Provider: Matt
Young
Profession: Miner
Hometown: Gillette, WY
Spring of 2008 Diary Entry
Hi everyone! Sorry I haven’t written in awhile. Things have
been very busy in Wyoming. The weather is starting to change and
spring is right around the corner for us. We got more snow this winter
than the last few winters, so that is good for our water supply. The
snow and rain is good for the local ranchers, but it makes life difficult
at the coal mine. Last year at this time we had a huge spring blizzard
that shut the mine down for 3 shifts (36 hours). This doesn’t
sound like much, but considering we only shut down for Christmas, this
is a lot of coal that we didn’t send to our customers. We had
about 2.5 feet in most places and some places the drifts were almost 10
feet tall! We are all hoping that we don’t see a repeat of
that this year.
Me standing next to one of our new “toys”!
A Caterpillar 797B 400-ton haul truck.
The
last time I wrote, I told you that I would tell you some more
about how we get the coal out of the ground and to the power
plants for them to generate electricity. The first step in the process is to remove
the top layer of dirt called topsoil. We save all of this topsoil
in order to use it when we are done mining through an area in order to
reclaim the land. After the topsoil is removed, we have big drills
that drill hundreds of holes in the ground, which we call overburden. The
holes are then filled with explosives and then blown up. After we
shoot the overburden, our giant electric and diesel powered shovels load
the overburden into big dump trucks. Our biggest trucks can haul
almost 400 tons of material. This is the same weight as 33 empty
school buses! That is a lot of dirt!
Me standing next to the same truck.
I am almost 6 feet tall and I am barely half
as tall as the tire!
Once all of the overburden has been removed from the top of the coal,
we drill and shoot the coal just like we did for the overburden. The
reason we blow up the dirt and coal is so that it is in small enough pieces
to move around and put into the trucks. After the coal is blown up,
we load it into the trucks and haul it to our crusher. The crusher
is just what the name sounds like; it crushes the coal from pieces that
are almost as big as a car down to 6 inches in diameter, then down to 2
inches in diameter. From here it goes into our coal silos where we
temporarily store it before we load it on a train. The trains pull
up underneath the coal silos and then get loaded with about 115 tons of
coal per car. Each train typically has 130 cars for a total weight
of almost 15,000 pounds of coal. We ship about 5 trains everyday
which adds up to about 27 million tons every year.
One of our Front End Loaders loading coal into 240T
haul trucks.
Once on the train, the coal begins its long journey to the Midwest part
of the nation to one of many power plants that we ship to. Usually,
the coal takes about 5 or 6 days to get from the mine to the power plants. Once
there, the trains unload the cars and the coal is put on a big stockpile
for the power plant to burn. Once empty, the train turns around and
heads back to Wyoming for another load of coal to “turn the lights
on”!
Once again I have left you all with some pictures of me and the coal mine. I
am getting excited to meet you and look forward to answering all of your
questions.
Matt
