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April 15, 2003
Opal Mining Update - No 13 Back Mining or are We? |
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G/Day Folks,
Back home at last, we arrived here on Sunday morning around 10am and after 3 and a bit long days on the road, the last leg from Tennant Creek was a bit much for us and as we could not reach home in the daylight, we got as far as a place called Cadany Station, which is a roadhouse with accommodation. |
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As we still had daylight saving in South Australia, we lost an hour on the way back and as we were nearing this Cadany Station it was dark and we had passed a lot of cattle along the side of the road and not wanting to get involved in hitting one of them in the dark we thought it was better to get a room for the night ($91.50) and continue in the daylight and we were only 154kms from home so it would not take long in the morning, did not realize that the clocks went back that night.
After getting home I started to unload the vehicle and Pat started to use the washing machine to try and catch up on some dirty clothes that always seem to accumulate on a trip like this, the rest of the day was spent cleaning the house (not me, but Pat) and I on the computer and putting Pats car battery on charge and catching up on the Spam along with the emails. Today was the day that Pat had to start back at work and for me, I just got the mining truck ready for going back on the field, as I had to charge the battery in that as well, check the oil and water, tires etc. I took the mining truck down to O.M.E. (Opal Miners Enterprises) to put fuel in it and found that all of the staff that I knew had gone, they had got rid of the manager just before I left, why I have no idea as far as I was concerned he was doing a very good job and we will miss him, but things will not be the same. Because of things going wrong in this O.M.E. which is supposed to be here for us members, I pay $25.00 a year to be a member there along with all of the other members, now they have put some prices up and the main ones that worry me personal is that the Explosives have been put up by 18.5%, a box of 100 detonators used to cost $87.50 and now cost $103.90, an increase of $16.40. A 225 meters roll of Safety Fuse used to cost $183.40, now is $233.60 up $50.20 and an increase of 27.4% and a 250 meters roll of Cordex used to cost $173.50 and now is $206.65 up $33.15 an increase of 19.1% and as for the Nitro (Ammonia Nitrate) I have not bought any for just over 3 1/2 years as I have been off mining for that long before I went back on this new claim, but the last lot cost me $21.50 for a 25 kilo bag and I used to buy them 10 at a time.  |
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Went out to the field to check the blower and claim, I knew that the batteries would be flat on the blower after not being used for the past 11 weeks, boy doesn't time fly when you are having fun, anyway I was right the batteries were flat on the blower, so I took them out and put them in the back of the mining truck to bring home and put on charge.
As I was driving the truck away from the hole, I noticed that a corner peg that is normally about 70 meters in front of me was not standing up, at first I thought that it had been knocked down by the storms that we have had while I was away, we had I was told about 4.5 inches of rain, but storm rain, the kind that comes down in buckets in a very short time, that about the only kind we seem to get here, as they say a feast or a famine. Anyway I went to put the peg back up and when I got to where it should have been, there was no peg, so I looked to my right as there should have been another peg just 50 meters away and that was gone as well, so was the other two pegs, so I came back into town and went straight to the Mine's Dept. I presented the paperwork the lady on the counter and asked why these pegs (Pats pegs) had been pulled, she pulled out a Pats Blue Card that has the recent pegging info on it and said that the pegs had not been pulled by them as the pegs and claim was current and up to date, we had just paid $141.00 for the year on Dec 20 2002 to which I replied they had been removed by someone. With that she had a look in a book that has all of the data when pegs are pulled on the field through being illegal and found that on February 17 while we were on holidays they had pulled our pegs and it would seem that they had made a mistake, so what else is new I said the Month of February was a shit of month for us, so this fitted in just nice with the other stuff that happened to us. They asked me if anyone else had pegged the claim or any part of it and I said no, but if someone had they would have been in the shit and then there would have been a court case to get the other pegs off the claim and get it back in Pats name, anyway they gave me Pats pegs back and I will have to re-peg her claim tomorrow. Went back on the field today and put the batteries in the blower and after a few minutes got it running and so proceeded