been on the plat all week, don't guess they let me out easy today, see what the Super has, bet it be a ball buster."
JB and Liffy work the same level, down at the 39, the lowest of the working levels. They will be doing the overtime shift today together. They eat their hearty breakfast and wash it down with tea, on the way out, each grabs a packed lunch.
Opening his lunch Liffy looks in and says “Aye, it be a Yank lunch if ever there be one, Spam sandwiches with molasses cookies and another apple, I bet I got ten apples down there on the lift, I line them up, hoping to get a chance to heave one at the Inspector."
They go out and get into the waiting Van. There are only five in the fourteen passenger van, a light load seeing how it is the weekend.
The union driver closes the door, and heads out, dust flying from the dirt road as he makes the nine miles over to the Juno mine. As they leave the smelter civilization drops away. They scoot along the 30-yard-wide mining road leading away from the smelter. Far off there is a cloud of dust, it gets bigger, and the union driver says "Blow me down! Every morning there is a train, even on the day before the Sabbath.” He pulls the van over, and drives right off the hard
traveled part of the road past the shoulder, and into the dessert just a bit, and the van comes to a stop. The dust cloud comes closer, and soon there is a pulsing bright light, a single head light seen in front of the cloud. Then the road-train comes close enough to be seen.
There is a mighty ten-wheeled tractor, with a "roobar" shielding the front. The regular headlights are on in the dawn hour. They light the road. Mounted on top of the tractor is a pulsating spot light, a foot across, put there to warn on-coming traffic to get out of the way. The tractor has a hood longer then any normal road tractor, there is a roar coming form the engine housed under the hood.
Behind the tractor are four ore cars, each with four axles under it, sixteen rubber tired wheels to each ore car. The first follows easy behind the tractor, the second is swaying just a bit, you don't notice the third because at 60 to 70 m.p.h. the final car is waging back and forth like the tail on a happy puppy. The tires of the last car spray gravel far and wide as it passes by, spraying the van parked well off the road surface. The trains have the right of way. More then that, when you meet one oncoming, you have to pull right off the road, and
if you spot one in the rear view, you'd be wise to pull off as well, for they go at a better clip them most four wheelers would want to go.
As they near Juno Mine, the head frame is the first thing to comes into view. The head frame is over the production shaft, a vertical shaft with the ore cage and man cage running in it, two offset ore cars, one going up while the other goes down. On top of one of the ore cars rides a man cage. The winch house set over to the side, the heavy cables running to the production shaft. Then the conveyors running from the shaft and the ore tip are visible.
They pull up past the Super’s house and come to a halt at the locker room. The Super is there to meet the van as they pull up.
"Liffy, take JB and you'll be checking the escape route".
"Aye Super, Well, that answers your question of what we'll be doing today, ha Yank? The bloody walk out, hope you’re ready for a long climb!"
As they enter the Locker room, each man puts his time card through the time clock, and grabs his battery off the charger. JB and Liffy prepare, much like a weekday. They clip the light to their helmet, put the battery on the heavy safety belt. There is a four-foot piece of rope also on the safety belt. On the end of the rope is a pigtail, a corkscrew like piece of heavy metal wire. The idea is to use the pigtail when working anywhere you could fall. One throw and the pigtail will go around a pipe or support or anything, come around and hook to
itself, making a quick way of tying yourself in as you work. In an emergency the rope can be thrown out during a fall, it will hopefully catch something and tie itself, breaking your fall. (Maybe your back as well, as you are stopped suddenly by a rope fixed to your waist belt.) Most all the miners don't leave the rope free ready for use, but wrap it tightly around the belt, keeping it neatly out of the way. Both Liffy and JB had theirs wrapped.
They would be going to the lowest level, so they would be on the first cage going down, it being a weekend there will only be two man runs, one to the lower levels, and one to the bell.
The way this mine looks underground, it might be hard to visualize. Most miners don't get to see enough of it to get a good picture of it. They go to their work station, and where they work the shift, and come back up the man cage. The mine is like a honeycomb. Starting just over 1,000 feet from the surface there are levels, every two to five hundred feet, each level is a series of drifts, a horizontal tunnel, running slightly uphill as it runs away from the shaft. The drifts run as much as three miles from the shaft, and then they have other dummy
shafts, a vertical tunnel that goes level to level, up and down but doesn’t go to the surface. The drifts go out like spokes from the shaft, with branching drifts as they go out further, and those branches branch, with dummy shafts every so often. These dummy shafts are ore drops. They will sink a shaft down to a lower level and then as they work a drift out, extending the horizontal tunnel, the ore will be dropped down the dummy shaft to the level below. There, it will be popped, mucked and taken by underground train to the platform (or
plat), there the ore will be loaded, usually by dropping another 3 to 5 hundred feet down a zigzag shaft, and that shaft will dump into the production shaft. The production shaft is the one with the winch and the man/ore cage.
