Spon Com Shovel

More bad spontaneous combustion.

Stuck Rear Dumper

Blair Athol Spon Com

The Blair Athol coal mine is well known for its spontaneous combustion problems. Here's some photos from a particularly bad spon com event.

 

Edit 7/12/10 - Additional photo. Looks like a zoomed-out version of the last photo.

10,000 visitors!

Yesterday, Mining Mayhem passed through a big milestone, so I thought I'd make a post to celebrate. Mining Mayhem has now had 10,000 visits.

When I first started Mining Mayhem, I had a long-term goal of 10,000 visitors per year. It's taken 18 months to reach the first 10,000 visitors, but only 9 months for the last 9000 visitors. The site has been a lot more successful that I've expected. I'm glad that so many people have enjoyed the site, and come back and read the site regularly.

I'd like to thank those who've sent in pictures, particularly Owen and Jerry.

I'd like to give a big thanks to those who've linked to the page. You guys are responsible for the big rise in traffic since the start of the year. So thank you to Bob Cornett, and to the people who linked to us from photostp.free.fr, buybigtires.com, and stripmine.org. And thanks to those who have passed along Mining Mayhem through word-of-mouth.


Interesting statistics:
Visitors by Month:
May 08: 2
June 08: 2
July 08: 32
August 08: 56 (Got a lot of referrals from blogger's 'next blog' link up top)
September 08: 38
October 08: 34
November 08: 46
December 08: 383 (Huge spike from people looking for pictures of Curragh's boom incident.)
January 09: 448
February 09: 1446 (Thanks Bob!)
March 09: 576
April 09: 606
May 09: 622
June 09: 684
July 09: 607
August 09: 951 (Thanks stripmine.org linker!)
September 09: 1161 (Thanks photostp.free.fr linker!)
October 09: 1791

 Visitors by Country:
1. USA (4021)
2. Australia (3789)
3. Canada (448)
4. France (430)
5. UK (196)
6. South Africa (121)
7. Indonesia (105)
8. Germany (93)
9. Brazil (93)
10. Belgium (76)

Dozer vs Light Vehicle

This photo was in my collection, and I just posted it without knowing the story. Fortunately, a reader did, and here's the story behind the photo:

The photo you posted on your site today was run over by a bulldozer at Goonyella / Riverside by Helvory Contractors {now known as HMP}. The story is that the dozer operater had to go to a different area to work in it was night shift and as he drove the dozer down off the bench he had the blade up in the front. The troopcarrier was parked up (with no one in it) in a unlit area. The dozer operator didn't see it, and collected it and it was rolling in front of the dozer until he traveled about 20 metres until someone told him to stop and look what was under his blade.

That's one of the many reasons why light vehicles have flags these days. Thanks, Owen!

Komatsu PC5500 Slip Off Float

These are another set of photos sent in by a reader. These are from the Griffin coal mine in Western Australia.


It looks here like the float has slipped backwards down the wet ramp.

Those chains are looking a bit small for the job.

You can see here that the tracks were muddy before being loaded onto the float. This would have decreased the friction between the excavator and the float.





Yeah, those chains are far too light for the purpose of restraining a 500t load. The only thing holding the excavator to the float was the surface friction of two metal plates with a bit of water and mud in between.

A lot of equipment doesn't get secured onto floats (probably because it would take a crane to lift sufficiently strong chains into place), but if you're going to do a job...


The Komatsu website lists the weight of the PC5500 as 525t, 'including operator'.

Hmm, no flag, beacon or even reflective markings on the light vehicle in the background.