to set the truck and winch over the hole ready to go down and finish cleaning up the dirt from the last shot, boy am I ready to Find some Opal after all of the troubles we have been through this last 2 months, talk about a holiday, I thing we came back home to have one! Anyway got everything set up on the hole and went to pull up the rope that I put the Explosives and Drill down with and it would not come up, it was stuck down the bottom, I knew straight away that I had a big problem as it was stuck in MUD, which means water, lots of water. I knew that I had got a bit of water down the shafts in the storms that hit while I was away, but at this stage did not know how much, until I went down to have a look and really only expected a little bit at the bottom, perhaps enough to make it sticky until I could do another shot and get some dry dirt over it or so I thought. So I thought that I would look down the shaft with a Mirror, which is a trick that we use to look down old shafts to see if they are open when we are looking for new places to check out for mining amongst the old claims, well all I saw down my shaft was WATER right up to the roof I think, which is about 7 feet from the floor, who said that Opal Mining was boring and I said that the exciting life was over for a while for us, boy what a crock that was. This photo shows you how the water has run and made a furrow straight to the shaft on the right, you can see that it has run under the wooden plank on the right, this made me believe only a little had gone down the shaft, but I was wrong, boy was I wrong.  |
This is about 25 feet from the first photo and to the right, a lot of water has been flowing here, this is what storm water does on the opal fields, it causes a lot of damage as it runs away quickly, I have heard that a miner here is still trying to get his tunnel machine out of his claim that was also flooded, this will cost him over $8000.00 to repair once he manages to get it out and strip it down, he will have to dry out electric motors and replace every bearing on the machine along with all of the hydraulic oil etc.
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This one is just to the left of the shafts and next to the blower, again you can see how the water has run down the hill, there was so much water at one time that it washed the dirt from under the blower trucks tires and the blower has moved sideways about 2 inches, this is the one that has put all or most of the water down the claim, as it made a furrow under the left piece of metal that I have the hand winch sitting on, it is a channel section and the water used this channel as a backdoor entrance into the shaft.
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I came back into town to seek advise from a couple of old and experienced miners that I know, one is in Adelaide so I could not get any info from him and the other said that I could not get any pumps here to pump the claim out as we did not have that type of pump here, pity we are not mining for Gold as they have big pumps that can lift water a lot more that 80 feet.
This is what I will have to do to get the water out of the claim, I have made a bucket from an old 20 liter oil drum and have fixed a 1lb snapper lead sinker to the side of the drum so that when it hits the water it will tip over and sink.  |
Here is how I have set up over the shaft with the drum, there is normally a big red weight with a big hook on the end of the winch rope, but I have removed this as I don't want to ruin it with putting it in water over the next few weeks, which I think that is what it will take me to get this water out.
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This is the first bucket to come up, the lead sinker worked just fine, but
as I think there is somewhere around 20 thousand liters down there, it
will take a while.
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This is going to a long and tedious job and the fly's are very bad this
year, they are in the thousands at the moment, I had to buy a Mosquito
Net this morning so I could work in the open, without this, work for any
length of time like this would have been impossible as the bush fly's are
very bad this year and on the opal fields they are worse than here in
town, even Pat's got one to work outside with.
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I don't want to carry this lot to far, so this is far enough, it takes me
about 5 minutes to get a bucket of water, so it looks like I will be only
able to take out 220 to 240 liters an hour and if I work like this
for 5 hours a day I should be able to take out around 1000 liters, so at
this rate for 6 days a week in 3 weeks I will have removed 18,000 liters,
if there is that much in there, which I hope not.
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The sinker was a good idea but did not last long, it got ripped of the
bucket on the 3rd attempt and so the days work came to an end, will go
home and do it again for tomorrow, perhaps I can get a full day in then I
hope and remove the 1000 liters that I hope to do very day.
