Major Highwall Failure

This is a strange one, with excavators, trucks, coal and a dragline. I can't really tell what happened, but it looks like the highwall has collapsed in a big way, going right across the pit.

Edit 7/12/10 - Additional photo. This makes the incident looks much worse.

Ensham Dragline Update

As we saw a few weeks ago, the Ensham dragline got severely flooded in January 2008. A few months later, in April, Ensham had been able to pump a large amount of water out of their pits, and expose their dragline to air.







Not only would there be the direct damage from the water, the fine silt which has made its way into everything would also cause major headaches, not the least of which would be the clean-up.

Dragline Bench Failure

I recently received a bunch of old dragline bench failures. This is the first of them to come through. This dragline is fairly lucky, only falling a little bit off balance. It would still be a major recovery effort.

Judging by the old Ford Falcon in the first photo, these photos must have been from the early 80's.

Broken Axle

Ouch. That's not the way you want an axle to fail.

Pothole of Doom

I'd hate to get a pothole like this on a suburban road...