Ensham Mine

Once again, friends of Michelle and Charles had organised for Kristin and I to visit a working coal mine in the Emerald area. The Emerald area is a mining town with approximatly 20 coal mines in the area. Many people come to Emerald to work on the mines because the mines pay very good wages and offer housing allowances. We've been talking to a regular at the Memo Bar whose family lives in Brisbane and he flies to Emerald to work 7 days on and then flies home to see his family for 4 days (many people are wroking in Emerald on a fly-in, fly-out basis). At Ensham, the Maintenence Superviser Bob took Kristin and I out on the mine for a couple of hours. At this particular mine they own 3 working Drag Lines with a forth being build at this time. We got to see the 3 working Drag Lines in action and were lucky to go on board 2 of them. A Drag Line is an extremely large excavator which removes the top layer of soil above a seam of coal. Smaller excevators come behind the drag line and load the coal into large dump trucks which then take the raw coal to a processing plant. The three Drag Lines at Ensham are 40 cubic meters(cu.m), 70 cu. m and 100 cu.m.

This first picture is of the smallest Drag Line. We didn't get to go on board this one. This picture hardly shows the true size of these machines.

The next 2 pictures are of the buckets used on the Drag Lines. Each one of these buckets would cost about one million dollars. The red bucket is 70 cu.m and the "EarthEater" is 100 cu.m.

Here's Kristin is about to be swallowed by the "EarthEater".

This picture shows the bucket hauling a load of dirt. In the background, the wide flat section is the top of the coal seam.

This picture shows how large the machines really are. You can see one of the operators outside on the ground, and if you look closer you can see the other operator in the cockpit on the left of the machine. The operator on the ground is directing the other operator where to walk the machine. That's right...these machines get around by walking at the blistering speed of 2 km/h. The mine has actually walked one machine 50 kms from another mine.

This is the inside of the Drag line in the last picture.

This last picture is of a coal conveyor. Just behind where we took the picture is a large hopper that takes the coal from the dump trucks and crushes it into small pieces. From here it will get sized once more and then loaded on to coal trains. The coal from this area goes mostly overseas to Korea and Japan.