Thursday, Apr 2. Fixed the bucket up again with another sinker and took another 2 out with me along with the gear to put them on with, as it is fishing wire trace, I did manage to pull about another 900 liters and then gave it away as it was getting a bit warm for me and it is a very boring job, standing there all day with the fly's and just operating the winch up and down with a bucket on the end. On my way home as I was passing the Airport turnoff, the Coober Pedy Mine Rescue Squad passed me going out to one of the fields, so I thought that as I had the camera with me I would follow them to see what is happing and it would make an experience for the readers who have not seen or heard of them, these are the people who have to come out to the fields after the miners have had a Accident on the field and not only miners, we have had Tourists who have fallen down shafts on the opal fields, there was a German Lady who fell down one the same year that we came here and she died about a week later from internal injuries form that fall. Here they are turning onto a Opal Field not far out of town and is on the west side of a field called Ryan's Hill, in front of this vehicle is 2 more, one of which is a Police Vehicle, this vehicle is the one that carries all of the equipment that is required to perform a mining accident rescue or a body recovery which sometimes is needed after a miner has been killed on the fields.  |
Here they are at a Noodlers Claim, I was thinking when I pulled it that it
was a mining accident and that as it was Noodler, I thought he or she had
fallen down a shaft, this has happened in the past a miner falling down a
shaft, quite a few times over the years in fact.
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Here is the Noodling Machine, this is a machine that they put the Mullock
or dirt in a hopper on the right of the machine, from here the small stuff
goes up the rubber conveyer belt through the cylinder that is made of mesh
and is rotating, this takes out the very tiny dirt and dust, from here it
then is taken through the black light room on the left on another conveyer
belt and under ultraviolet lights where the opal or potch shows up as
white, they put it in a bucket where it is sorted when they get home.
This vehicle was being drive by a CID Detective, when I asked a friend of mine what was going on, he said that he could or would tell me was that the Police was looking for something, I assume that something has been stolen here and hidden underground and they received a tip off.  |
Here they are carrying a mess plate to put over the shaft, it has a
removable circle in the middle that a person can go down through, this is
placed on top of a couple of metal C-sections, just like I have on the top
of my shaft that has the hand winch on, and I have what I call a square
hole made of wood that I put over my shaft for safety as you can above
where I am pulling the water bucket out of the shaft.
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This is a 4 post tripod hand winch, that they will put over the shaft, for
lowering a person down.
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Here is the tripod set up over the shaft and the metal hole, as this is a
Rescue Squad everything here is sort of done with the utmost safety
of the people involved in mind, the opal miners do not use this type of
equipment and in the foreground on the left, squatting down is a
Policeman and the guy next to him is the CID Detective that
spoke to me, wanting to know who I was.
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This is the Rescue Vehicle from the side, you can see that they have
special items for different types of emergences, in the rear they also
have the metal body stretcher that they can strap a body in and haul it up
a shaft vertically.
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They are setting up the winch and a harness that one of them will wear to
be put down the shaft, also setting up the cable that will be run over to
the generator for the electric lights.
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The guy (Dave) who is going to go down is putting on the harness, it is
like a parachute harness.
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Here they are making sure that the harness is fitted right and does not
hurt or impede Dave while he is doing his job, so here he is suspended in
mid air to check it out before being lowed down the shaft.
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Dave is now being lowered down the shaft, I would have liked to know just
what was going on here, but I will find out at a later date, cannot keep a
secret here for long.
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There might not be a lot to talk about for the next couple of weeks and I have got out just over 1900 liters out of the claim in 3 days, (2 days and 2 buckets) I will have to repair the ground out there around the shafts to try and protect them from more rain that might come, so you will see how I do that.
I also have to bring in the pipes that I have laying on the ground, as I will not be needing them for some time yet and again I will bring in the batteries off the blower as I only half charged them last time, so I will charge one up full overnight on Monday and take it back out so I can start the loader and then carry out the repairs around the shafts. Don't be surprised if my left arm is longer than my right after the next 3 weeks of lifting that water bucket around 40 plus times a day. Hope you have enjoyed this issue and look forward to the next one, hopefully I will have some more good photos to show you in the next issue and maybe some of Good Looking Opal and lots of it, I am still hoping that this will be a good year for us in mining, so stay with us over the next few months and find out what goes on in our part of the world as far as Opal Mining goes. Stay Tuned for the next Issue, who knows what I will have to report. Until the next issue.........  and wish me lots of LUCK.
Cya Later, Stuart Bird. To return back to the Archived Page for more Updates click, Here! |
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