These radiating spoke-like drifts, and dummy shafts are growing all the time as the miners work, expanding them and bringing out the ore. In places the drifts and shafts are so numerous that all that is left are pillars, vertical columns of rock, with the rest of the material around them removed.
The pillar pullers do just that, they will set charges in a pillar, and remove it, taking the resulting ore to a lower level, and eventually up to the surface.
The "Bell" is a huge open room, a mile and a half high, and over 3/4 of mile across, this is an area where the drifts and shafts made pillars, and the pillars have been pulled, leaving a empty room honey-combed on the sides. In the Juno Mine there are three bells, each off the shaft in a different direction. Below a bells are more levels, the ore is brought to the edge of the bell from the levels, with train, and dropped down dummy shafts that lead out into the bell. The bell is like a giant salt shaker with holes at the bottom. The ore falls into the shafts at the bottom, and at the next level down, there are muckers, breaking the rock up with explosives and loading the ore into rail cars to be taken to the production shaft.
As a safety measure, an escape route is established and maintained. It is a way a man can walk out in case there is some reason the winch isn't operating to bring them out with the man cage.
The escape route is always changing, as the mine expands, parts are left stale, and parts are removed, the escape route has to be moved and reestablished. The route is marked by a man in the running posture, with an arrow under it. The route will go along a drift, then maybe up a shaft using ladders, or steps fastened to the side of the shaft, some are vertical shafts, some are the zigzag, some are a short l00 foot climb, some seem like they go on forever. The route meanders, and there are old routes no longer in service along the way.
They will be marked by the running man with an arrow with an x somehow over it. Sometimes it will be two steps drilled into form the x. Other times it will be paint that can be hard to see. Sometimes the x will be chiseled into the rock.
Liffy and JB are to start at the bottom, and another team will start half way out, the upper crew will to try to get to the surface, and Liffy and JB will try to get to where the upper crew started. The upper escape route is better established, it is in the part of the mine no longer being mined, and it doesn’t change, the lower route goes around and through the production areas, along the edge of the bell, in and out all over the place.
Liffy and JB go down to the 39 level, over six miles from sunshine. They will start by going down to the sump and then back to 39 and then work up. It is a hassle to take the cage below 39, so they will climb down to the bottom and come back. The idea, is to check along the way that everything is safe. When going along a drift, they check the temperature. An area left without air moving will raise in temperature from the rock around it, and there is a good chance the air will become toxic, (deadly) but if the air is cool, it means it is being pulled through there and it will be safe to breathe. They check the "back", that is the rock over head, the ceiling, look for areas that look like they might have worked loose, or be cracked. They don't have the gear with them to pin them back, so they just have a spray paint can and mark it for another crew to come in later and pin it (set lags -- steel pins -- in and bolt them tight).
Along all the drifts there is a "piss trench", a trench running along the side of the rails where the water drains down towards the shaft. If one gets lost, look in the trench, if there is water flowing, it will be flowing towards the man cage, that doesn’t mean you can get to the man cage that way, the way could just lead to a dead area, or into the bell. But water flows towards the production shaft. Air on the other hand usually will flow the escape route. (Usually) On the surface there are eight shafts besides the production shaft and each has a great fan eight feet in diameter pulling air up out of the mine.
This keeps the air cool and safe to breathe, the air goes down the production shaft, and out these other eight dummy ventilation shafts.
Underground there is no light, it is six miles to the surface, no light makes its way down there unless you bring it with you. It is total darkness. The platform of each level, the crib room and the Grizzly area have electric lights, but move up a drift 200 feet from the grizzly or the platform, and the light you have is the light on your helmet or the hand held "Big John" light. Otherwise your eyes don't work, can't tell if they are open or closed. They just don't work at all. Most people have never seen complete darkness, no light at all. On the surface it is rarely ever witnessed. Underground if your helmet light goes off, your eyes don't work at all, nothing!
Liffy and JB are each given a pack, in it is a length of rope, a Big John light, some ladder pins, a radio, two little bottles of water and a few other odds and ends, then there is room for their lunch since they won't be getting back to the crib room for break.
The first task is to go from 39, where they work daily, down to the sump. To do this they have to leave the plat in a direction neither has ever taken. The area is not in use and the water coming out of pin holes in the sides and back are all discolored, some yellow, some green and another white. They seek out the route, looking for the markers. The route is marked to be ascended, not descended, so if you are to go up a shaft, it will be marked at the bottom, maybe not at the top. They get to the first shaft. It is a zig-zag, JB stays up, and Liffy goes down the first set of ladder rungs, mounted in the wall. The steps don't come just even like they would on a ladder. The pinholes for the rungs have been drilled with a portable air leg. Sometimes to get one started the hole doesn’t end up just where the operator had hoped, some of the rungs are sloped to the side, others are a little too far apart. It is a climb, but on the zigzag the way is made easier by the slope of the shaft.
Liffy gets down part way and calls for JB to come on down where he is. He has found a place where the rungs are far apart and wants the paint can to mark it.
That done, he continues on down, tapping the rungs with a hammer as he passes (only after he has had his full weight on them as he climbs down). Where the zig meets the zag there is a little shelf cut out. They both unite there. JB continues on down, checking as he goes.
The morning went along like this, an exploration down to the sump, then a quick return to 39, then they found it a bit easier going up, the rungs could be tested before standing on them, and the route was better marked. They got up to 38, traversed across a drift for several hundred feet, and found the next shaft, a vertical. When you climb a ladder you have it at just the right angle so your weight is on the ladder and you can climb with the least strain. A vertical ladder, or one set too steep, leaves your weight hanging back, dependent of your
hand holds as well as you foot holds. Also in a vertical there are no rest stops, you climb, and climb, and keep climbing till you get to a drift.
Sometimes some miner will take pity on a climber and pop out a room sized platform as a rest station, but these come too few and far between. To make one of these interim rest areas an airleg and drill have to be lowered down the shaft, then a man has to drill and pop the platform out with nowhere to stand. They don't come often enough.
After much climbing and exploration, Liffy and JB were on 32 at noon. There they had a hard time finding where the escape route went, they followed one set of marks, they lead to a dead end, a shaft that was choked with debris, and a mark showing to return. They retraced their tracks, and didn't find a marked escape route, but they did see a shaft with steps in it. They marked the place, and each went off exploring a ways, and they came back. Then they both went off exploring, together looking for the marked escape route. There is a lot of track
down there, they came out to the bell in two different places. With the Big John light they could look and see that they where near the bottom of the bell, maybe two levels up, the light wouldn't pick up the back of the bell, and only just barely reached the far side. This is a light like a car head light. The far side of the bell at the level they were at was nearly too far away to be picked out by the light.
"We could radio up to the Super, and tell him we can't find it". Said JB.
"Aye, and look like a couple of lost boy scouts, I doubt it mate. We can go up that one we saw with the steps, must be it. Let’s have a look".
Liffy went first, JB waiting. Liffy got up a ways and called for JB. They met 150 feet from 32 level. There was a drift there, but the shaft continued on up, it was a place to rest, and meet, and make another assault, still no markings saying they were on the right trail. Liffy headed up again, this shaft had a steel ladder in it, pined to the wall every so often. Liffy climbed, and as he came to a pin fastener he taped it with the hammer. The water running down over the years with the minerals in it had rusted the pins, the whole ladder was just
a bit unsteady as Liffy worked his way up. JB waited in the intersecting drift, he could see the light from Liffy's helmet each time he looked back down. He was getting a ways up there.
Then there was a noise. Underground when there is a noise it is caused by you. You are in solid rock with no way for sound to get to you from anywhere else.
So if you hear something, either you or your mate has made the sound. It was the sound of steel on rock, not like the tap tap of the hammer, more like a crashing sound. Then more, the stones began to fall from the shaft, JB couldn't see up to where Liffy was, but something was going on. The bottom of the ladder
moved, then more ladder came down the shaft, and more rock, ladders, and steel falling past the drift where JB was standing, he stepped back, and as quick as it started, the movement and noise stopped.
The shaft had bits of ladder wedged across it, and several sections where right there by the drift. JB got over by the Shaft and called. "Liffy! Liffy! You OK?!"
The reply came "****!" Now JB could see his light. It was moving, he must be all right if the light is moving and he can still swear. Liffy was hanging from the bottom rung of the ladder, everything below that had fallen down below him.
He was busy doing a pull-up getting up on to the rest of the ladder.
JB couldn't help. There was now no ladder leading up from where he was, and he couldn't even go down, the shaft was choked with broken bits of ladder.
Liffy called down. "****! Mate!
JB called back up, "You OK?"
“Ya, I’m on the bottom step, nothing below, don't know what's up above me, Give a shut to the Super".
So JB called the surface and told the Super where they where, and as much as he knew about what happened. Two crews where sent down right off, one to 32 and one to 30, JB was able to get out along the drift he was standing on. It took into the second shift to get Liffy out, they had to drop ladders and all down, pretty much make a way for him to get out. Later it was pointed out to them that they where not on the escape route, the route had gone up another shaft, one they hadn’t found. The whole experience was a bit sobering. The area they
work in is more than a days walk-out, and it isn't well marked, and for them to attempt to walk out they only got a small part of the way and then had to be rescued. A sobering thought, don't take the man cage for granted.

Hang on let me make some fresh coffee and get back to you on that one....will takes a few hours to read

Good morning JB!!! You are up and very busy this morning!!! Have a great day.....

LOL, It didn't take that long to write.